Athletes have unparalleled alternatives to capitalize on their sports activities stardom lately by threading collectively enterprise, advocacy and philanthropic ventures by way of social media and on-line communities.

Soccer famous person Alex Morgan and her longtime enterprise accomplice Dan Levy focus on how Morgan is charting her transition off the pitch into enterprise, content material, basis and nonprofit work on the newest episode of Selection podcast “Strictly Enterprise.”

Morgan retired from skilled soccer in September 2024 after 11 seasons with the Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League, as a constitution participant from the league’s first season in 2013. For the U.S. Ladies’s Nationwide Staff, Morgan performed in 22 World Cup matches and scored 9 objectives. Over her 15-year skilled profession, she performed in 16 Olympic matches and scored six objectives.

4 years in the past, ladies’s sports activities accounted for 4% of the overall TV time dedicated to dwell video games and associated protection. In 2025, that quantity has spiked to 16% and it’s prone to be 20% by subsequent 12 months, in accordance with analysis carried out by Deloitte and the Assortment, the feminine centered advertising arm of Wasserman, the place Levy serves as government VP.

It’s no accident that girls’s sports activities is now commanding extra of the highlight. Skilled athletes akin to Morgan have labored onerous to advocate for girls’s leagues, demand pay parity on the skilled stage and battle for fairness in youth sports activities. Morgan partnered with three fellow sports activities leaders — WNBA nice Sue Hen, champion snowboarder Chloe Kim and Olympic swimmer Simone Manuel — in 2021 to launch Togethxr. It’s a sports activities model that features every thing from content material manufacturing to model consulting to advocacy and help providers for feminine athletes who’re additionally moms.

“We work with manufacturers to activate within the ladies’s sports activities area. We additionally do lots of studio work in partnership with different media manufacturers or manufacturing corporations,” Morgan mentioned in the course of the Q&A held July 17 as a part of Selection‘s annual Sports activities and Leisure Breakfast in West Hollywood. “We’re an area the place we’re trusted by feminine athletes and types as a result of it’s a firm constructed by feminine athletes and for feminine athletes. …There are such a lot of unimaginable tales that go unrecognized and unheard and unread within the feminine sports activities area that Togethxr is specializing in now.”

Morgan’s advocacy on the problem of equal pay for girls in sports activities prolonged to her promiment participation in a 2019 pay parity lawsuit towards her employer, the U.S. Ladies’s Nationwide Staff. The gamers reached at $24 million settlement in 2022.

Morgan’s braveness to advocate for greater pay and higher working circumstances for the ladies’s group was notably vital turned it got here “throughout her peak powers as a participant,” Levy confused. Morgan has additionally been unusually centered on branching out into enterprise and public service alternatives. “Loads of athletes battle with attempting to determine the right way to handle their profession and be the perfect at what they do, on the sphere, on the court docket and on the identical time, put within the time effort and work to construct their enterprise exterior of it. … It’s uncommon that you’ve somebody who can do all these issues within the prime of their profession.”

(Pictured: Alex Morgan and Dan Levy at Selection‘s Sports activities and Leisure Breakfast in West Hollywood)

“Strictly Enterprise” is Selection’s weekly podcast that includes conversations with trade leaders concerning the enterprise of media and leisure. (Please click on right here to subscribe to our free publication.) New episodes debut each week and may be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and extra.