WNBA Players Want More of the League’s Revenue. Can They Get It?

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1:02Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. 28 years in the making, the New York Liberty are WNBA champions! On October 20th of last year, the New York Liberty faced off against the Minnesota Lynx in the WNBA finals. The original franchise has its very first title. It was an historic night. The Liberty won its first ever WNBA championship, marking the end of a remarkable season for the team and for the league. In 2024, attendance at WNBA games was up nearly 50 % from the previous year, its highest in more than two decades. Televised games attracted tens of millions of viewers over the course of the season.

1:56More than a million people tuned in to see the Liberty claim their first title. The next day, the WNBPA, the union representing the league's players, posted a video on X with a clear message. The WNBA, you know, if you want us to be here, you have to pay us more. It was an announcement. The players' union was opting out of its existing contract with the league. The union agreed to keep the contract's terms through the end of the 2025 season, while both parties negotiated new terms. But today, October 31st, 2025, the clock on those negotiations runs out. One of my favorite things is that it's on Halloween.

2:35It feels very spooky season. Sarah Spain has been covering the WNBA for ESPN for more than a decade. She's also the host of the women's sports podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. Yesterday, instead of reaching a deal, the league and the players union announced a 30-day extension, saying they'd continue negotiations through the month of November with a caveat. The union maintains the right to terminate the extension at any time with 48 hours notice. How would you characterize the quality of the conversations, the negotiations that have taken place so far?

3:10Acrimonious. Acrimonious, in part, because there's a lot at stake. Less than a handful of WNBA veterans are under contract for next year. Almost every single player not tied to a rookie contract has elected to have their contract end with this season. And really what's at the center of it, at the biggest, most important level, is a desire for the players to get a revenue share. Lexi Brown is a guard for the Seattle Storm. She's not a free agent. But after eight seasons in the league, she's asking for a bigger piece of the pie. We're asking for the share of something that we've built, something that we've created.

3:48Lexi says she's seen huge improvements for players on and off the court since she started. But she says the growing popularity of the game has made her realize how undervalued the players have been. It's like being in a relationship with the toxic man and then you find the good man. You're like, oh, this is what it feels like. And I feel like Vegas and New York and Seattle have been three of the organizations that have finally had ownership groups that are making all of us feel respected, valued, and really investing in us. Just understanding how undervalued we've been for so many years. And I think for most of us, that's really the principle of showing us that you value us as players and value the product that we put out every season.

4:38I'm David Gurra, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, at the negotiating table with the WNBA and the WNBPA. What the players want, what the league wants, and what's on the line for one of the fastest growing sports leagues in the world if they can't make a deal.

5:01The WNBA started nearly 30 years ago in 1997. It was a pivotal moment in women's sports. Many of the players that first season had just won a gold medal for Team USA at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. To even qualify for the team, they had to spend the year leading up to the games, traveling the world, leaving existing careers and taking pay cuts to play in small arenas and local gyms. Part of then-NBA Commissioner David Stern's plan to drum up interest in women's basketball, players nicknamed it the WNBA Test Balloon. Decades later, that balloon is floating higher than ever. Players like Caitlin Clark, Breonna Stewart, Paige Beckers, and Angel Reese have become household names.

5:44Standard metrics of success, TV viewership, game attendance, valuations, and ticket sales have soared. All except for one. Player pay, specifically a share of the revenue. In 2025, base pay for WNBA players ranged from about$66 ,000 to$250 ,000. NBA players play roughly twice as many games, but their annual salary is significantly higher, anywhere from about$1.2 million to$56 million. At this year's WNBA All-Star Game, players wore t-shirts that read, Pay us what you owe us. It was a big statement. Here's ESPN reporter and Good Game host Sarah Spain. So right now, they're getting less than 10 % of the WNBA revenue compared to about 50 % that NBA players get.

6:36And at the crux of it is the league side wants them to get higher salaries, but they want their revenue to be affected by certain stipulations, a predetermined rate. Whereas the players want their revenue to go up, their salary cap to go up, All of those things to be dependent on growth along with the revenue that they're creating for the league. I want to dig into the revenue sharing piece of this a bit more. And you brought up the contrast between the WNBA and the NBA. So can you spell that out a bit more explicitly? Well, we'll give you the extremes. So as of the most recent reports, Steph Curry is the highest paid NBA player, plays for the Warriors.

7:16And Jackie Young is one of the highest paid WNBA. And Steph Curry makes 230 times as much money as Jackie Young. There was a great op-ed in The New York Times by Nobel Prize winning economist Claudia Golden. And these are her numbers. And one of the very tricky things about discussing this issue is that there is such a lack of financial transparency from the NBA, WNBA league side. So everyone is sort of estimating at revenue, profit, everything else, cost. But according to Claudia Golden's numbers based on game attendance, TV viewership, all the other stuff, WNBA players should make somewhere around a quarter of what NBA players are making, and they're making an 80th.

8:02That's partly because WNBA base salaries are lower. But another factor is that the NBA and the WNBA have really different approaches when it comes to the way they pay their players, what's essentially a bonus. That's something Bloomberg data visualization reporter Jenna Hawk has spent years looking into. So the NBA looks at everything in terms of basketball-related income. So basically anything that is brought in there, media rights, deals, concessions sold at games, ticket sales, corporate sponsorships, merchandise, it's all under one pot. And within that large pot, they basically split it up.

8:40And 51 percent, between 50 to 51 percent goes directly to players. The rest goes to the league, the owners, etc. The WNBA, on the other hand? When it comes to revenue sharing, only league revenue is up for sharing. So the current collective bargaining agreement technically already has a revenue sharing provision. But unfortunately, because of really strict requirements that have been outlined in that CBA and because of really difficult thresholds that the league has to meet, The revenue sharing has never actually kicked in for the players. So even though it's been outlined in this CBA since 2020, players haven't actually seen a dime of that money go into their paychecks.

9:23Jenna says those requirements are difficult to meet. The league has to increase its revenue by 20 percent for two consecutive years in order for the players to claim a share. And so if you miss your target one year, the following year you have to make up for all that lost money and again meet your 20 % goal for that year. So you can imagine weathering a pandemic, there's some lost money on the table, so the kind of growth targets have then become much higher for the league. After you meet all these cumulative targets, only about 17.5 % of the final area that's up for grabs will actually go to players.

10:00And so we kind of calculated a couple years ago how much would players actually receive. Well, when you actually split it up, give the players the portion that they are owned, give the league what they're owned. There's another provision called the cost of doing revenue. So if you start out with an excess of$2 million and the union opts to split all of these funds kind of equally, players would basically only get a$2 ,000 400 one-time bonus. Here's Seattle Storm player Lexi Brown. The WNBA takes care of our housing. You know, if you don't have a car in market, they take care of that. They do supplement a lot of expenses for us, despite these really low salaries.

10:46I do think like we're super underpaid for what we do on the daily and the expectations they have for us. I remember, I think I made 40 grand my rookie year. The season I got waived and only played half the year. I think I only made like$15 ,000,$20 ,000 playing. And I won a championship that year. When it comes to the current contract negotiations, Lexi pointed out the league is offering them higher base salaries. But what it doesn't want to budge on is the revenue share structure. You do have some players who are looking at these new numbers and they're like, that looks pretty good to me. Like, what's the big deal?

11:21And then you also have just other players. Like, it's the principle of what's going on here. Like, they are not allowing us to also grow with this business that we are helping grow. The league argues that while it's rapidly growing, it still isn't profitable. And getting a look at those finances can be tricky because the WNBA is a private company. So they don't actually have to disclose how much money that they're making every single year, whether they're churning a profit. it. In 2023, though, Jenna got her hands on some official WNBA documents, which helped give her a picture of the league's finances.

11:55From the end of fiscal year 2019, the league had brought in around $51.8 million. In 2024, the league brought in over$144 million. So it's 177 percent jump. Even so, Jenna says, we can't definitely say whether or not the WNBA is profitable. Some of those numbers still are a little murky to us because of these complicated accounting structures. It also kind of depends on owners that you ask. There's a lot of NBA owners who also have tie-ups in the WNBA that claim they're losing lots of money. Other owners will tell you it doesn't look like that if you take into account the larger picture. So we can't say definitively whether the WNBA is truly making money yet.

12:39The WNBA did not respond to questions about its profitability. But when it comes to the revenue share deal on the table, a league spokesperson told us it offered players, quote, a revenue sharing component that would result in the players' compensation increasing as league revenue increases without any cap on the upside. That revenue share deal would only go into effect if certain requirements were met, like the current contract. And the question of profit, how much or how little the league is making, sits at the center of these negotiations. What is eating so much into the WNBA's profits? Wouldn't we all like to know?

13:14Wouldn't we all like for them to tell us? This is a league that starts an 11-year$2.2 billion rights deal next year and has a series of lesser value media rights deals and has record merchandise, attendance, viewership, everything else. So the idea that the argument would be the same decades later, which is that it's still on the players to really settle for scraps as they try to build this league, as opposed to seeing the players' percentage and salaries go up along with the growth of the league, is I think what's so frustrating. Coming up after the break, how the WNBA's dizzying ownership structure complicates the picture and what could make the two sides come to a deal.

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15:10The WNBA and the WNBPA's spooky Halloween deadline is here. And instead of reaching a deal, the two sides have agreed to extend their talks for another 30 days, with the condition that the players may terminate the extension at any time with 48 hours notice. A source familiar with the situation said the league will have the option to terminate it as well. There's no shortage of competing factors at play in these negotiations, but ESPN's Sarah Spain says a significant one is the league's financial picture, made even more complicated by its ownership structure. So the WNBA has 42 percent, the NBA has 42 percent, And then there's a 16 percent that was sold in 2022 to a variety of investors.

15:53At the time of the 2022 deal, that 16 percent was sold off for$75 million, which would have valued the whole league at around$470 million. Three years later, one team, the New York Liberty, was valued at close to that number on its own. You have a league that is estimated to be worth billions in the next couple years, and you sold off 16 percent of it for just$75 million. Here's Bloomberg reporter Jenna Hawk. There's almost two camps on how people view this. There's the one camp which is like this was the biggest amount of investment into women's sports in the history of all time at that point.

16:35And you had all these really big names declaring their support and earmarking their money directly for women's sports. Really big names like Condoleezza Rice, Michael and Susan Dell, Lorene Powell Jobs. On the other hand, you have other people being like, well, if women's sports and the WNBA as a league is on the precipice of this really big moment and we know that the growth is coming, why dilute the shares? And that has kind of been lurking for years now, especially as you kind of shore up these big media rights deals, especially as you talk about this collective bargaining agreement negotiations.

17:16It's all kind of like, OK, well, was this a good business move and did this bring more eyes to the game or did we make a bad move here? From where I sit, I hear a lot of investors talking a pretty good game about women's sports. They celebrate it and support it. What role are they playing in these negotiations, those who've invested in this league? Are they being outspoken about what's going on here? No, and that's what's fascinating. So we had a WNBPA lawyer on my show, Good Game with Sarah Spain. And one of the things that she talked about that really could push these negotiations, could move the needle publicly, is if the folks who invested, believing that they were both making a great business decision, but also supporting the players and the teams that they care about, if they spoke out and said, why isn't the money that we put in getting to the players?

18:04Why is it just enriching these other folks? That would really change the conversation, I think. Sarah says so far, WNBA team owners haven't really spoken out either. But they aren't monolithic. They approach this from a variety of perspectives. Some of them are invested in what it means to support and invest in women's sports. And some of them have just been told that it's a great place to invest with a lot of upside. And they're aligning more with the side that I think is trying to make the money without spending it. But Bloomberg's Jenna Hawks says it may be too early for those owners to judge the return on their investment.

18:42At what point in a league should you actually be talking about profitability? The NBA is decades older than the WNBA. It took them many, many years to turn a profit. There's still plenty of different sports leagues that are decades years old and they're not churning a profit. So I think all of these questions about how much money are they bringing in? When should they be making money for their owners? It's all kind of gotten into a question, well, like, if you're in a period of major growth, are you supposed to be seeing profit yet? All this comes down to whether the players trust the league's leadership to appropriately value their worth.

19:18And the relationship between the league and its players union has only deteriorated as these negotiations have dragged on, with the players union and the league publicly sparring for weeks now over everything from the value of its media deals to the leadership of the league's commissioner, Kathy Engelbert. You look at Nafisa Collier's statement during her exit interview for the Minnesota Lynx talking about private conversations she had. She told me players should be on their knees thanking their lucky stars for the media rights deal that I got them. Before the first game of the WNBA finals, the commissioner responded to Nafisa Collier's statement.

19:52And if the players in the W don't feel appreciated and valued by the league, then we have to do better and I have to do better. In the weeks since, the back and forth has continued. Here's Lexi Brown again. Early in negotiations, it was very much, we're going to, you know, we're going to keep this in-house. Like, basically, like, keep it cute. And then I think just things just weren't going the way we expected it to. considering the explosion of the WNBA in the last few years, I think it kind of caught everybody off guard that the league was just kind of like, yeah, like, we're doing amazing, y 'all are doing amazing, but, like, we still want to, like, keep y 'all in this little corner over here that we've had y 'all in for the last 25 years.

20:34So slowly and slowly and slowly, we've kind of brought it more out to the public. Now the players in the league have 30 more days to try to see eye to eye. In a statement, the WNBPA said, quote, While we believe negotiations would be further along, the players are more focused, united, and determined than ever to reach an agreement that reflects their value and undeniable impact on the league. The WNBA says it stands ready to continue negotiations, adding it hopes the union does the same so that both parties can, quote, finalize a mutually beneficial new CBA as quickly as possible. Lexi Brown says she hopes to find a way to work with the league and stay on good terms with leadership.

21:15One day, she could see herself being one of them. I can just speak for myself. Like, I do want to work in front office one day, whether that's in the league or for a team. And I feel like the best way to help grow the league when you're done is to, like, be a part of the higher-ups. So that's something that I've always dreamt of doing is being on the other side of the table in these negotiations. Having a player's perspective, I feel like, could be super beneficial. So this is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. The show is hosted by me, Wan Ha and Sarah Holder. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patty Hirsch, Rachel Lewis-Kriskie, Naomi Ng, Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Chavin, Alex Gura, Julia Weaver, Yang Yang and Taka Yasuzawa.

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