It seems you can’t look anywhere without hearing about the growth and profitability of women’s sports. The refrain has gone from “no one watches women’s sports” to “everyone watches women’s sports” in a matter of just a few years. For longtime fans of women’s basketball, women’s soccer and women’s hockey, the meteoric growth of leagues like the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) can feel exciting. But with all this growth comes more complicated feelings too.

The argument for investing in women’s sports often falls along capitalist lines such as “there’s money to be made here, and it would be unwise to pass it up.” A new report from Deloitte estimates that global revenue generated by elite women’s sports will exceed £1.8 billion (approximately $3.3 billion in Canadian dollars) in 2025. With investment opportunities increasing exponentially, women’s pro sports leagues are signing sponsorship deals with major companies left and right. However, which brands these leagues are choosing to partner with now that there is money available is increasingly at odds with the presumably progressive values these leagues have been perceived to have by long-time fans.

The WNBA players, in particular, have made a name for themselves with their commitment to racial justice activism and social justice advocacy cause that they dedicate each season to (there is even a documentary about their activism, called Power of the Dream). In women’s soccer, the U.S. Women’s National Team’s fight for equal pay often transfers to perceptions of the NWSL because many of the same players are represented. Even though those values and actions come from the players themselves, the public perception often applies those views to the leagues as a whole. In the public sphere, the distinction between the league (a corporation with its own interests in mind) and the players (individual workers with their own views) is often flattened.

But why would a league that is being heralded as “a beacon of social and political activism” think that partnering with Amazon would align with its values? Amazon is well known to be a company that, among other things, exploits workers, puts them in unsafe working conditions, helps fund ICE, has a terrible environmental record and is single-handedly responsible for killing bookstores. Perhaps for the same reason they thought their new partnership with Alex Cooper’s Unwell Hydration drink was a good idea? Cooper, the host of the popular Call Her Daddy podcast, is a former employee of Barstool Sports and has done little to distance herself or her brand from Barstool’s toxic and offensive content in the years since she left the company. Not only that, her Unwell Hydration beverage is a Nestlé product, which is currently the subject of multiple boycotts for reasons that include political, environmental and human rights concerns. In Canada, the company faces boycotts from the Council of Canadians and the indigenous rights organization Lakota People’s Law Project for extracting water from watersheds that have recently seen droughts. All of the leagues have at least one official partnership with a company that is on the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) list.