Sports Business Journal wrote earlier this month<\/a>.<\/p>\nIn less than 24 hours after their title, the Liberty shattered the WNBA\u2019s previous all-time 30-
day record for championship merch sales. It wasn\u2019t just Liberty Mutual signing on for 2025:
It was Pinterest, Fanatics, Amtrak, Essie, New York Lottery, Lola and Flamingo, among
others. It was increased local media rights deals with Fox 5 and My 9, putting the team in
7.5 million New York-area homes. It was sponsorship revenue climbing by 50% YOY. It was
ticket sales in Barclays Center\u2019s upper bowl rising 68% YOY. It was overall social media
engagement spiking 665%. It was e-commerce sales widening 58% YOY. It was in-arena
merch on non-game days climbing by 241% YOY, which means random fans were just
stopping by. Which all started with the parade.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Friend notes that the Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment marketing team \u2014 known to not miss many beats \u2014- used the championship parade down Manhattan\u2019s Canyon of Heroes to further ingrain the championship motif into the team.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we turned the corner at Canyon of the Heroes, it was like, \u2018Oh my gosh, this is
about the people,\u2019\u201d Keia Clarke, Liberty CEO, said Friend. \u201cI cannot one-to-one correlate that winning feeling as the reason we\u2019re averaging 16,000 fans this season, but make no mistake, there are people [at the parade] who said, \u2018I need to go to a game, or I need to watch when they\u2019re on TV, or I need to order something online, or I will follow them on social media, or I will take the time to learn a little bit about who [Breanna Stewart] is as a mom.\u2019<\/p>\n
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\u201cHow we celebrated this team was important. The investments made in the parade, in rings, in the gratitude for the team and the staff and the partnerships that we have. It was very intentional.\u201d<\/p>\n
SBJ looked at the big new sponsorship deal the Libs announced after the championship: a multiyear, multimillion dollar deal between the Liberty the WNBA team and Liberty Mutual, the insurance giant\u2026<\/p>\n
Natural as the mating may have seemed for years to a lot of people, it didn\u2019t come to be until the basketball team got into the WNBA Finals in 2024 and the two sides met at a Finals game.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, it\u2019s kind of Captain Obvious,\u201d Clarke told Friend. \u201cLiberty Mutual. We do share a name.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The success on the court also led not just to sponsorships and endorsements and TV deals etc. but an ability to sell a stake in the team \u2014 estimated in the \u201cmid-teens\u201d per Bloomberg News \u2014 to a group of investors that included Jack Ma, the founder with Joe Tsai, of Alibaba, as well as five New York sportswomen that brought in roughly $40 million. That gave the Liberty a valuation of $450 million. That in turn is being used by BSE to finance around half the cost of the Liberty\u2019s new training center in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a 75,000 square foot facility that\u2019s likely to be the WNBA\u2019s best and a lure for the next class of free agents that\u2019ll be need to keep New York\u2019s dynasty going. It opens in time for the 2027 season.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ember has burned from October to this year,\u201d Clarke said. \u201cEverybody\u2019s come in with this mindset of, \u2018OK, let\u2019s do it again.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
At both ends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Success for a sports team can be measured in a number of different ways, on the court, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[435,67337,67332,61778,2005,436,67333,67336,99,67335,67334,434],"class_list":["post-100648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-breanna-stewart","tag-keia-clarke","tag-liberty-mutual","tag-new-jersey-nets","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-liberty","tag-new-york-lottery","tag-season-ticket-sales","tag-sports","tag-sports-team","tag-tom-friend","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}