WNBA’s popularity booms, but money for players hasn’t kept pace

PHOENIX — Allisha Gray is a 29-year-old guard for the Atlanta Dream. She is 6 feet tall, speaks with a central Georgia drawl and smiles as if she’s keeping the best secret.

During the WNBA’s All-Star weekend, she jumped into a whole new tax bracket. Her salary this year is $185,000, but she earned an additional $115,150 Friday by winning the league’s 3-point contest and skills competition.

The WNBA awards $2,575 to each winner in its skills competition and its 3-point contest, but most of Gray’s windfall came courtesy of a deal announced the day before between the players’ union and insurance company Aflac, which agreed to pay $55,000 per winner.

Gray’s situation illustrated a theme of the league’s All-Star festivities. There is more money than ever coming into the WNBA from sponsors, ticket sales and new media rights deals, like the ones announced Wednesday, which are expected to be worth six times what its current deals are. The presence of rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese has exponentially increased interest in the league this season, and many fans of those two players have stayed to watch the rest of what the league has to offer.

But the WNBA has never been profitable. The league’s financial health has been shaky for most of its 28 seasons. Because of that, player salaries and benefits, which are outlined in the collective bargaining agreement, are a fraction of what their male counterparts in the NBA receive.

As its popularity booms, the WNBA has made some concessions to players beyond the collective bargaining agreement, but it isn’t quite ready to fully loosen its purse strings. Some owners would also like to make serious investments in players, but league rules protecting competitive balance often don’t allow for that.

For instance, Mat Ishbia, owner of the Phoenix Mercury, offered to increase the competition prize money to $100,000 per winner, hoping to lure some of the WNBA’s top stars, but the league declined the offer, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss league business. Dina Skokos, a league spokesperson, said there was no prohibition on the league that kept it from increasing prize money but that for a team owner to do so would be considered circumventing the salary cap.

“Growing women in sports — it’s like a chicken-and-the-egg situation,” said Sabina Ahmed, assistant vice president of sponsorships and experiential at AT&T, the name sponsor for the WNBA All-Star Game this year. “There’s a huge momentum this year particularly, and we’ve seen the growth over the last few years. We have a responsibility to put more investments behind these women.”

AT&T has been a WNBA sponsor since 2019, the same year the company partnered with the NBA. It was one of 24 brands with stations at WNBA Live, a fan festival Friday and Saturday that was sponsored by U.S. Bank.

Woman-centric companies such as dating app Bumble, and hair care company Mielle and Opill, which makes an over-the-counter birth control pill, all had a presence in the 100,000-square-foot space. Under Armour held a basketball clinic for local girls with Las Vegas Aces star Kelsey Plum, Marina Mabrey of the Connecticut Sun and the college player Saniya Rivers appearing as surprise guests.

In 2022, the first year the league held WNBA Live, only six brands participated. Last year, there were 13, said Colie Edison, the league’s chief growth officer. Edison was especially proud of an increase in multiyear partnerships.

“We’re seeing partners stay committed to the growth of the league and wanting to be involved in the long-term success,” Edison said.

New Balance announced a partnership with the WNBA a few days before the All-Star game. After a decades-long absence from the sport, the company rejoined the basketball world in 2018 via a sponsorship with NBA player Kawhi Leonard. Last year, the company signed Cameron Brink, the second overall pick in this year’s WNBA draft, to a name, image and likeness deal, its first partnership with a women’s basketball player.

The company felt comfortable expanding into women’s basketball “now that we’ve garnered validity from a product and a culture marketing perspective,” through the brand’s work with NBA players, said Jessica Vassall, New Balance’s head of partnerships.

The connection to the NBA, which founded the WNBA and has invested more than $500 million in it, is helpful in accumulating sponsors, said Bob Lynch, founder and CEO of SponsorUnited, which collects and analyzes sponsorship data.

While there may be fewer women’s sports fans overall, Lynch said, they tend to be more engaged with brand promotions by their favorite teams than men’s sports fans are. The WNBA is seeing the benefit of that.

“Because of the Caitlin Clark effect and Angel Reese effect, the amount of engagement with their brand partners has almost quadrupled,” Lynch said, adding, “I think you’re going to see a financial benefit in the next couple years.”

The league is also about to see increased revenue from its media rights deal. The NBA reached an 11-year agreement worth about $77 billion with Disney, Comcast and Amazon to broadcast NBA and WNBA games. From that, the NBA allotted $200 million per year for the WNBA and is expecting to get at least another $60 million per year from other media partners.

The number, while much bigger than the $43 million per year the WNBA currently receives in rights fees, was met with skepticism. Cheryl Miller, a women’s basketball great who coached one of the teams during the WNBA All-Star game last weekend, called it a “lowball.” Terri Jackson, the union’s executive director, asked for transparency in how the NBA came to that number.

Ishbia, owner of the Mercury, Joe and Clara Wu Tsai, who own the Liberty, and Mark Davis, owner of the Aces, have all signaled an eagerness to spend beyond the league’s norms. There is an expectation that Joe Lacob, owner of the expansion team the Golden State Valkyries, will as well.

Jess Smith, president of the Valkyries, worked in men’s sports for more than a decade before moving into women’s sports with Angel City, the Los Angeles franchise of the National Women’s Soccer League. She has been privy to conversations in which executives who run men’s teams have considered getting into women’s sports.

“The mindset overall from all stakeholders was, if we do this, how do we not lose money?” Smith said. “Why would you approach any business and try not to lose money? You approach business to make money. Instead of thinking through things like, if we sell 5,000 tickets, we won’t lose money, how about, what happens if we sell the stadium out?”

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