The most innovative companies in sports for 2026

FastCompany: For decades, the business of sports ran on a simple, durable logic: The leagues held the rights, the networks decided what to pay for, and we watched what they gave us. That logic is changing. Women’s sports is no longer a niche or a moment. It’s a market. The Professional Women’s Hockey League is packing arenas, growing attendance 52% in its second season and selling out NHL venues across North America. League One Volleyball spent four years building youth clubs across 28 states before its first professional game, then sold out every market once it began play.

The Premier Lacrosse League launched the sport’s first-ever professional women’s league in 2025, and ESPN bought an equity stake in both its men’s and women’s leagues—the first time the network has invested in a sport. The shift in sports is also about who’s creating, owning, and watching. Jomboy Media built a baseball audience so devoted that Major League Baseball chased a deal with them. Boardroom gave athletes a media company where they don’t just appear in the content, they own it. Wave Sports & Entertainment is doing the same for a generation that consumes sports in 60-second clips rather than three-hour broadcasts.

Even the definition of an athlete is being renegotiated. Bleacher Report ‘s Creator League is rewriting what a professional athlete looks like—and who gets to be one. With 81% of its audience under 34, it’s engaging the fans that traditional sports broadcasts have all but lost. It seems the fans the industry has spent years ignoring are now the ones everyone is chasing. 1. Professional Women’s Hockey League For putting women hockey players at center ice Two years ago, the Professional Women’s Hockey League hadn’t played a single game.

Today, it’s proven that demand for elite women’s hockey hasn’t been lacking, it’s just been waiting for the right platform. The league’s boldest move was its PWHL Takeover Tour—nine neutral-site games staged in NHL-capacity arenas beyond the league’s six original markets. More than 123,000 fans showed up. Vancouver drew a sold-out crowd of 19,038 to Rogers Arena. Detroit packed 14,288 into Little Caesars Arena, setting a U.S. attendance record for women’s professional hockey. The real story: Nearly 80% of Tour attendees were experiencing their first PWHL game, transforming casual curiosity into activated fandom.

The Tour directly informed the league’s April 2025 expansion decisions, bringing permanent teams to Vancouver and Seattle. Unlike previous attempts at women’s pro hockey, the PWHL secured an eight-year collective bargaining agreement before its first puck drop—a structural foundation that’s now being studied by other emerging women’s leagues. Corporate partnerships grew 50% season-over-season to 60 sponsors, while overall attendance jumped 52% to 735,000-plus fans.

The league entered its third season in November 2025 having drawn 1 million fans to arenas in just 14 months, with the 2026 Winter Olympics primed to position the league’s best players on the global stage. Read more about Professional Women’s Hockey League , No. 38 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026 . 2. FloSports For providing high-quality coverage of underserved sports Most streaming services chase the biggest leagues. FloSports built a $200 million business doing the opposite.

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The article addresses a significant shift in the sports industry, highlighting the importance of women's sports for brand strategies, which is highly relevant and somewhat novel in the context of evolving market dynamics.