Counting the Fans, Counting the Dollars

What the numbers say, and don’t say, about the economic footprint of women’s sports in Minneapolis and St. Paul

Minneapolis and St. Paul have quietly become one of the busiest markets in the country for women’s professional and college sports. Between the Minnesota Lynx, the Minnesota Frost and the University of Minnesota’s flagship women’s programs, the Twin Cities now draws more than half a million fan visits a year to women’s sporting events. The harder question is what that attendance is actually worth to the regional economy, and the answer depends heavily on how the question is asked.

Start with the crowds. The Lynx drew roughly 250,000 fans to Target Center in 2025 across the regular season and playoffs, a surge that has accompanied a franchise valuation climbing from 85 million dollars in 2024 to 405 million dollars today, according to the Star Tribune’s reporting on Lynx season-ticket price increases. The Frost, playing in the Professional Women’s Hockey League, have averaged well over 8,000 fans a night at their downtown St. Paul arena this season, among the best draws in the young league, building on a debut season that set North American attendance records for women’s professional hockey, per Star Tribune coverage of the team’s launch.

College sports add substantially to the total. University of Minnesota volleyball drew more than 80,000 fans across its 2025 season at Maturi Pavilion. Women’s basketball at Williams Arena is drawing an estimated 3,500 fans a game, and women’s hockey at Ridder Arena has climbed to roughly 2,300 a game, extending a multi-year attendance gain first documented by the Star Tribune in 2023. Combined, these five programs, the Lynx, the Frost, and Gopher volleyball, basketball and hockey, account for roughly 545,000 attendee-visits in a typical year. That figure excludes one-time events such as the 2022 NCAA Women’s Final Four, which alone drew more than 36,000 fans to Target Center over a single weekend.

Translating attendance into dollars requires a model, and the best locally calibrated benchmark available comes from a study Minnesota Sports and Events commissioned from Conventions, Sports and Leisure International (CSL), ahead of that 2022 Final Four. Using the federal Regional Input-Output Modeling System, one analysis calculated multipliers specific to the Twin Cities economy and found that the three-day tournament generated 34.4 million dollars in net-new economic output for Minneapolis, supported 702 jobs, produced 10.7 million dollars in personal income, and generated roughly 2.3 million dollars in combined city, county and state tax revenue, according to the full report.

Applying that same multiplier framework to an ordinary season, rather than a marquee tournament weekend, produces a smaller but still meaningful number. A model built on comparable per-fan spending assumptions puts the combined net-new annual economic output of the Lynx, the Frost and the three flagship Gopher women’s programs somewhere between 16 million and 25 million dollars a year for the Twin Cities metro, supporting on the order of 200 jobs and generating one to two million dollars in state and local tax revenue.

That range comes with a caveat economists routinely raise about industry-commissioned impact studies. Most fans at a Tuesday-night Lynx game or a Saturday Gopher volleyball match are metro-area locals, not visiting tourists, and the money they spend on tickets and concessions is, in large part, money they would otherwise have spent on a movie, a restaurant meal or some other form of entertainment elsewhere in the same regional economy. Economists call this the substitution effect, and the CSL report itself builds in an adjustment for it, noting that a large majority of Women’s Final Four tickets were purchased by people from outside the seven-county metro area entirely, which is precisely why displacement was a minor factor for that event. Routine season attendance runs the opposite way, so any regular-season multiplier estimate should be read as an upper bound on genuinely new money entering the region, not a precise accounting of it.

Where the multiplier framework holds up best is for marquee, one-time events that pull real outside visitation, hotel stays and national media coverage, the way the 2022 Final Four did. The CSL study separately valued the earned media generated by that single weekend at up to 26.5 million dollars, apart from the direct spending figures. If the Twin Cities lands another marquee women’s tournament, whether an NCAA regional, a Big Ten championship or a milestone PWHL game, the local economic bump in that particular year could rival or exceed the entire annual baseline generated by routine Lynx, Frost and Gopher attendance combined.

The larger story the numbers tell is one of momentum rather than a finished picture. Lynx attendance has climbed as the WNBA’s national television audience has grown, the Frost set attendance records for women’s professional hockey in their debut season, and Gopher volleyball and hockey have each posted multi-year gains. Minnesota Aurora FC, a community-owned women’s soccer club, and an incoming professional women’s volleyball franchise set to begin play at the Frost’s arena in 2027 suggest the roster of teams generating these numbers will only grow. As franchise valuations, ticket prices and media rights fees continue to rise, the economic footprint of women’s sports in Minneapolis and St. Paul appears likely to grow with them, even if today’s multiplier effect remains modest next to the region’s marquee men’s franchises.

Finally, while sports is generally not the largest  industry in an economy, the numbers here show that  beyond women’s sports contributing to the quality of life in the Twin Cities, its economic impact needs to be appreciated and perhaps  studied more.