‘We’re way undervalued’
With more star power, fans, can WNBA make money?
After the Indiana Fever made Caitlin Clark the WNBA’S No. 1 draft pick last week, the team’s ticket prices soared. The basketball star’s long-distance shots and huge following have landed her on “Saturday Night Live,” attracted interest from sponsors such as Nike and sold out jerseys at a rapid pace.
In exchange for Clark’s once-in-a-generation talent, the WNBA will pay her … $76,535.
News of the paltry first-year salary has ignited a countrywide debate that even President Joe Biden weighed in on, commenting that “even if you’re the best, women are not paid their fair share.”
It also highlighted a hard truth that largely goes unspoken about the WNBA and many women’s sports leagues: They aren’t profitable.
The simplest reason the WNBA isn’t paying Clark more is that the league brings in just $200 million annually and relies on the NBA for some of its funding. The NBA, by contrast, brings in about $10 billion.
When the NBA and its commissioner at the time, David Stern, founded the WNBA in 1996, return on their investment wasn’t their immediate focus. As Stern later recounted, he wanted “to develop new fans, more programming, have arena content outside the NBA season, give more girls an incentive to play basketball.”
And, he added, “we knew it was going to be a long haul.”
Indeed, many argue that the WNBA simply needs more time: The NBA had a 50-year head start, and stars such as Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan helped lift it up in the 1980s and ’90s.
The question now is whether Clark is the WNBA’S own Bird or Johnson, a huge star coming at exactly the right time to raise interest across the sport. Or is she more like the league’s Tiger Woods: a talent whose popularity as a prodigy has yet to be replicated?
The WNBA’S profitability hinges on media rights. The league’s $60 million annual deal is up for renewal in 2025, and several trends are working in its favor, including a race among streamers to collect rights to live sports and a rise in legalized gambling that leaves bettors eager to expand their outlets.
College stars such as Clark, Cameron Brink, Angel Reese, Alissa Pili and Aaliyah Edwards, who are joining the WNBA in fashionable style, bring an additional jolt to the league. Their collective drawing power during the NCAA Tournament helped deliver a television audience for the women’s championship game that topped viewership for the men’s final for the first time.
“We’re way undervalued today,” Cathy Engelbert, commissioner of the WNBA, said.
Stars have powered viewership peaks in women’s sports. In a 2018-19 survey by researchers at Ohio State University, only 3% of respondents said women’s sports constituted all or almost all of their sports consumption, and 10% said half or most of it. But viewers will show up in hordes, particularly when those matches are being played on a big global stage.
— Serena Williams’ final match of the 2022 U.S. Open brought in between 4.8 million and 6.9 million views, the most for a tennis match in ESPN’S history
— A record 6.43 million viewers tuned in to watch the women’s U.S. soccer team, which included Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe, play in the World Cup last year.
— Clark’s final college game, a loss in the NCAA championship game, drew 18.87 million viewers on ABC and ESPN, about 4 million more than the men’s championship game.
Alex Michael, a managing director at investment bank Liontree, said the value of stars might be increasing as media consumption continues to shift away from broadcast television. “It’s not only the live games, but just their lives — whether it’s social media or other facets of storytelling,” he said.
The chicken-or-the-egg problem. Although more viewers translate to more money for the league, it takes money to find new viewers. In 2022, the WNBA raised $75 million from an investor group that includes Nike, Condoleezza Rice, Laurene Powell Jobs and Michael Dell. The league is also planning multiple expansion teams that it hopes will bring in more money.
The 2022 funding has gone into marketing, ad campaigns, influencer marketing and live events, Engelbert said. And some of those efforts may be paying off: This past season, the league averaged 627,000 viewers per game on ABC — still a fraction of the 1.09 million across all networks for NBA games, but its most-viewed regular season in more than a decade.
“The seeds were sown over the last five years for this monumental growth,” Chiney Ogwumike, a host for ESPN who was the WNBA’S first overall draft pick in 2014, told Dealbook.
As evidence of ESPN’S role in that progress, she cited pregame shows for the WNBA and an increasing number of shows about women’s college basketball.
Some industry executives say it’s especially hard to ignore this stat: More than 2.4 million people tuned in to the WNBA draft, beating the previous record by more than 300%.
Bobby Sharma, founder of Bluestone Equity Partners, who previously worked as a senior legal executive in the NBA office, told Dealbook that he was one of the many viewers who had tuned in for the first time.
“There is a real possibility we may be witnessing a transformational moment for the WNBA, for the sport of basketball, and maybe even a cultural and economic shift for women’s sports in America,” he said.