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Sports Editorial (United States), October 13.- All-time high in sponsorship income. Record audiences. Sixteen percent more attendance at the pavilions. New franchises in San Francisco and Portland. The League aims to raise close to 200 million dollars. But the salaries of the players are not growing. The highest, $240,000. Cancel the Collective Agreement in 2025, a way to improve its conditions.
But the oldest professional women’s league in the United States is not knowing how to reflect that period of prosperity in the main protagonists, the players, who currently have a huge salary gap compared to the NBA.
The WNBA has grown exponentially and has been reflected in facts such as the 2022 season being the most watched in the last fifteen years, or that sponsorship income is already the highest in the history of women’s sports.
Those numbers have skyrocketed just one year later, this year in 2023. For example, the first game of the Finals between the Las Vegas Aces and New York Liberty represented an increase of 31% compared to that same game in 2022, which It means that 729,000 people followed him in front of the television.
Additionally, the regular season has been the most watched in the last 21 years.
The WNBA also mobilizes fans, and attendance at the halls has become one of the big news of the year, it is the best total record in the last 13 years. The increase is 16% for an average of 6,615 fans in the stands.
On social networks the impact is also enormous, the WNBA has managed to generate a record of 373 million views, 96% more than a year ago.
And it’s not just something about television shares and attendance at pavilions, everything has increased: the WNBA’s digital platform sells more, betting houses register double the number of interactions with women’s basketball, the merchandising sales record was broken in the Las Vegas All Star…
These are very positive and promising data that allow the league to project raising between 180 and 200 million combining income from the league and the teams themselves. It is almost double the numbers obtained just four years ago, in 2019, before the pandemic.
But not everything shines and shines in the WNBA, there is an abysmal lack of balance between all this positive data and the reflection it has on the players’ salaries. The highest salary received by a WNBA professional is around $240,000, ‘this honor’ belongs to stars like Jewell Loyd, Diana Taurasi or Alyssa Thomas.
One of the sensations of the year is Sabrina Ioanescu, of the New York Liberty, who despite her tremendous impact on the competition, slightly exceeds 200,000 annually, the same figure as Aces center A’ja Wilson.
The lowest salary in the WNBA is $62,000, while that of the NBA is close to a million at $950,000. It is, with the numbers in hand, one of the largest salary differences between genders in the world of sports.
The solution, despite the intention of both parties to be found, is far away in time if we take into account the Collective Agreement signed in 2020 between the union and the league. It is valid until 2027, with an option to be canceled in 2025 if notified a year in advance, an option that is on the table.
In the case of female players, the options to increase their emoluments involve reaching commercial agreements with brands, something very limited and limited to the big names in the league. The other option is to play out of season on other continents, something that since the terrible incident suffered by Brittney Griner in Russia is no longer seen as something so interesting by the group.
The league is expanding, and it seems that the success of the Las Vegas Aces’ arrival in the league has sparked the interest of other major investors in the WNBA. The owner behind the Nevada franchise is Mark Davis, the owner of the NFL Raiders, who joined forces with Tom Brady to acquire the champion team that is defending its title this year.
Taking into account the league’s estimated valuation of about $475 million, plus the individual value of each franchise, it is estimated that acquiring an expansion is around $50 million.
With these numbers, there are two cities with a strong basketball tradition, such as San Francisco and Portland, that appear on the horizon of that expansion that Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner of the WNBA, is seeking.
Meanwhile, the Portland thing is currently a rumor, but the prestigious newspaper ‘The Oregonian’ published this week that the agreement is close to being closed and will be announced before the end of the month of October.
The new franchise in San Francisco, however, is confirmed and presented. Although it does not yet have a name, it is already known that it will play its games at the fabulous Chase Center, the home of the Golden State Warriors, from 2025.
The logic is simple, the Warriors themselves and their owners, with Joe Lacob at the helm, are the ones who have bought the expansion and will manage the women’s team under a submissive institution.
The seven-time NBA champion team gave him a grand welcome, with enormous support from Stephen Curry and Steve Kerr, among others. Both spoke at ‘Media Day’ about the importance of the Bay having another professional basketball team.
For Curry, thinking about women’s basketball takes him back to his childhood, when in Charlotte he saw the now-defunct Charlotte Sting play: “I remember when the Sting played for the first time. The energy in the city was incredible. Now with the expansion of the WNBA we have an opportunity here in the Bay Area. It’s going to be fun. There is no better time to develop women’s basketball and women’s sports in general, to invest in this sport. It’s going to be exciting to know what the team name will be.”
Nacho Garcia
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