Dozens of women’s sports bars are opening in the U.S.A. as interest grows exponentially

Women’s sports bars are experiencing significant growth in 2025, with plans to quadruple their numbers by the year’s end.

This information comes from an NBC News analysis, which highlights three new bars that opened this year, with 14 more anticipated to join the trend. These venues will be spread across the nation, with openings scheduled in major cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, as well as in smaller towns such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City, Missouri, according to ‘LGBTQ Nation’.

As Women’s March Madness begins, two new venues have recently opened: Title 9 Sports Grill in Phoenix and 1972 Women’s Sports Pub in Austin. A third venue, Set the Bar, is set to open in Omaha with the Women’s Sweet 16 this Friday night.

At the newly opened 99ers Sports Bar in Denver, which debuted in December, patrons filled the bar the same night the Professional Women’s Hockey League achieved an all-time attendance record at the city’s arena for a professional women’s hockey game. Attendees displayed signs saying “After party at the 99ers,” and despite the cold Colorado weather, a line soon formed outside the bar.

This reflects the growing popularity of women’s sports in the United States and the eagerness of new bar owners to provide welcoming spaces for fans to enjoy these events.

“I’m super excited to have a sports bar that feels good and a place where everyone’s welcome,” expressed Set the Bar’s owner, Molly Huyck. “You definitely have to ask to get women’s sports on and, for sure, to get the audio on women’s sports” in other Omaha sports bars.

Significant increases in viewership have been recorded across women’s basketball, hockey, soccer, and boxing in recent years. In 2024, over 74 million viewers streamed the rematch between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano on Netflix, marking it as the most-watched women’s sporting event in U.S.A. history.

Last year, the NCAA women’s basketball national championship game, featuring South Carolina and Iowa, became the most-watched basketball game since 2019, surpassing viewership for all other men’s, women’s, professional, and college basketball matches.

Iowa star Caitlin Clark’s success propelled the WNBA’s Indiana Fever to its most-watched season and highest attendance in over twenty years.

Perhaps the most notable surge in popularity is tied to a four-year, $240 million (approximately £186 million) television rights deal with the National Women’s Soccer League, which saw a staggering 95% rise in total viewership in 2024 compared to the prior season.

Several new bar owners have mentioned that these statistics, along with the inspiration from the country’s first bar dedicated to women’s sports, motivated them to enter the business.

In 2022, Jenny Nguyen, a chef and entrepreneur from Portland, Oregon, launched a million-dollar idea: the Sports Bra. This popular venue in Grant Park became such a hit that Nguyen is now expanding the concept through franchising.

“I thought about if I came into a place like the Sports Bra when I was younger, when I was seven or nine or 13,” Nguyen shared with LGBTQ Nation in 2023. “And I realized that I had never been in a place where I felt seen, felt fully represented — how that would impact me and how much that would mean to me as a kid? All of those things really triggered something in me that was like, ‘Okay, I don’t have a choice anymore.’”

At the heart of Nguyen’s concept is a passion for women’s sports.

“We are a married couple, and people can connect the dots and see that this is lesbian-owned, and we’re proud of that, but we don’t lead with that,” noted Jax Diener, co-owner of Watch Me! in Long Beach, California, which opened last summer. “We lead with this — celebrating women’s sports — and that’s what sets us apart from other queer bars out there.”

In San Francisco, Rikki’s Women’s Sports Bar is expected to open in May alongside the new WNBA franchise, The Valkyries.

“We met playing soccer,” co-owner Danielle Thoe, alongside business partner Sara Yergovich, recently told LGBTQ Nation. “We want our teammates to come after games and hang out, whether there’s something to watch or not. As long as they support women’s sports, we welcome everyone.”

“We need more of these,” stated Annie Weaver, co-owner of 99ers Sports Bar, where fans queued up after the record-setting hockey game in Denver.

“We need them all over the United States,” she emphasised. “They need to exist everywhere. Everybody deserves to have a space like this.”