a record in theaters and a failure on television
In Philadelphia, the women’s league 3X3 Unrivaled broke all attendance records for a professional women’s basketball regular season game, gathering 21,490 spectators at Xfinity Mobile Arena, including numerous sports and entertainment personalities.
This was the Unrivaled’s first outing outside of Miami, and the two-day leg also served as a test for Philadelphia, which hasn’t hosted a professional women’s game since 1998 and is already planning the arrival of a WNBA franchise in 2030. For Unrivaled, the leg showed the strength of its national event and tour model that demonstrated the strength of its national event and tour schedule.
“It was amazing. You could feel the love in the room tonight. I’m so happy we came here. I can’t explain it except to say I was filled with joy. It was extraordinary.”, reacted league co-founder Nafisa Collier. “It’s a testament to what we’re building and the trust people have in this project… To see this city respond, to break a historic record for professional women’s basketball, and to do it for Unrivaled, that’s incredible. The future belongs to Unrivaled.”
But behind this record in the stands, the television audience tells a different story. Aired on TNT and truTV, the league has struggled to convert this enthusiasm into viewers, with a big drop from the previous season. The league thus shows an average of 92,000 viewers on TNT and truTVa drop of 49% compared to last season at the same stage of the competition (183,000 viewers after 26 matches).
In other bad news: TNT’s prime-time broadcast of Unrivaled also saw 68% fewer viewers compared to prime-time programming aired on the channel in the four weeks prior to Unrivaled’s launch (93,000 viewers compared to 291,000).
2026-01-31 14:15:00
