The PWHL’s Growing Fanbase: What’s Driving the Surge?
The PWHL has spent its first three seasons building more than just a league. It has been building an audience.
Attendance has increased every season since the league began. During the 2025-2026 regular season, more than 1.1 million fans attended PWHL games, with an average of 9,304 per game. The league reported that this was a 28 percent increase over the entire 2024-2025 season, including playoffs, and a 71 percent increase over its inaugural season.
But the growth is not limited to the league’s existing cities. Over the past two seasons, the PWHL has taken games across North America through its Takeover Tour, bringing professional women’s hockey to communities without a team of their own. During the 2025-2026 season, the tour featured 16 games in neutral-site cities, including Calgary, Chicago, Dallas, Halifax, Hamilton, Washington, D.C., and Winnipeg.
Some of those cities have now become home to expansion teams. Detroit, Hamilton, Las Vegas and San Jose will join the league for the 2026-2027 season, bringing the PWHL to 12 teams. The expansion is another sign of how far the league has grown in just three seasons.
Taking the PWHL to the Fans
When the PWHL launched, its eight teams were based in Boston, Minnesota, Montréal, New York, Ottawa, Toronto, Seattle and Vancouver. For fans outside those cities, following the PWHL meant watching from a distance.
The Takeover Tour has started to change that. Instead of asking fans to travel to an existing PWHL city, the league has brought games to them. During the 2025-2026 season, the 16 Takeover Tour stops attracted a combined 200,000 attendees.
The response has been hard to miss. Washington, D.C., drew 17,228 fans for its Takeover Tour game on January 18, 2026. Detroit drew 15,938 on March 28, while Hamilton brought in 16,012 on January 3. The numbers showed that interest in women’s professional hockey was not limited to the league’s existing fanbases.
Hamilton provided an especially strong example. When the PWHL came to Hamilton, more than 70 percent of the 16,012 ticket buyers were purchasing their first PWHL game ticket. The game was not simply bringing existing fans into a different arena. It was introducing new people to the league. A few months later, Hamilton was announced as one of the PWHL’s expansion teams for the 2026-2027 season.
Detroit followed a similar path. The city hosted the PWHL’s first-ever neutral-site game during the league’s inaugural season in 2024, drawing 13,736 fans. A year later, another 14,288 fans attended a PWHL game at Little Caesars Arena. Then, on March 28, 2026, 15,938 fans attended another Takeover Tour game. Detroit had now hosted four PWHL games over three seasons, more than any other neutral-site city. The Takeover Tour did not guarantee that either city would receive a team, but it gave the PWHL an opportunity to introduce the league to new audiences and see how those communities responded.
Detroit and Hamilton were two places where the response was clear. Now, both cities have teams of their own.
Four New Teams, Four New Fanbases
Expansion will bring more than four new teams to the PWHL. It will bring the league into four communities with different hockey backgrounds and opportunities for growth.
Detroit brings the PWHL into one of hockey’s most established cities. The PWHL has also pointed to the strength of girls’ hockey development in Detroit and Michigan. Hamilton adds another team to a region with deep hockey roots and one of the largest and most concentrated areas in the world for girls’ hockey participation. The league has also noted that more than 15 percent of PWHL players come from the Greater Golden Horseshoe region. Las Vegas brings the league into the American Southwest. The PWHL has described the city as one of North America’s fastest-growing sports and entertainment destinations and pointed to the area’s growth in youth hockey participation, particularly among girls and women. San Jose gives the PWHL its first team in the Bay Area. The league cited the region’s established professional and youth hockey culture, support for women’s sports and geographic diversity as reasons for the expansion.
Each city is different, but the opportunity is similar: turn initial interest into a connection that lasts beyond one game. The Takeover Tour can introduce fans to the PWHL for one night, while a local team gives them an entire season to follow. That connection is already starting to show in other parts of the league. During the 2025-2026 season, online merchandise sales increased more than 50 percent year over year, while in-arena merchandise sales doubled. Fans are not just showing up. They are buying jerseys, following players and becoming more invested in the teams they support.
More Ways to Follow the League
The PWHL’s growth is also happening outside the arenas. As the league has expanded, so have the ways fans can watch and follow it. During the 2025-2026 regular season, live YouTube viewership increased 77 percent year over year, with PWHL games watched from 154 countries. Website traffic also increased 66 percent, with 89 percent of that traffic coming from new users.
The league is also seeing more engagement from fans who are already following it. During the 2025-2026 season, the PWHL generated 682 million social-media impressions, a 150 percent increase from the previous season. Online merchandise sales increased more than 50 percent year over year, while in-arena merchandise sales doubled.
Those numbers show that the growth is not limited to people buying tickets. Fans are watching games, following players, engaging with the league online and buying merchandise.
A fan does not have to live in one of the PWHL’s cities to become invested in the league. They can discover a player online, watch a game digitally, follow a team on social media or see a Takeover Tour game when it comes to their area. For a league that is still building its audience, having more ways to reach fans matters.
A Fanbase Still Growing
The PWHL’s first three seasons have shown that there is an audience for women’s professional hockey. The challenge now is turning that growing interest into something that lasts.
The league has already taken steps in that direction. Attendance has continued to rise, the Takeover Tour has introduced PWHL hockey to new communities and four expansion teams will bring the league to 12 cities for the 2026-2027 season.
Detroit and Hamilton have shown what can happen when a city responds to the opportunity to host professional women’s hockey. Las Vegas and San Jose will now give the league a chance to reach entirely new audiences. The Takeover Tour has also shown that the PWHL does not have to wait for fans to come to the league. It can bring the league to them. That may be one of the biggest reasons the fanbase has grown so quickly.
The PWHL is reaching more people, in more places and in more ways than it was when the league began. Now, with 12 teams and another season ahead, the next challenge will be turning that interest into a lasting part of the league’s future.
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