While the USA Men\u2019s basketball team has had an unfair advantage when it comes to the Olympic Games, the women\u2019s team had more modest origins. In this Member Insights piece, David Alexander, the founder and MD of Calacus PR elaborates.<\/p>\n
The NBA and USA Basketball came together in 1996 to support a female version of the Men\u2019s \u2018Dream Team\u2019 for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta \u2013 with the women winning gold, a title they have retains at every summer Games since.<\/p>\n
The National Basketball Association backed a women\u2019s league (WNBA) which started in 1997 with eight teams in established basketball cities. The NBA still owns 60% of the WNBA.<\/p>\n
As recently as last year, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver underlined<\/a> the importance of collaboration between the two leagues and of integration.<\/p>\n Seeing off challenger the American Basketball League (ABL), it expanded to 12 teams and then 16, with players signing a collective bargaining agreement and growing to the point where the 2024 season enjoyed record viewing figures of 54 million, sellout arenas and fan voting for the All-Star Game rocketing by 538% compared to the previous year.<\/p>\n There have been conflicting reports about the health of the WNBA and its teams, with some reports<\/a> suggesting that losses will amount to $40 in 2024 while the increase in value of a team such as The New York Liberty, who were sold in 2019 for $10m-$14m and are now valued<\/a>\u00a0at around $450m suggests that finances are healthier than they have been portrayed.<\/p>\n As the LA Times suggested<\/a> last year: \u201cWomen\u2019s basketball has never seen anything like\u00a0Caitlin Clark<\/a>, the sweet-shooting rookie guard for the WNBA\u2019s Indiana Fever. She\u2019s\u00a0Taylor Swift<\/a>\u00a0with a jump shot,\u00a0Mia Hamm<\/a>\u00a0in a singlet; a figure so transcendent she is changing her profession.\u201d<\/p>\n It speaks volumes that more than 3 million people tuned in to ESPN just to watch her get\u00a0drafted and she signed the most lucrative sponsorship deal in women\u2019s basketball history, a $28-million agreement that includes a signature shoe.\u00a0<\/p>\n Not everyone is so lucky. WNBA star Angel Reese has even\u00a0claimed she could not afford her $96,000 annual rent<\/a>\u00a0on her $72,000 salary, with her other sponsorships and earnings from other competitions needed to support her outgoings.<\/p>\n A new $2.2 billion media deal seemed on the surface to signal all the progress being made, raising their annual rights income from $60 million to $200 million.<\/p>\n But WNBA players\u2019 union executive director Terri Jackson suggested that the deal undervalued<\/a> the WNBA, especially with the NBA media rights reportedly worth a total of $76 billion with Disney, NBC and Amazon Prime Video.<\/p>\n She said: \u201cWe have wondered for months how the NBA would value the WNBA in its media rights deal. With a reportedly $75 billion deal on the table, the league is in control of its own destiny. More precisely, the NBA controls the destiny of the WNBA.<\/p>\n \u201cWe look forward to learning how the NBA arrived at a $200 million valuation \u2013 if initial reports are accurate or even close. Neither the NBA nor the WNBA can deny that in the last few years, we have seen unprecedented growth across all metrics, the players continue to demonstrate their commitment to building the brand, and that the fans keep showing up. There is no excuse to undervalue the WNBA again.\u201d<\/p>\n Salaries have always been an issue in the WNBA.\u00a0<\/p>\n The top base salary in 2024 was $242,000 with Clark earning just over $75,500 in her first year as a pro.<\/p>\n Without salary caps, overseas teams can offer bigger packages to female players, who supplement their income in the off-season \u2013 even though we saw Brittany Griner imprisoned in Russia in 2022 after a drugs charge. LINK<\/p>\n When the WNBA\u2019s Commissioner\u2019s Cup was introduced five years ago, the league branded it as another opportunity to put money in players\u2019 pockets, with $500,000 in prize money split among the winning squad\u2019s players.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Clark said<\/a> after the game that the event highlighted pay issues in the women\u2019s game.<\/p>\n \u201cYou get more (money) for this than you do if you\u2019re the (WNBA Finals) champion. It makes no sense. Someone tell (WNBA commissioner) Cathy (Engelbert) to help us out.\u201d She jokingly referred to the competition as the \u201cCathy Cup.<\/p>\n When the WNBPA, the players\u2019 union, was presented with a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) at the start of July, it was rejected<\/a> out of hand.<\/p>\n Phoenix Mercury\u2019s Satou Sabally, a WNBPA player representative, suggested that the WNBA\u2019s initial proposal was a \u201cslap in the face,\u201d especially with new expansion teams taking the league to\u00a0a record 18 franchises<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to MarketWatch<\/a>, players receive only 9.3% of league revenue, including TV deals, tickets and merchandise sales,\u00a0compared to 50% for men in the NBA.<\/p>\n There are suggestions that comparing the pay structure<\/a>\u00a0between the men\u2019s and women\u2019s leagues isn\u2019t reasonable, given that the NBA has a six-month regular season\u00a0and brings in billions of dollars in corporate sponsorships, while the WNBA is in its 29th season and plays four months of the year with significantly lower revenue.<\/p>\n One major sticking point in negotiations related to the league wanting a fixed percentage payment while players want \u201ca better share where our salaries grow with the business, and not just a fixed percentage over time,\u201d\u00a0according to Nneka Ogwumike<\/a>, president of the WNBPA and Seattle Storm forward.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been made clear that there\u2019s this perception that the players don\u2019t understand the business,\u201d Ogwumike said. \u201cCathy has told me that to my face. I communicated that to the players and I said, \u2018Let\u2019s demonstrate that we do understand the business, especially as we\u2019re going back and forth in negotiations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n To her credit, Engelbert says she wants the same things players want: a \u201ctransformational deal,\u201d but her messaging hasn\u2019t always matched the players\u2019 urgency.<\/p>\n \u201cI want a lot of the same things the players want,\u201d she said<\/a> ahead of the All-Star game. \u201cI\u2019m still really optimistic that we\u2019ll get something done that will be transformational and next year at All-Star we\u2019ll be talking about how great everything is. Obviously, there\u2019s a lot of hard work to be done on both sides to get there.\u201d<\/p>\n She might have been shocked when, at the All-Star game in mid-July, players warmed up in shirts reading: \u201cPay us what you owe us.\u201d<\/p>\n Each and every one of the 22 All-Stars agreed with the idea, as chants of \u201cPay them!\u201d echoed from fans throughout the Gainbridge Fieldhouse arena.<\/p>\n The All-Stars\u00a0unanimously donned those shirts<\/a>\u00a0during pregame warmups in front of a sellout crowd of nearly 17,000 and millions more viewers watching from home on ABC, with the protest sending shockwaves through the sporting world and underlining the collective power athletes have to take a stand.<\/p>\n Some players, including All-Stars Collier and Angel Reese, say they may stage\u00a0a walkout<\/a>\u00a0if a new CBA is not reached by October.<\/p>\n \u201cThe players are what is building this brand,\u201d said Collier, All-Star game MVP and WNBPA vice president. \u201cWe feel like we\u2019re owed a piece of that pie that we helped create.\u201d<\/p>\n Sports economist David Berri estimates<\/a> that the WNBA could pull in $500 million in revenue by 2026 and said<\/a>: \u201cClearly, if the league is going to treat WNBA players like they do the NBA players, there has to be a substantial increase in pay.<\/p>\n Harvard economics professor and 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin has been advising the WNBPA in collective bargaining and recently wrote<\/a>\u00a0an essay in the New York Times entitled \u201cHow Underpaid Are WNBA Players? It\u2019s Embarrassing.\u201d<\/p>\n After examining TV ratings, attendance data and other metrics, Goldin estimated that the average WNBA salary should be \u201croughly one-quarter to one-third of the average NBA salary to achieve pay equity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In light of the huge pay disparity, she added: \u201cHow could that be? The most likely explanation is that the WNBA is not receiving the full value it contributes to the combined NBA and WNBA enterprise revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n