Calacus Monthly Hit & Miss – The WNBA pay dispute
Every month we look at the best and worst communicators in the sports world from the last few weeks.
The WNBA Pay Dispute
While the USA Men’s basketball team has had an unfair advantage when it comes to the Olympic Games, the women’s team had more modest origins.
The NBA and USA Basketball came together in 1996 to support a female version of the Men’s ‘Dream Team’ for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta – with the women winning gold, a title they have retains at every summer Games since.
The National Basketball Association backed a women’s league (WNBA) which started in 1997 with eight teams in established basketball cities. The NBA still owns 60% of the WNBA.
As recently as last year, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver underlined the importance of collaboration between the two leagues and of integration.
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.
There have been conflicting reports about the health of the WNBA and its teams, with some reports 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 at around $450m suggests that finances are healthier than they have been portrayed.
As the LA Times suggested last year: “Women’s basketball has never seen anything like Caitlin Clark, the sweet-shooting rookie guard for the WNBA’s Indiana Fever. She’s Taylor Swift with a jump shot, Mia Hamm in a singlet; a figure so transcendent she is changing her profession.”
It speaks volumes that more than 3 million people tuned in to ESPN just to watch her get drafted and she signed the most lucrative sponsorship deal in women’s basketball history, a $28-million agreement that includes a signature shoe.
Not everyone is so lucky. WNBA star Angel Reese has even claimed she could not afford her $96,000 annual rent on her $72,000 salary, with her other sponsorships and earnings from other competitions needed to support her outgoings.
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.
But WNBA players’ union executive director Terri Jackson suggested that the deal undervalued the WNBA, especially with the NBA media rights reportedly worth a total of $76 billion with Disney, NBC and Amazon Prime Video.
She said: “We 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.
“We look forward to learning how the NBA arrived at a $200 million valuation – 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.”
Salaries have always been an issue in the WNBA.
The top base salary in 2024 was $242,000 with Clark earning just over $75,500 in her first year as a pro.
Without salary caps, overseas teams can offer bigger packages to female players, who supplement their income in the off-season – even though we saw Brittany Griner imprisoned in Russia in 2022 after a drugs charge.
When the WNBA’s Commissioner’s Cup was introduced five years ago, the league branded it as another opportunity to put money in players’ pockets, with $500,000 in prize money split among the winning squad’s players.
But Clark said after the game that the event highlighted pay issues in the women’s game.
“You get more (money) for this than you do if you’re the (WNBA Finals) champion. It makes no sense. Someone tell (WNBA commissioner) Cathy (Engelbert) to help us out.” She jokingly referred to the competition as the “Cathy Cup.
When the WNBPA, the players’ union, was presented with a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) at the start of July, it was rejected out of hand.
Phoenix Mercury’s Satou Sabally, a WNBPA player representative, suggested that the WNBA’s initial proposal was a “slap in the face,” especially with new expansion teams taking the league to a record 18 franchises.
According to MarketWatch, players receive only 9.3% of league revenue, including TV deals, tickets and merchandise sales, compared to 50% for men in the NBA.
There are suggestions that comparing the pay structure between the men’s and women’s leagues isn’t reasonable, given that the NBA has a six-month regular season and 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.
One major sticking point in negotiations related to the league wanting a fixed percentage payment while players want “a better share where our salaries grow with the business, and not just a fixed percentage over time,” according to Nneka Ogwumike, president of the WNBPA and Seattle Storm forward.
“It’s been made clear that there’s this perception that the players don’t understand the business,” Ogwumike said. “Cathy has told me that to my face. I communicated that to the players and I said, ‘Let’s demonstrate that we do understand the business, especially as we’re going back and forth in negotiations.”
To her credit, Engelbert says she wants the same things players want: a "transformational deal," but her messaging hasn’t always matched the players’ urgency.
“I want a lot of the same things the players want,” she said ahead of the All-Star game. “I’m still really optimistic that we’ll get something done that will be transformational and next year at All-Star we’ll be talking about how great everything is. Obviously, there’s a lot of hard work to be done on both sides to get there.”
She might have been shocked when, at the All-Star game in mid-July, players warmed up in shirts reading: “Pay us what you owe us.”
Each and every one of the 22 All-Stars agreed with the idea, as chants of “Pay them!" echoed from fans throughout the Gainbridge Fieldhouse arena.
The All-Stars unanimously donned those shirts during 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.
Some players, including All-Stars Collier and Angel Reese, say they may stage a walkout if a new CBA is not reached by October.
“The players are what is building this brand,” said Collier, All-Star game MVP and WNBPA vice president. “We feel like we’re owed a piece of that pie that we helped create.”
Sports economist David Berri estimates that the WNBA could pull in $500 million in revenue by 2026 and said: “Clearly, if the league is going to treat WNBA players like they do the NBA players, there has to be a substantial increase in pay.
Harvard economics professor and 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin has been advising the WNBPA in collective bargaining and recently wrote an essay in the New York Times entitled “How Underpaid Are WNBA Players? It’s Embarrassing.”
After examining TV ratings, attendance data and other metrics, Goldin estimated that the average WNBA salary should be “roughly one-quarter to one-third of the average NBA salary to achieve pay equity.”
In light of the huge pay disparity, she added: “How 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.”
Even former US Vice President Hillary Clinton got involved, saying on Instagram: “Everyone watches women's sports — and the players should be paid what they're owed. I stand with @theWNBPA and everyone else fighting for equal pay.”
The post secured more than 17,000 likes, reflects underlining growing public attention and concern over the financial inequities facing female athletes.
The WNBA and its players are less than four months away from the expiration date of their current collective bargaining agreement, and the two sides remain at odds.
That disconnect is dangerous. This isn’t just about spreadsheets and salary caps – it’s about trust.
A failure to agree to better terms could see more players moving overseas amidst a backdrop of resentment and frustration that could throw the future of WNBA seasons in doubt.
It would leave Engelbert leaving a legacy of a player strike, instead of being recognised for her work presiding over the most significant growth in women’s basketball history.