First, they discussed where the current CBA, which was signed in 2020, falls short:
“[In 2020], the league was in a low spot in terms of attendance, it was in the lowest spot it had been on a per game basis to that point for average attendance during the regular season,” Mox explained. “So you can see what precipitated it, but really, the players ended up with a deal that just simply does not work for the current state of the finances of the WNBA. Like I said, it was the lowest average attendance in WNBA history to that point, [but] there were reasons to be hopeful. Obviously, the big one at the time was Sabrina Ionescu was coming into the league soon, so that was obviously the big one. But outside of that, you know, they weren’t able to get charter flights codified, to the point, as our Howard Megdal reported, that when the Liberty used a private plane, they were fined a lot of money for it because it was deemed, at the time, a competitive advantage that was unfair. Also one of the concessions that the players had to make is prioritization. In order to get slightly higher salaries, they had to commit to a system where players with a couple years of service time had to report to the league a little bit more readily than they had under previous CBAs, where you could play overseas and then show up a couple weeks into the season and it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. But really the big thing is going to be the revenue share. … They were locked into a system that simply does not match … the current state of finances. And even if COVID … hadn’t disrupted a lot of the first couple years of the CBA, it hardly would have matched it then even. … Maybe back in 2019 it wasn’t as obvious, but now it’s glaringly obvious, how how imbalanced it is.”
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Then, they touched on what the ongoing negotiations have looked like:
“You come to terms on a deal, the labor, aka the union, they need to vote on how many of them want this deal or agree with the deal,” Leite said. “There’s usually a threshold of how much of percentage that votes need to go in in order for the deal to be accepted. And then once a deal comes to terms, everybody goes through it more, then it gets signed. And so I would say that that is probably like the rough draft of the process that would happen should these two sides come to a deal, hopefully soon. It’s funny because the at the beginning of the season, I think the the players put a very lofty kind of goal of having it done by All-Star break, that has come and passed. There’s no deal currently. And there was an in-person meeting at the All-Star game, and more than 40 players showed up, which is a big percentage of the league, given that there’s only about 150 players, give or take, on any given day in the in the WNBA currently. And so yeah, it doesn’t seem like they’re any closer, just given what the players are saying. I know a few have been pretty vocal about that.”
Leite and Mox also gave more details about what “revenue sharing”, one of the most vocal demands from the players’ perspective, actually entails:
“There’s been a lot of talk about how [for] the NBA, 50% of basketball related revenue goes to the players in the salary cap directly, whereas in the WNBA, I think the number is like 9.3%, [is] what is reported,” Mox explained. “And frankly, that number is been going down because revenue is going up fast. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I can comfortably say the salary cap is going up by 3% every year since the CBA started, revenue over the last couple of years has definitely gone faster than 3%. … So the players right now … were locked into a number, and even though there was revenue sharing built in … even if that revenue sharing had kicked in, it still wouldn’t have kicked in in a way that kept pace with the actual revenue of the league, and that’s what the players want to see change.”
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“The players want to go to that direct percentage of revenue put straight towards the salary cap, instead of having it be on incremental revenue beyond certain targets. … So that as the league grows, the players grow to the exact same extent, and ideally as the league previously has been operating on thinner margins, and the new revenue kicks in for the new media rights deal, for the television contracts, ideally, the players would probably want to have a higher percentage of that over time. Because in the short term, the league is operating at a loss from [an] accounting perspective, and as those margins get better and better for the league, then it becomes more reasonable for the players to want a higher percentage, whereas right now, it’s going in the other direction. So that’s the big thing … the players right now are in a situation where their share of the pie is regressing, and they would like it at least … to be static, and at best, they want it to be progressing,” Mox continued.
Tune in to hear more about the process of putting together a CBA, what we can expect after the 2025 season concludes, and what the chances are of a WNBA lockout in 2026. To stay up to date with every episode of the podcast, subscribe on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. And catch up on all our WNBA coverage here.