The WNBA is expected to see the value of its television broadcast rights skyrocket once they expire following the 2025 season. The NBA is in the process of negotiating those rights, and it couldn’t come at a better time for a league that has seen a surge in popularity.
The bad news? The league could really use the money.
Buried in this week’s Washington Post report about the unique nature of the NBA-WNBA joint broadcast-rights negotiations was this nugget about the WNBA’s finances:
This year, the WNBA and its teams still are expected to lose around $50 million, according to two people with knowledge of the figures, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the league’s finances.
Although details of the league’s balance sheet might come as a surprise to bandwagon fans swept up in the fervor of a rookie class headlined by Caitlin Clark, longtime observers of the WNBA know the league has never turned a profit.
“On average (we’ve lost) over $10 million every year we’ve operated,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told The Associated Press in Oct. 2018.
The WNBA beefed up its security efforts for players prior to the season, and also chartered flights for teams for the first time. The extra efforts have been justified. The league announced Monday that May 2024 was its highest-attended opening month in 26 years, and its most-watched start of the season across all networks ever.
Still, the WNBA’s extra measures (read: expenditures) for the 2024 season suggested that the league was finally turning a corner toward profitably. Although Clark’s sponsorship arrangement with Nike will make her the highest-paid rookie professional in the history of women’s basketball, it does not reflect a rising tide for all the league’s boats.
Not yet, at least.
The rights to broadcast both the NBA and the WNBA after next season are being negotiated in tandem by the NBA. Although this all but ensures an unprecedented windfall soon to come the WNBA’s way, it also comes with a catch: evaluating the broadcast rights for both leagues individually is speculative.
“If you’re not getting a number from the media companies, then you are hanging on to the NBA,” Laura Gentile, an industry consultant, and ESPN’s former chief marketing officer, told the Post.
It’s not incidental to the WNBA-NBA relationship that the women’s league has survived longer than any of its forebears. Neither the WPBL (1979-81), NWBL (1997-2007), WABA (2017-present) or ABL (1996-99) partnered with the NBA. None enjoyed the fruits of the men’s league’s largesse.
According to the Post, the NBA owns roughly 60 percent of the WNBA. Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal report their television rights will be worth more than $7 billion per year combined. That ought to be enough to push the WNBA in the black — even if that hope rests on a tricky bit of accounting.
