It was a historic night at Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia on Friday night, as Unrivaled drew the highest attendance figure of any professional women\u2019s basketball regular-season game in the history of the sport.<\/p>\n
A total of 21,490 packed into the home of the NBA\u2019s Philadelphia 76ers and the NHL\u2019s Philadelphia Flyers for its inaugural tour stop in the three-on-three women\u2019s basketball league\u2019s second season.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt speaks to the names of the players we have in our league,\u201d Unrivaled president Alex Bazzell said. \u201cThe popularity, the sport is skyrocketing, the platform is finally there. We\u2019re just excited to have an extremely diehard fan base.\u201d<\/p>\n
The previous attendance record for a regular-season women\u2019s game was 20,711 for a WNBA game between\u00a0the Indiana Fever and Washington Mystics on Sept. 19, 2024.<\/p>\n
All of Unrivaled\u2019s games have previously been staged at the Sephora Arena in Medley, Fla., the league\u2019s home base. This was the league\u2019s first time making a tour stop, and it plans to make touring a regular part of its schedule, expanding to more cities next season in 2027, while still maintaining its hub.<\/p>\n
Unrivaled chose Philadelphia in part because several of its investors had ties to the city, including Wanda Sykes, Dawn Staley and Geno Auriemma. But part of the draw was that it wasn\u2019t already a women\u2019s basketball market; there was an opportunity to bring the women\u2019s game to a new set of fans. Friday\u2019s games were the first time the city had been home to professional women\u2019s basketball since 1998, with the ABL\u2019s Philadelphia Rage. The WNBA plans to return to Philadelphia with an expansion team in 2030.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to go to numerous cities, making sure that we\u2019re serving the fans, but also not certainly changing the entire DNA of who we are,\u201d Bazzell said. \u201cPlayers don\u2019t want to be traveling every single game, but you like going to a different atmosphere and feeling the energy of a city and getting out there. To have a packed house tonight, (for) every player, it\u2019s what you want to do. You want to play in front of a sold-out crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n
The interest in the Philadelphia stop is an important growth indicator for Unrivaled in 2026. The league experienced a significant decline in television ratings to start its season, which began earlier than in 2025 to accommodate the FIBA World Cup qualifying window in March, but it is beginning to bounce back. The highest-rated game of the season came last Monday (194,000 viewers for Lunar Owls vs. Hive), one of the first times all year when Unrivaled wasn\u2019t directly competing against the NFL or College Football Playoff.<\/p>\n
Unrivaled\u2019s digital audience has increased by 24 percent year-over-year. Merchandise sales were up 54 percent as of opening weekend. Bazzell also touted the social reach of its newest club Breeze BC, which stars Paige Bueckers. That team has more social media followers than the two newest NWSL teams (Bay FC and Denver Summit FC).<\/p>\n
The tour is also a new revenue stream for the league. Bazzell said the ticket sales from one night in Philadelphia essentially equaled what Unrivaled drew in the first season, when the capacity at its home arena was less than 800. Ticket revenue was already up in 2026 relative to 2025 because of an expanded arena that now seats about 1,000, plus an additional night of games every week.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur salaries have gone up substantially because the business is producing substantially higher than what we even expected coming into year one and year two,\u201d Bazzell said.<\/p>\n
Unrivaled just passed the halfway point of its regular season, which concludes on March 4. The league will break for its annual 1-on-1 tournament from Feb. 11-14.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a historic night at Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia on Friday night, as Unrivaled drew the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101298,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70,37281],"class_list":{"0":"post-101297","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-philadelphia","9":"tag-philadelphia-headlines","10":"tag-philadelphia-news","11":"tag-wnba"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}