When Asisat Oshoala left Nigeria for Liverpool in January 2015, she was 20 years old and had just been named the best player at the FIFA Under-20 Women’s World Cup. She had grown up in Ikorodu, Lagos, played her early career at Rivers Angels and FC Robo, and won enough to attract serious attention from abroad. Liverpool’s manager called her one of the best young players in the world.
She has spent the decade since proving him right, at Arsenal, at Dalian in China, at Barcelona, where she scored 107 goals in 149 appearances and became the first African woman to win the UEFA Women’s Champions League. Then the NWSL. Then Al Hilal in Saudi Arabia. Six African Women’s Footballer of the Year awards. Three World Cups. The first African woman nominated for the Ballon d’Or.
When she arrived at Bay FC ahead of the 2024 season, she spoke about what she hoped her journey meant for the players behind her. “You want to think about the African players who can actually get more opportunities,” she said. “You want to encourage these girls to come here as well.” Back home, she runs a foundation in Lagos with an annual football tournament for girls. She understands that the pipeline she came through needs to be built from the ground up.
You want to think about the African players who can actually get more opportunities.
Her career traces a route that African women’s football has followed for thirty years. The talent forms on the continent. The value compounds somewhere else. That gap, between where the talent originates and where it is commercially captured, is what makes African women’s football one of the most significant underpriced opportunities in global sport. The opportunity runs across multiple markets at different stages, with different entry points for different types of capital.
The market landscape
The CAF Women’s Champions League, now in its fifth year, has become the most useful market map on the continent. Its winners have come from South Africa, Morocco, and DR Congo. Its semi-finalists have included clubs from Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania. Eight sub-confederations now feed into the competition. The prize pool has grown 52% since the inaugural edition, with the winner receiving $600,000 and every group-stage club guaranteed at least $150,000, according to CAF.
Read those figures as a commercial survey, and two things become clear. First, where infrastructure already works. Mamelodi Sundowns operates within the PSL ecosystem, a league built on centralised broadcast rights, consistent title sponsorship, and an ownership model that has been compounding for two decades. AS FAR sits inside Morocco’s football economy, which contributes more to national GDP as a share than any other African country, according to research cited by FIFA. Both clubs know how to retain value at home. Their continental dominance reflects decisions made years before they won anything.
The talent forms on the continent. The value compounds somewhere else.
Second, where it does not yet work, and what that means. Ghana’s Hasaacas Ladies contested the first final. Vihiga Queens of Kenya qualified for the inaugural edition. Simba Queens of Tanzania reached the 2022 semi-finals. These clubs have competed at the highest level of African women’s football on budgets that serious private capital has never touched. The audience watching them is real and expanding. The 2025 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations reached more than 120 broadcast territories, according to CAF. A 2022 semi-final between Morocco and Nigeria drew over 45,000 people, the largest crowd in the tournament’s history. That is a signal of active demand with nowhere adequate to go.
Different markets, different opportunities
The opportunity does not present itself the same way across every market, and that matters. Academy investment in West Africa captures transfer value at the point of formation, before it migrates. Broadcast rights in East Africa sit in a television market that is underdeveloped for women’s football and growing fast, with first-mover positioning still available. Club ownership in Southern Africa comes with a working commercial blueprint, the PSL model, and a regional audience already primed for professional women’s football. These are different risk profiles, different capital requirements, and different timelines. The continental spread is what gives the opportunity its range.
Global women’s football revenues reached $820 million in 2025, up 300% since 2021, according to Deloitte. S&P Global describes the elevation of women’s sports as producing opportunities with relatively low entry valuations and high growth potential. Those numbers belong to a market that has already moved. In Africa, the equivalent moment is arriving across several markets at once, at prices that still reflect where things started.
The long term view
Oshoala’s foundation tournament in Lagos fills its pitches every year. The girls playing in it are growing up in the same football environment she left at 20. Same talent. Same passion. Same understanding that football is a serious path. What is different now is that the commercial infrastructure around them is, for the first time, beginning to take shape. The leagues, the academies, the broadcast deals, the sponsorship agreements: in several markets, at the same time, the architecture is being built.
The question is who builds it.