Napheesa Collier was in record-breaking form on Saturday night as she set a new high for a WNBA All-Star Game, with 36 points. But much of the attention was focused on what happened before the game when players warmed up with shirts bearing the message “Pay us what you owe us.”
The move came after players and the league failed to reach a deal on a new collective bargaining agreement. Do they have a point though? Evaluating athlete pay is notoriously tricky because sports accounting always includes a certain amount of voodoo.
That’s especially true in the WNBA, whose fortunes – literally and figuratively – are tied up with the NBA’s, for better or for worse. The relationship has evolved through the years, and many current WNBA teams have no direct ties with an NBA team, although some remain under NBA ownership. NBA commissioner Adam Silver refers to the two leagues as “integrated,” and they have bundled their broadcast rights together in a massive 11-year deal.
And Silver is the one who has faced pressure within the NBA over the WNBA’s apparent losses, something that those who believe the likes of Collier and Caitlin Clark should be happy with their current salaries often use as a counter argument to demands for a pay hike. Silver said in 2018 that the WNBA’s losses were roughly $10m a year. And reports last fall said the WNBA was due to lose $40m in 2024. Adjust the 2018 figures for inflation, and the WNBA is supposedly losing three times as much as it was a few years ago.
That’s a curious figure given other public statistics suggest the league’s financial health has never been better.
First, while WNBA attendance dropped from an overall average of more than 10,000 in the late 1990s to a little under 7,000 just after the pandemic, Clark and Co wiped out most of those losses in 2024 alone, pushing the league average close to 10,000 again, and the league is flirting with a new record in 2025. Second, the league’s broadcast rights alone have ballooned from zero in 2002 to roughly $60m a year in the current deal, with that number set to go to $200m as part of the combined deal with the NBA. Third, total league revenue jumped from $102m in 2019 to the $180m-$200m range in 2023, Bloomberg reported.
Some expenses have gone up, most notably a $25m per year commitment to fly teams by charter planes rather than on regular flights, as has been the case in the past. The WNBA salary cap has also risen incrementally from $622,000 in 2003 (inflation-adjusted to 2025: $1.1m) to $1.5m in 2025. The league has one fewer team now (13 instead of 14) than it did in 2003 (although expansion teams are on their way) so the total cost of player pay has gone from a maximum of $15.4m to $19.5m. But these expenses don’t add up to a full counterweight to the reported rise in revenue or the well-publicized jump in broadcast rights. It’s a good bet that Joe Lacob and Peter Guber, the owners of the WNBA’s well-supported Golden State Valkyries and the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, are taking a bigger risk by paying 37-year-old Stephen Curry nearly $60m a year than they are in paying the entire Valkyries roster barely $1m.
The bottom line is that we don’t know what’s included in the bottom line. Reinvestment in the league? Facilities? Postgame meals catered by five-star restaurants? (Surely not the latter.)
All we know is that it’s not going to the players. Generally, the less a league makes, the lower the share of revenue its players get – 50% of $1bn is less of a chore to pay than 25% of $100m. But WNBA players are making less than 10%, a rather tiny figure for any professional organization.
And in the land of voodoo accounting, sports teams have been adept at pleading penury when circumstances call for it. It’s not just the WNBA either. Eight years ago, ESPN uncovered numbers showing nearly half of the NBA’s teams didn’t generate a profit on their own.
Perhaps the best indicator of how well WNBA teams are actually doing – or are poised to do – is the price paid when teams are sold. The New York Liberty were sold in 2019 for somewhere in the $10m-$14m range. Six years later, based on a sale of a stake of the team, the the Liberty’s value was calculated at around $450m.
Little wonder WNBA players are noticing these figures and asking why their pay is still small enough that many of them are forced to spend their offseasons playing elsewhere. Players’ “Pay Us What You Owe Us” T-shirts at the All-Star Game weren’t printed on a sudden whim. None of those players are suggesting that they should be paid the same as their counterparts in the NBA, where league revenues top $10bn a year. But they surely deserve more, considering the WNBA rookie minimum is just $66,000 compared to $1.27m in the NBA.
And it’s not just the per-player pay. It’s the number of players who get paid at all.
A typical NBA roster now has 15 full-time players and three “two-way” players who are called up from the second-tier G-League. WNBA teams are limited to 12 players, and some may only carry 11. In a recent Golden State-Phoenix game, Phoenix only had eight players available.
So job security is minimal, and those low paychecks sting a bit more when a player is a few bad games away from not receiving them at all.
WNBA players may face a bit of opposition as they strive for improved salaries. Some NBA owners seem less enthusiastic than others about the whole venture, even if the most pessimistic reports of WNBA losses don’t even add up to the salary of a Curry or a Jayson Tatum alone. Some corners of social media have reacted to the WNBA All-Stars T-shirts with the expected chortling and guffawing. But the post-Covid women’s sports boom shows no sign of abating, and the numbers as we know them seem to be on the players’ side. Public opinion is likely to follow.