CEO discusses unmitigated power of WSL: “We have the ability to put a new surf break on the map”

Big Bro is watching.

Surf fans, long used to making fun of the World Surf League over perceived incompetence, had hair blown off foreheads after the acting CEO, Ryan Crosby, painted an extremely bullish picture of the “Home of Global Surfing’s” state. Sitting down with financial resource JohnWallStreet, Crosby shared that the WSL audience was up 40% 2025 compared to 2024.

Part of the explosion, he explained, was a pivot away from traditional sports’ broadcasing. “We started looking at our events less like a sport and more like Netflix looks at their programming, or how Hulu and Disney Plus would look at theirs,” he said.

All the eyeballs have, in turn, increased the WSL’s desire to non-endemic sponsors. Only four years ago, a third of Championship Tour sponsors hailed from the surf industry. That, in 2026, has dwindled to single digits though the market cap is $5 billion.

Blue-chip brands, JohnWallStreet reported, are “flocking to the WSL in search of a younger fan base.

Crosby proudly shared the average professional surfing fan age is 38.

He also spoke on the amount of tourism board dollars the WSL receives because, “We drive a lot of tourism, so governments are willing to pay a lot of money for us to come. We have the ability to put a new surf break on the map.”

Now that’s power. JohnWallStreet pointed to how the WSL put Nazaré on the map, as an example, but I would imagine Garrett McNamara might have thoughts on that.

Anyhow, the piece rounds out with the reveal that 80 million people watched professional surfing for 20 million hours, last year and that wave tubs remain the future.

“Probably the most interesting opportunity right now derives from the proliferation of surfing wave pools in the world. There are ~35 today. There will be 70 by 2027,” Crosby declared before ending with, “Similar to the way Netflix does, we have the ability to understand the movement and size of the audience, and how likely they would be to pay for a product and what they would be willing to pay (combined) with brand tracking data, our intelligence provides a much more complete picture of the audience in terms of targeting and going directly to them for our brand partners.”

Big bro is watching.