November 2, 2025, was not just the day India’s women lifted the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup trophy. While the title ended a decades-long wait for the trophy, its significance went beyond the result. For countless young girls across India, it offered a new picture of what was possible—and for parents, perhaps a new reason to see cricket as a path worth encouraging for their daughters. If 1983 made cricket India’s obsession, 2025 could be remembered as the year women’s cricket found its moment.
Importantly, the win also changed the commercial conversation around women’s cricket. It gave brands, broadcasters and sponsors a new reason to look at the game not just for its sporting value, but for the scale of its audience, its cultural relevance and its potential as an advertising avenue.
Ten months on, two of the biggest tests of that shift lie just weeks apart. The Women’s Asia Cup is already underway in Dubai, running through to its final on September 13, with Harmanpreet Kaur’s India having faced Pakistan on September 5. Barely a fortnight later, the same squad heads to Japan, where India opens its Asian Games campaign in Aichi-Nagoya on September 17, defending the cricket gold it won at Hangzhou in 2023. Two continental chases back-to-back, within a month.
The signs suggest that the gap between the weightage accorded to the men’s and women’s cricket teams is steadily decreasing, with the shift becoming evident when comparing the women’s team’s standing before and after their World Cup win. India’s World Cup win carried a record prize pool of $13.88 million, a 297% jump from 2022, while the BCCI followed up with a `51 crore reward for the squad—part of what the board described as a 300% increase in prize money for the women’s game.
The tournament’s reach tells the same story. According to the JioStar broadcast data, the 2025 World Cup delivered a viewership reach of 446 million—the highest ever recorded for a women’s cricket event, and greater than the combined total of the previous three ICC Women’s World Cups.
But IMPACT is following a shift that is a little away from the pitch. Within days of the World Cup final, talent managers were fielding a level of interest that would once have been reserved for the biggest moments in men’s cricket. And now, endorsement values for India’s leading women cricketers have climbed anywhere between 25% and 100% of pre-World Cup percentages, according to agencies handling the squad, with breakout performers seeing some of the sharpest jumps.
The Women’s Premier League (WPL) has played a major role in that transition. Launched in 2023 on the back of a `951 crore media rights deal, the league has recorded one of the steepest viewership growth curves in Indian sport. Its inaugural season drew roughly 50 million TV viewers across 14 matches. By 2025, its reach had touched an estimated 300 million fans, while the final drew 185 million viewers on JioHotstar—matching the audience for the men’s T20 World Cup final the previous year.
That curve has only steepened. WPL 2026 was its most-viewed season ever on digital, up 17% year-on-year, with overall consumption rising 69%. The 2026 final delivered twice the reach of the 2025 summit clash and became the most-viewed women’s T20 game ever across all screens, per JioHotstar data. Anup Govindan, Head of Sales–Sports, JioStar, explains, “Brands now view women’s sport as a marketing and growth platform, and this shift can be attributed to Team India’s maiden ICC Women’s World Cup title in 2025. The participation of brands across diverse sectors and categories that have never before been associated with women’s cricket is the clearest indicator yet of the commercial maturity this ecosystem is beginning to achieve.”
A Humbling Revisit
The momentum can look sudden, but the runway has been decades-long. Women’s international cricket actually predates the men’s World Cup—the inaugural Women’s Cricket World Cup was staged in England in 1973, two years before the men’s edition began. For most of the decades since, though, the sport ran largely outside cricket’s commercial main stage— unpaid tours, patchy telecasts and administration handled separately from the men’s boards. In India, the BCCI absorbed the Women’s Cricket Association of India only in 2006, bringing the women’s game under the same governance, and eventually, funding structures as the men’s.
The commercial ecosystem has expanded alongside the audience. Central sponsorship revenues for the WPL doubled from around `50 crore in 2023 to more than `100 crore by 2025. WPL 2026 opened with more than 70 advertisers across broadcast, spanning BFSI, fintech, beauty, automotive and FMCG—categories that had rarely, if ever, found meaningful space in women’s cricket before.
That is perhaps the strongest indication that the game has moved beyond being a representation play. When Candere, the lifestyle jewellery label from the House of Kalyan Jewellers, named Smriti Mandhana as its brand ambassador in June 2026, alongside its existing face Shah Rukh Khan, the pairing barely raised an eyebrow in marketing circles. A few years ago, a jewellery brand placing a woman cricketer alongside a Bollywood superstar might have felt like a statement. Today, it looks like a regular business decision.
Ramesh Kalyanaraman, Director of Candere by Kalyan, says Mandhana was a natural fit “because she embodies confidence, authenticity and ambition, while representing a generation of consumers that sees jewellery as an extension of personal style.” As women’s cricket continues to grow, he believes athletes such as Mandhana will become increasingly meaningful partners for brands looking to build genuine, long-term relationships with modern audiences.
Pee Safe’s association with Mandhana follows a similar logic, albeit in a different category. Rithish Kumar, Co-founder of the personal hygiene brand, Pee Safe, says Mandhana was chosen to front the brand’s Comfort Range because her confidence and perseverance mirror its philosophy around women prioritising their health and comfort. “Initiatives such as #PlayInComfort and #BeInYourComfortZone are designed to reframe menstruation as something that should not interrupt everyday life. For Pee Safe, such partnerships are increasingly being evaluated on trust, engagement and conversion across health, wellness and personal care, rather than simply optics. The objective is less about awareness and more about normalising conversations around menstrual and intimate hygiene.”
The roster beyond Mandhana tells a similar story. Skipper Harmanpreet Kaur became the face of Shyam Steel earlier this year, fronting a campaign built around trust and reliability in home-building decisions. Shafali Verma, fresh from her ‘Player of the Match’ performance in the World Cup final, was named ambassador for the Haryana State Commission for Women, alongside existing associations with Puma, SG and My11Circle.
Apollo Tyres, meanwhile, built a new chapter of its ‘Har Safar Mein Dum Hai’ platform around the personal journeys of India’s women cricketers. The campaign featured Verma cutting her hair short to get into a boys’ cricket academy and Renuka Singh’s long commutes to practice. The storytelling is significant because it treats the athletes not as symbols of women’s sport, but as individuals with stories capable of carrying a mainstream brand platform.
Broadcasters, too, are recalibrating their bets on the women’s game. Rajesh Kaul, Chief Revenue Officer and Business Head, Sports and International, Sony Pictures Networks India, says “Women’s cricket has moved beyond being seen primarily through the lens of representation or purpose; it is now a mainstream media and advertising opportunity. India’s emergence as ODI World Cup Champions has accelerated audience interest, while players such as Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana and Jemimah Rodrigues have become widely recognised personalities beyond the sport. This builds on the foundation created by icons such as Mithali Raj.”
He further claims that Sony is not entering the picture, just now. “We’ve always championed the unstoppable power of female athletes—from our 2022 ‘Non-Stop Cricket’ campaign with Smriti Mandhana and Pankaj Tripathi, to our latest milestone for the Women’s T20 Asia Cup 2026. Featuring Indian captain Harmanpreet Kaur, our bold new campaign makes it clear—cricket is ‘Not a Gentleman’s Game’.”
That is where the commercial evolution becomes most interesting. Nikhil Khatri, Vice President of Biddable Performance at the digital marketing agency LS Digital, describes the shift as one from representation to performance. Brands, he says, are no longer partnering with women athletes simply to make a statement around inclusivity. “They want to know whether the association can reach new audiences, strengthen brand preference and deliver measurable business outcomes over time,” he remarks. In other words, women cricketers are increasingly being assessed against the same metrics as any other celebrity: reach, engagement, brand lift and business impact.
The WPL has been crucial in creating that shift. Keith Braganza, Sports Lead at TheSmallBigIdea, points out that women cricketers were once largely viewed through the lens of marquee tournaments, with attention peaking around World Cups. “Franchise cricket has changed that equation by giving players individual fan bases and more consistent visibility. Tournaments may create the spark, but the value of a player comes from what happens between them.”
That distinction also frames the September 5 fixture against Pakistan. For the men, India-Pakistan has long existed as a commercial property in its own right—one that can generate attention irrespective of the wider tournament narrative. The women’s game isn’t there yet, and it doesn’t need to be; the more relevant story this month is simply that two very big tests, the Asia Cup and the Asian Games, lie back-to-back for a team whose off-field value has never been higher.
Shakir Jamil, Head of Marketing at CREX, an Indian cricket community platform, believes engagement with women’s cricket has become less dependent on marquee tournaments altogether. “Fans increasingly follow individual players’ performances, milestones and journeys throughout the year, with Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana and Jemimah Rodrigues developing identities that extend beyond a particular team or tournament. The Asian Games could provide another visibility spike—cricket’s inclusion puts the sport in front of audiences who may not follow every bilateral series or franchise game,” he notes. Jamil also argues the real commercial value lies in what follows: sustained engagement through year-round cricket and digital content, rather than allowing attention to disappear once a tournament ends. That continuity is what turns a player into a long-term brand property.
Ricky Vasandani, CEO and Co-founder of lab-grown diamond label Solitario, sees the appeal through the lens of brand equity. “Partnering with top women cricketers, he says, is no longer simply about short-term buzz. The athletes bring authenticity, independence and modern values that can connect with premium consumers in ways traditional Bollywood glamour cannot always replicate. For Solitario, that was part of the rationale behind its partnership with the Gujarat Giants during WPL 2025,” Vasandani says. As he points out, jewellery is a women-dominated category while cricket remains India’s biggest sport — making the combination a natural fit.
Abhijit Awasthi of Sideways Agency offers an equally straightforward explanation for the growing number of partnerships. “Women are increasingly becoming a large part of the addressable market, he says, while India’s premier women athletes are performing well enough across sports to command appeal across demographics,” Awasthi notes.
Kaul mentions that the Asian Games, where India will defend its gold medal, provide just another high-profile stage to sustain that momentum and bring these athletes to an even wider audience. Advertiser interest is also evolving and brands increasingly recognise that leading women cricketers can connect with consumers throughout the year, not only during major tournaments. The larger opportunity, therefore, lies in building long-term associations around their personalities, achievements and individual stories, rather than limiting investments to tournament-led campaigns.
So, are women cricketers there yet? If the benchmark is whether brands are willing to put serious money behind them, the evidence is clear. The brands who want to put their money into the women’s game seem to be only increasing every day, as ONLY Denims taps Smriti Mandhana for their Autumn collection and Excitel joins the brands backing DP World Women’s Asia Cup 2026 to help the tournament gain momentum.
