WNBA players say they’re not paid what they’re owed. Are they right? | WNBA

NApheesa Collier was in record fit on Saturday evening when she set a new summit for a WNBA stars match, with 36 points. But a large part of the attention was focused on what happened before the game when the players warmed up with shirts carrying the message “Pay us what you owe us”.

This decision was made after the players and the league did not conclude an agreement on a new collective negotiation. Do they have a point, however? The evaluation of the remuneration of athletes is notoriously delicate because the sporting accounting always includes a certain amount of voodoo.

This is particularly true in the WNBA, whose fortune – literally and figuratively – are linked to the NBA, for better or for worse. The relationship has evolved over the years, and many current WNBA teams have no direct links with an NBA team, although some remain under the ownership of the NBA. The NBA commissioner Adam Silver refers to the two “integrated” leagues, and they have gathered their diffusion rights together in a massive 11 -year agreement.

And the money is the one that has faced the pressure within the NBA for the apparent losses of the WNBA, which those who believe that Collier and Caitlin Clark should be satisfied with their current salaries often use as a counter argument for demands for wage increase. Silver said in 2018 that WNBA losses were about $ 10mmmon per year. And reports last fall said the WNBA had to lose $ 40 million in 2024. Adjusting the 2018 figures for inflation, and the WNBA is supposedly losing three times more than it was a few years ago.

It is a curious figure since other public statistics suggest that the league’s financial health has never been better.

First, while Wnba Wait Dropped from an Overall Average of More than 10,000 in the Late 1990s to A Little Under 7,000 Just After the Pandemic, Clark and Co Wiped Out Most of Those Losses in 2024 Alone, Pushing the League Average To 10,000 Again, and the League is Fliring Record in 2025. Second, The League’s Broadcast Rights Alone Have Balloned from Zero in 2002 to Roughly $ 60MA Year in the Current Deal, with that the issue should go to 200 million dollars as part of the agreement combined with the NBA. Third, the total league revenues increased from $ 102 million in 2019 to an $ 180 million dollar range in 2023, Bloomberg reported.

Some expenses have increased, including a commitment of $ 25 million a year to pilot teams by charter planes rather than on regular flights, as has been the case in the past. The WNBA salary ceiling also gradually increased from $ 622,000 in 2003 (adjusted to inflation to 2025: $ 1.1 million) to $ 1.5 million in 2025. The League has a team less now (13 instead of 14) than in 2003 (although the expansion teams are on their way), so the total cost of the player’s remuneration is maximum of $ 15.4 mm. But these expenses do not add up a complete counterweight upwards reported or leaps to diffusion rights. It is a good bet that Joe Lacob and Peter Guber, the owners of the Golden State Valkyries well supported by the WNBA and the Golden State Warriors of the NBA, take a greater risk by paying Stephen Curry, 37 years old, almost 60 mm $ than to pay the entire alignment of Valkyries, aged 1 and a $.

The main thing is that we do not know what is included in the results. Reinvestment in the league? Facilities? Meal after the match supported by five -star restaurants? (Surely not the latter.)

All we know is that it doesn’t go to players. Generally, the less a league makes a league, the lower the share of income is that its players get – 50% of $ 1 billion is less a chore to pay than $ 100 million. But WNBA players are less than 10%, a fairly tiny figure for any professional organization.

And in the country of voodoo accounting, the sports teams were able to plead the shortage when the circumstances ask for it. It’s not just WNBA either. Eight years ago, ESPN discovered figures showing that almost half of the NBA teams did not generate profits by themselves.

Perhaps the best indicator of how the WNBA teams are In fact Do – or is ready to do – is the price paid when the teams are sold. The New York Liberty was sold in 2019 somewhere in the range of $ 10 million at $ 14 million. Six years later, based on a sale of a team’s participation, the value of the liberty was calculated at around $ 450 million.

No wonder the players of the WNBA notice these figures and wonder why their salary is still small enough for many of them to be forced to spend their seasons outside the game elsewhere. The “Us What You Dose” T-shirts of players in the stars have not been printed on a sudden blow. None of these players suggests that they should be paid in the same way as their counterparts in the NBA, where the League income have the most $ 10 billion per year. But they surely deserve more, given that the minimum recruit of the WNBA is only $ 66,000, against $ 1.27 million in the NBA.

And it is not only the salary per game. This is the number of players who are paid at all.

A typical NBA list now has 15 full-time players and three “bidirectional” players who are called from the second level G-League. The WNBA teams are limited to 12 players, and some can only take it 11. In a recent Golden State-Phoenix game, Phoenix had only eight players available.

The safety of employment is therefore minimal, and these low pay checks bite a little more when a player is some bad games not to receive them at all.

WNBA players can face a little opposition when they aim to improve wages. Some owners of the NBA seem less enthusiastic than others of the whole company, even if the most pessimistic reports of losses of the WNBA do not even add up to the salary of a curry or a Jayson Tatum alone. Some corners of the social media reacted to the T-shirts of the WNBA All-Stars with the expected thumb and laughter. But the post-comfortable female sports boom shows no sign of slowdown, and the figures as we know them seem to be on the side of the players. Public opinion should follow.