Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe Are Riding the “Rocket Ship” of the Female Sports Media Ecosystem
Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe have a packed schedule for the WNBA All-Star weekend in Indianapolis. “We’ll be taking over Indy, basically,” Rapinoe tells Vanity Fair.
The sports media power couple will be hosting a live event for their podcast, A Touch More, an after-party, and Bird will be hosting an additional live event for her new podcast, Bird’s Eye View. Building on the excitement and media attention surrounding women’s basketball, the pair are “creating that experience that people can tap into,” Rapinoe says. “We definitely want to continue widening our footprints at these events, to create cool spaces that, frankly, we never had before.”
The former athletes, who have been engaged since 2020, have recently become business partners in their burgeoning sports media empire, focusing on live events and experiences for a female sports-fan community that the couple argues has previously been overlooked. “There’s a variety of things that finally ripped the blinders off people to women’s sports, and now they’re seeing all of it when it was already there,” Bird says.
During the COVID pandemic, Bird and Rapinoe turned to social media for community, hosting Instagram Lives for followers. Then they hit pause and finished their professional playing careers—Bird in basketball and Rapinoe in soccer. Post-retirement, the pair launched the live series and a podcast with the help of Vox Media. Since then, they have become fixtures on the media circuit at events like Cannes Lions, SXSW, and WNBA All-Star weekend, interviewing a wide range of guests including JuJu Watkins, Paige Bueckers, Aubrey Plaza, Gabby Thomas, and, most recently, Tara Davis-Woodhall and Hunter Woodhall. Rapinoe and Bird even hosted former second gentleman Doug Emhoff on the podcast while Kamala Harris campaigned for president.
I attended a live taping of their podcast in May, just hours after the New York Liberty were presented with their 2024 championship rings and won their home opener against the Las Vegas Aces. The fans coming decked in Liberty gear left the game and filtered into Shell’s Loft, a sun-soaked event space in Brooklyn.
As fans sipped on the signature cocktail a Home Opener Spritz, sports journalist Pablo Torre was checking out the scene, and in the back of the room, Jason Sudeikis was perched at a high top, in a Liberty sweatshirt and hat. Breanna Stewart, the guest for the episode, barely had a moment to get ready, rushing over immediately after playing for 27 minutes in the game, where she’d put up 25 points and eight rebounds.
The expansion of their podcast and live-events business also happens to coincide with a recent surge of interest in the female sports space. By the time Caitlin Clark broke through in the media, Bird and Rapinoe already had an infrastructure in place to feed the desire for regular content and analysis. The pair, who are both Olympic gold medalists and female sports legends in their own right, argue that the fandom and community surrounding women’s sports has always been active, but was deeply suppressed in the media over misogynistic biases. Since the start of their professional careers, “the mechanism for information delivery changed dramatically,” Rapinoe says, with social media allowing for far more access than a news cycle dictated by a daily ESPN highlight reel.
Rapinoe and Bird feel a responsibility to bring expertise and nuance to the female sports media ecosystem, which at the moment feels a bit “land grabby,” Bird says, as new media entrants and investors catch up to a market opportunity that was one vastly overlooked.
