You've probably heard of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese in recent months. Two superstar rookie WNBA players who some claim are behind one of the fastest turnarounds in sports league history. I can't think of a time in my lifetime that I've ever felt that type of movement in the air around you of just this is happening. This is something that you know, you dream about and, you know, playing in front of these crowds and these fans is amazing. Take a look at this chart right here. It shows the WNBA team valuations as of June 2024 for the Las Vegas Aces. The reigning champions are valued at $140 million. Just three years ago, the team was bought for $2 million. They won the championship the next year in 2022. But that's beside the point. The New York Liberty are valued at $130 million. In 2019, the team was reportedly sold for $10 million to Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai.

The team made $2 million in ticket revenue in just one game this season, the most ever of any WNBA team. Elected officials, corporate, private equity, everybody like, how do I get into the WNBA and how do I invest? And can I have an expansion team or can I invest in a current team? Caitlin Clark signed a $28 million Nike deal before she had even played a professional game. She has also signed with Wilson, the first basketball player to do so since Michael Jordan in 1984. Angel Reese has deals with Reebok, Beats by Dre, Wingstop, Xfinity, and many more. Despite all of this, there's been a lot of talk about the modest earnings of players. Clark's base salary this year is about $76,000. Breanna Stewart, the reigning league MVP or Most Valuable Player, is earning $205,000. Sure, they can both make more through bonuses or marketing opportunities with the league and can make

millions in sponsorship deals. But lots of other athletes get these deals too and still receive a higher salary. For example, this year's number one NBA draft pick will earn a $12.6 million salary before sponsorship deals. The comparisons to men's leagues are always tough for a league that's only 28 years old. The NBA is 78 years old. We've got players making significant endorsements who had zero endorsements back in 2019 when I joined this league. They wouldn't have any of those opportunities if they didn't have this league to play in. It's easy to look at other leagues and see the multi-million dollars that these folks are getting. We're going to be there one day. It's just continuing the positive progress that we've made and make sure that the sustainability of this league for the future generations is still going to be there. The league's biggest challenge now is making its business model work while players are negotiating for a bigger slice of the pie.

A monumental $2.2 billion TV rights deal with Disney, Amazon Prime, and NBC Universal starting in 2026 could change everything. The question is, will it be enough? This is Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut. Third place Connecticut Sun is playing number one New York Liberty in the Women's National Basketball Association. It's 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, and the 10,000 seat stadium is nearly full. Let's go outside. There is so much energy in this arena, no matter what time of day it is. WNBA is in its 27th season and has never experienced a year quite like this. I remember where all we wanted was insurance all year round to seeing where we are. Coach White has been around the league for 25 years, first as a player and then as a coach. The New York Liberty has two national team players on the team, MVP Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu, whose Nike shoe has become one of the most popular

sneakers in the market. The home team is loaded with stars too: Dewanna Bonner, Brionna Jones, and Alyssa Thomas. They all played in a WNBA All-Star game a couple of weeks later. Another event that broke records, including in attendance and viewership. Jones is earning $212,000 in 2024. That's a long way from the about $49,000 she made as a rookie in 2017. From where I started to where I am now, just, you know, I'm, you know, proud of that growth that I've made, just, you know, to earn that kind of money. Still, after the WNBA season is over, Jones goes overseas often to a league in Europe to play a second season, mainly to supplement her income. I'm getting paid to do something that I love year-round, and that's great. But you know, as I'm getting older, my body is, you know, feeling the constant,

you know, wear and tear of playing all year round. Playing overseas has been a lucrative option for WNBA players for decades. Superstars like Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird were some of the first to be rumored to make more than $1 million per season in Europe, often in Russia. Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner did it, too. She was detained for 293 days for possession of medical marijuana. Roughly half of the league's 144 players played in a second league in the winter of 2024. We're never going to tell players what to do, never going to tell them not to go overseas if that's what they want to do, for them and their family. But, you know, if you look at the 10, 11, 12 players on the bench who don't get a lot of playing time in the WNBA wants to make a roster the following year, they probably need to go play in the off-season in some league.

Playing an entire year without a break is very strenuous on the body and can increase the risk for serious injuries that ultimately shortens a player's career. On top of it, the WNBA training camp starts at the end of April, but some European leagues aren't finished by then. This year, a highly debated prioritization rule kicked in. If a player missed any time with their WNBA team, they're ineligible for the season and forfeit their salary. If you're trying to build a legitimate sports, media, entertainment property and players aren't there for the first month, I mean, the owners saw that, this happened well before I came in the door here. In 1996, the NBA and its then commissioner, David Stern, launched a women's league, the WNBA. The men's league was going through a huge boom with Michael Jordan at the helm, and a women's league played in the summertime would provide a full year of

basketball and would also help grow the sport internationally. The NBA and its owners would own the WNBA. It survived because of the great support the NBA has given it over many years. So there's a reason why the WNBA is the longest-tenured women's professional sports league in the country. Think about this by double any other. WNBA team owners received a 50% stake in 2002. In 2022, the league raised $75 million from a group of investors, the league's first-ever outside investment and the largest in women's sports history. They received a 16% stake in return, leaving only 42% left for WNBA and its owners. What made you decide to do that? How did that come about? Coming into 2021, we hired a banker and I said, I really need capital because I need people. I need people to grow this business, I need marketing. And so we started deploying it immediately, did a digital transformation, hired some outside

consultants. It'll be viewed in hindsight as a smart move to have done what we did. But this also means only 42% of national-level revenue, like TV and sponsorship deals, trickles down to the WNBA owners. The remaining goes to the NBA and its owners, five of which are also WNBA owners and the outside investor group. The current TV deal is worth about $60 million in 2024, only about $2 million of that goes to each team. I think the WNBA, if they had foreseen this kind of growth that was ahead, they would maybe take an alternative path than selling 16% of this league. The WNBA will tell you that the $75 million of capital that came into the league allowed them to take advantage of this incredible moment in time they had by beefing up marketing staff, increasing headcount across the board. Local revenue, on the other hand, from tickets to parking to concessions to local media rights are kept

with each individual team. Really, they need to make their money on the local level, and there's a huge disparity in from the top to the bottom, much more so than you see in the other sports leagues. In 2024, the WNBA is estimated to bring in $200 million in revenue. Just for comparison, the NBA is expected to earn $13 billion. The WNBA has historically lost around $10 million per season. Some estimates have said that the league is going to lose about $50 million. Is there a scenario that you will try to raise more money right now? Probably not. We probably don't need to raise capital like we did back in when I came in in 2020, started assessing raising capital, but I think it's more about the impact we're able to have on bringing in corporate partners at valuations that are worthy of now our viewership, our attendance. And I think corporates are seeing that, wow, if I want

to get with a consumer brand and a growth property, and I want to get to women and women of color. We're 80% women of color. WNBA might be a place where I would allocate my discretionary capital. I'm not sure if we didn't raise that capital. I'm not sure we would have been ready for this moment. They are in growth mode right now, and if you're a fast-growing tech company, your revenues are going through the roof. You might be losing more money than ever. You would never had a WNBA team with their own practice facility. And here we have the Phoenix Mercury. Mat Ishbia opening up a $100 million facility, the Las Vegas Aces. Mark Davis was the first to do it. This is Jess Smith, the president of Golden State Valkyries, the first WNBA expansion team since 2008. The San Francisco team will start playing in 2025. Toronto and Portland will be added to the league in

2026. Valkyries have already signed 15,000 season ticket deposits, the most in women's sports history. Pressure is high. The team paid $50 million just to join the league. The men's team, which is owned by the same family, has won four NBA championships in the past decade. I really do consider pressure a privilege. We have big aspirations to be part of that financial upside, of showing what's possible, not only with the number of seats that we have, but being really intentional about the experiences that we create. But Smith says it's important not to compare the WNBA with the NBA, salaries or otherwise. They are inherently different products, she says. The lifespan of the leagues, the number of teams, the number of athletes, the broadcast deals. It's just a different moment in time. In fact, when you do rewind to where the NBA was at this same moment in time for the W, they're more

comparable. And so, I think it's important to take note of that and to be aggressive, but charge our own path forward. That also doesn't mean we have to wait for things, but it does mean that we need time to grow. But that time may be coming sooner than later. On July 24th, 2024, the league signed an explosive 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal with Disney, Amazon Prime, and NBC, set to start in 2026. This is historic. It's never been done before. As media companies look at it, they're looking at those household names, those rivalries, those games of consequence. We have our playoffs coming up. They all love the playoffs, so they're paying now a much more right-sized value for our IP, which is called the WNBA and its players and the product they put on the court. When we look at player salaries, people wonder why are NBA player salaries 100 times higher than WNBA

salaries? Because the TV money was 100 times higher in the NBA than it was in the WNBA. Most sports leagues have a union that advocates on behalf of its players, negotiate salary caps, maximum and minimum salaries, benefits, and the way league revenue is split. That contract is called a collective bargaining agreement. The current CBA between the WNBA and the WNBPA was signed in 2020. There are times where I was like, oh, you know, I look at it as NBA. There's men that are, you know, making ten times 20 times what I'm making. You know, it's tough to see that inequality and knowing that, you know, on paper we're kind of, you know, equal. Jones' teammates Alyssa Thomas is arguably one of the top three players in the league. She makes the most of anyone on the Connecticut Sun. Still, only $218,000. She too plays in Europe in the off-season.

The opportunity is there to make money over there. Of course, in the CBA, they've tried to prevent it and, you know, make you fined or suspended if you're late to the W. But I found value in overseas. I've been able to develop my game over there and making two salaries in a year. Why not? While my body is still in great shape, I'm just trying to take advantage of that. The current CBA was a big step up from the prior, at least from the players' perspective. Top players can earn up to $500,000 in cash compensation between salary, marketing opportunities, and merit bonuses. The maximum base salary is $241,984, but only three players make that right now. So players have the ability to make a fair amount, especially with a four and a half, five-month season. You want to have a league for these players to hand off to the next generation of players. So that's why we've been very careful.

But it's hard to get younger players and others to focus on. There's actually a business here that has to sustain itself, and yes, we absolutely want to return more to the players. The contract runs through 2027, but there's an option to opt out by November 2024. The union is expected to do so. This is not going to be unexpected at all. We've done things to return to the players outside of collective bargaining, like a charter program that's collectively bargained. We couldn't afford it back in 2020. Now we can. 53% increase in playoff bonuses, and we want to work side by side with the players, and we want to return more to the players. One debated topic that is anticipated to come up in CBA negotiations is how much of league revenue the WNBA will share with its players. The NBA, for example, gives its players 50% of all basketball-related revenues. For the WNBA, it works very differently.

It only shares half of what is called incremental revenue. Basically, once it reaches its pre-set revenue target, and it has to be 20% more than the year prior, only then do the players get half of that incremental income. Let's say the WNBA made its revenue target $1 million in 2023. It would have to make at least 1.2 in 2024, 20% more. If it does, only that $200,000 is split with the players. These are made-up numbers, of course, since the revenue target is undisclosed. Tell me why the revenue target or this unique sort of structure was set up to begin with? Yeah, we were just surviving back then. We had no ability to, given the losses, we had low attendance. We didn't have a lot of merch sales, we didn't have a lot of viewership. We didn't have a media deal worthy of what we're going to have now in '26 and beyond.

So it's all just a business model. And so as we get into the next round of negotiating, I'm sure that's on the table. As of April 2024, the target revenue had not been reached. Do you expect to reach that revenue target this year? Probably not the way it was designed based on a kegger. So what? That means a cumulative average growth rate. And because if you looked at the prior year, especially Covid year, two Covid years, it's tough. This entire deal was struck just before Covid hit, and that totally decimated the economics of just about every sports league. And what propped up, really the other sports leagues is those national TV contracts, because the game still went on. The WNBA didn't have that massive TV deal they could fall back on. We would like to see that that number go up. But also, I think in the right way, I think it doesn't need to just, you know, go to salaries.

What does that look like? Like because we now have chartered flights and things like that. And you know, you were adding teams and things like that. So, um, yes, we would like to see this number go up, but we also want to see the league grow and improve. We go ahead and start trying to snap our fingers tomorrow, and all of a sudden, the current roster of WNBA players are getting 50% of league revenues like their NBA brethren. What type of financial position does this put the league in? And I think any of us that are following this, we'd rather see these players still have opportunities to play on WNBA teams, uh, rather than see the league go defunct because they were too aggressive. It's been the reason that we've been able to sustain 27 years, and now we are getting to the point where there's more marketing, there's more influx of of of funds coming into to the W, and then that will allow

for the next level of salaries. But while the league is going through immense growth, it is also facing some growing pains. In an interview with CNBC, Engelbert's response to a question about what the league is doing to prevent racism and hate speech as it relates to its star rookies Clarke and Reese sparked a heated debate among players and fans alike. It is a little of that bird magic moment, if you recall, from 1979, when those two rookies came in from a big college rivalry, one white, one black. And so we have that moment with these two. But the one thing I know about sports, you need rivalry, that's what makes people watch. They want to watch games of consequence between rivals. They don't want everybody being nice to one another. In a letter to the players, the commissioner said: I regret that I didn't express in a clear and definitive way condemnation of the hateful speech that is all too often directed at WNBA players on social media. With

so much at stake. The WNBA has put together a five-person advisory committee to help with the upcoming CBA negotiations. Once signed, it'll go into effect for the 2026 season. By then, two more teams will have joined, and the new TV rights deal will have flushed the league with some much-needed cash. The question is, will it be enough? We're looking forward to sitting down with the union, with that advisory group of owners and players across the table. We'll be in listening mode. And I know a little more now about the economic model and how we need to sustain it. But look, we're in a great place, and we look forward to sitting down with the players. Are you at all worried or nervous about 2026 and beyond, the expectations of it, and living up to that and being able to capitalize on all this immense growth? When you have a lot of people calling you to invest in your teams or your league, it's a really good sign.

that people want to put capital in what they view as a growth business.

Why WNBA Player Salaries Lag Despite The League's Rising Popularity

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Why WNBA Player Salaries Lag Despite The League's Rising Popularity

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