For years, the marketing budgets of corporate America flowed to men's professional sports with the reliability of a utility bill — predictable, substantial, and rarely questioned. Now, it seems, some of that money is finding a new address.

Josh Childress, the former Stanford forward who played for the Atlanta Hawks, Phoenix Suns, Brooklyn Nets, and New Orleans Pelicans before joining the ownership ranks, says he believes a shift in advertising spending is helping to accelerate investment in women's sports. Mr. Childress became a minority owner of the Portland Thorns of the National Women's Soccer League in 2024.

"Traditionally, men's sports gobbled up a large chunk of those marketing dollars," Mr. Childress said in a recent interview with Front Office Sports. "Now, you're seeing this shift where a lot of that marketing spend is going to women's sports."

The more interesting part of his argument concerns not the dollars that are moving, but the dollars that are arriving for the first time. Mr. Childress suggested that women's sports have created opportunities for brands that would have had little reason to advertise around men's teams.

"I would assume that a Sephora or a Skims, or some of these women-forward brands, wouldn't have been as inclined to lean in to marketing for the Warriors," he said. "But them having women's sports and being able to market to those individuals has created a new kind of pool of capital."

(The phrase "lean in," of course, carries its own freight in conversations about women and business, though Mr. Childress appeared to use it without irony.)

Whether this new pool proves to be a pond or an ocean remains to be seen. But for a league like the N.W.S.L., which has spent years building audiences and credibility, the arrival of beauty and apparel brands with no prior interest in sports sponsorship represents something genuinely novel: not a reallocation of existing dollars, but an expansion of the total available pie.

Mr. Childress, for his part, said he hoped to add more sports investments to his portfolio in time. The Bhathal family, through whom he acquired his Thorns stake, also owns the Sacramento Kings and the Golden State Valkyries of the W.N.B.A.

"I wish," he said of joining those ownership groups. "That's all to come as I continue to build out my business."

The line between aspiration and announcement, on matters of sports ownership, has always been a thin one.

Original story published in Front Office Sports: "Josh Childress: Women's Sports Attracting 'New Pool of Capital'"