A 30th season and an $850m franchise: is the WNBA’s rocketing growth sustainable? | WNBA

OPenting Night usually vibrates with anticipation rather than nostalgia, but the New York Liberty wore a “judicial origin” uniform that alludes to its history as one of the eight founding members of the WNBA when it hosted the Connecticut Sun on Friday.

Lengthy and pugnacious negotiations between the players’ union and the league threatened to delay or even destroy the new season. But a deal that gives players significant pay raises means the league has a lot to look forward to, as well as a lot to think about, as it celebrates its 30th anniversary.

Commissioner Cathy Engelbert described the 30th season as a “transformative moment” and the “start of a new era.” An economic boom suggests that these clichés have some credibility.

A $300 million deal reached in March to sell the Sun, based in Connecticut since 2003 and owned by the Mohegan Tribe, to Tilman Fertitta, an entertainment mogul who owns the NBA’s Houston Rockets and was named U.S. ambassador to Italy last year, is a symbol of the WNBA’s changing fortunes. The league is leading the way as interest, salaries and team valuation soar across North American women’s professional basketball, soccer and ice hockey.

The Sunset Suns — whose departure was disappointed by their New England fans — are expected to be renamed the Houston Comets, reclaiming the brand identity of an original franchise that dominated the nascent WNBA with its formidable Big Three of Cynthia Cooper-Dyke, Sheryl Swoopes and Tina Thompson.

Founded in April 1996 with the support of the NBA, which shares ownership of the league with individual team owners and other investors, the WNBA emerged the following year, riding a wave of enthusiasm after the Americans won gold at the Atlanta Olympics. Since then, it has expanded and contracted like the bellows of an accordion for its 15 teams this season. Only three of the original eight – the Liberty, Phoenix Mercury and Los Angeles Sparks – remain and still play in their original cities.

True to their name, the Comets got off to a flying start and then disintegrated. They won the first four WNBA championships, but disbanded in 2008 because they couldn’t find new owners for a franchise valued at $10 million — about $15 million in 2026. The Comets’ demise is an alarming indication of the league’s worrying state as the global financial crisis hits. Today, while Fertitta reportedly paid a league-record fee, the value of a WNBA franchise in Houston has soared 1,900 percent in less than 20 years.

The figures are dramatic, even though they only date back two years. In 2024, the owners of the Portland Fire (another legacy name, referring to a franchise that died in 2002) would have paid an initial $75 million to join the league this season. Newcomers Toronto Tempo, Canada’s premier WNBA team, were billed $50 million. Yet in June of last year, the league announced further expansions to Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. The team fee would be $250 million, a new high for American women’s sports and higher than the NWSL record of $205 million paid by Columbus, who will join the team in 2028.

One factor for optimism – and inflation – is the overnight success of the Golden State Valkyries, who share primary ownership and arena with the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. They paid $50 million to start in 2025 and quickly set the WNBA record for average attendance with 18,064. (The overall league average last season was 11,148.) The Valkyries implemented a waiting list after selling more than 12,000 season tickets for the new campaign. Thanks to their crowds and sponsorship deals, CNBC named the Valkyries the first $1 billion franchise in women’s sports, with the WNBA’s second-most valuable team, the Liberty, valued at around $600 million. Sportico puts the Valkyries at $850 million and estimates the NWSL’s top club, Angel City, is worth $335 million. The Los Angeles-based team paid just $2 million to enter the league in 2022.

Home to Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area is no stranger to hot startups. Still, there’s logic to the math: CNBC estimates the Warriors are the NBA’s most valuable team, worth $10.8 billion, and their estimated annual revenue of $840 million, like their value, is about 10 times that of the Valkyries. Even the least valuable American team in CNBC’s WNBA rankings, the Atlanta Dream, is worth about $330 million, making $250 million to $300 million for a franchise seem like a solid investment despite uncertainty over the profitability of the WNBA. The WNBA would lose every year, although NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has argued that the two leagues constitute “one integrated enterprise,” creating a complex financial situation.

“The growth of the WNBA is important because it changes the basic perception of women’s sports. It signals to investors, sponsors and media partners that women’s sports are credible, scalable and commercially viable,” Katie Lebel, a sports business professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, said by email. “From one perspective, this is a market correction. For years, women’s sports properties have been undervalued relative to their audience, cultural relevance and growth potential. What we are seeing now is that investors are catching up. They are assessing the future value of women’s sports rather than judging women’s sports properties as risky investments based on limited past earnings.”

Could a professional women’s franchise one day be worth more than a men’s team?

“I don’t think we’re about to see a WNBA team surpass the value of the Dallas Cowboys in the near future,” Lebel said. “But the value of a franchise isn’t really about gender, it’s about market size, rarity, growth trajectory and strength of the business model. Women’s sports are currently in a high growth phase. Their audience is growing, investment is increasing and there is a strong cultural tailwind. In contrast, men’s leagues are mature assets, so they have slower growth. In that sense, it’s more about growth potential than market maturity. So yes, I can predict it on the right market, with the right property, it’s entirely possible.

Valuations are speculative and variable, but player salaries are facts. The WNBA’s highly contested seven-year collective bargaining agreement, ratified in March, calls for a minimum salary of $270,000, a staggering increase from the 2025 base of $66,079. Last season, the maximum salary was around $250,000; now the cap rate is $1.4 million and the team salary cap has increased from $1.5 million to $7 million.

The NBA’s rookie minimum salary is $1.27 million – but that league has been around since the 1940s. Perhaps a fairer comparison would be to MLS, which started in 1996. In MLS, the minimum senior salary is $113,400, although its senior roster includes 20 players, compared to a dozen in the WNBA.

“You now have professional athletes who can actually live and train like professional athletes, play their season and have an offseason without having to think about where else in the world they’re going to play to make money during the WNBA offseason,” says Michele Donnelly, an associate professor of sports management at Brock University in Ontario.

“I think that’s also a great example – and I think we’re seeing some of that happening right now in the PWHL, the women’s hockey league – [of] athletes truly invested and active in the governance of their own sport. I think the role of the WNBA Players Association cannot be overstated in this process, they really have been so productive, active and so effective in their advocacy for increased wages and benefits.

The spending, along with vocal support from NBA superstars such as LeBron James, who attends WNBA games and this week sent a good luck message to Caitlin Clark, the league’s most famous name, “signals legitimacy,” says Vassilis Dalakas, a marketing professor at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. “I remember in the past, in the early years, a lot of the marketing, at least to sponsors, was, ‘It’s a good cause, do the right thing.’ [and] support him.” It wasn’t like, “It’s legit and it’s a good investment for you.” This mindset has changed,” he adds. “An investment of this magnitude would not be made if there was not a firm belief that it would be sustainable.”

In 2024, the year Clark was selected first in the draft by the Indiana Fever, the WNBA announced an 11-year media rights deal with multiple networks worth about $200 million a year, more than triple the previous deal. Add to that the sponsorships and the money and attention contrast with the relative anonymity and hardship experienced by previous generations of WNBA professionals. Now, WNBA stars are guests at the Met Gala.

Cooper-Dyke spent 10 seasons in Spain and Italy before the birth of the WNBA. There were times when, after a big performance in Europe, she felt “like… condemnI have to admit, it would have been nice to do that with 20,000 people chanting my name. Or it would have been nice to be on SportsCenter for some highlights, or in the LA Times sports section the next morning with a story,” she told the Players’ Tribune in 2020. “I wouldn’t say I felt cheated You’re welcome, necessarily – but I still had those moments where I was aware of what I was missing, simply because I was a female player rather than a male.

This generation of the WNBA can enjoy widespread attention and adulation while earning far more than the $75,798 base salary Cooper-Dyke earned with the Comets in 2000 as the league’s highest-paid player. This season, all 44 Fever regular season games will be broadcast on national television. Clark missed much of the final campaign due to injury, but viewing figures still increased.

“There’s so much potential, but it’s really going to take an intentional, ongoing commitment rather than an overly celebratory attitude of ‘oh look, we’ve arrived,’” Donnelly said, noting the buzz around the Tempo, which hosted the Washington Mystics in a close 68-65 loss Friday. “I hope one of the things that happens is that it can be a catalyst for these other leagues so that they don’t have to wait 20-plus years to get to this point where the WNBA is,” she adds. “People are ready. They’re ready to support women’s sports more…it’s taken so long.”