Tonight the New York Liberty and the Washington Mystics will face off in the season opener of the WNBA, launching what is set to be a high-stakes season for the league.
The league has been riding a recent groundswell of interest in women’s basketball. With 36 million total unique viewers across all national networks, the WNBA had its most-watched regular season in more than two decades last year and game attendance was up 16% from 2022. Last year, the league brought in more than $200 million in revenue, a 200%-plus year-over-year increase.
This growth is due in no small part to the $75 million the league raised in early 2022, says WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert. “When I joined the league in 2019, we had one marketing person,” Engelbert tells Fast Company. “Now we have 26. That capital allowed us to hire people so that we could get to work on analytics and fan data, as well as social media. We could also deploy a digital transformation through our app. All of that is really, really important.”
Now, teams, brands, and league officials alike are making major investments in anticipation of what should be a historic 2024 WNBA season.
“A growth property”
The league’s expansion is coming at an auspicious time for women’s basketball in general. The recently wrapped NCAA tournament brought a new generation of fans to the sport, thanks in part to University of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese’s dynamic play and engaging rivalry. The women’s March Madness final averaged 18.7 million viewers, while the men’s final averaged just 14.82 million viewers. In fact, the women’s NCAA final racked up more viewers than any basketball game—college or professional, men’s or women’s—since 2019.
As former college stars like Clark and Reese enter their rookie professional seasons, expectations for the WNBA to also break viewership and attendance records are sky-high. The 2024 WNBA draft was the most-watched in history, averaging a record 2.446 million viewers, a 307% increase over 2023. According to StubHub, since drafting Clark, Indiana Fever ticket sales have increased 13-fold. And across the league, WNBA ticket sales are up 93%, compared to last season.
“The WNBA is a growth property,” says Colie Edison, chief growth officer at the WNBA. “We are growing at a clip that is record-breaking in every single metric that’s important: from viewership, to attendance, to merchandise, to league valuation, to team valuation.”
“It’s a really exciting time in women’s basketball. I don’t think any of us could have asked for much more,” says former WNBA point guard Sue Bird, noting that the growth of the league has been “brewing” for years. “It’s really been the perfect storm when you add in this incoming rookie class, headlined by Caitlin and the excitement she’s brought to the game.”
As Edison says, “The momentum has never been higher.”
Team investment
In October, the league announced it would be adding a new team in the Bay Area, and reports emerged last week that another expansion team is headed to Toronto.
But all WNBA teams are hoping to capture new audiences this season. In order to do this, many are investing in bigger and better facilities. For instance, teams such as the Mystics and the Las Vegas Aces have moved their games against the Fever to larger arenas in order to accommodate the expected surge in demand.
And in April, the Seattle Storm unveiled a new $64 million practice facility, the first WNBA training center designed and built specifically for a women’s basketball team. As a new member of the Seattle Storm’s ownership group, Bird says the project sets the standard for how decision-makers should invest in their teams.
“Vegas opened their practice facility last year. The Mercury now have their own facility. The Storm is technically the first to build a dedicated WNBA facility, and you’re going to see franchises doing that more and more,” says Bird. From her own experience as an athlete, Bird says having a dedicated practice facility improves the player experience (which can make it easier for teams to recruit top talent) and can also increase player performance.
These kinds of investment are not just the right thing to do, but good for teams’ bottom lines, she argues. “For a long time, women’s sports was framed as a charity,” says Bird, “as if you were donating to it, doing the right thing, checking a box—however you want to frame it. People are really truly starting to see that this isn’t charity, this is a great investment. It goes back to why I wanted to be a part of WNBA ownership: It’s a smart business choice.”
In 2008, the Storm sold for $10 million. Today, the Storm is valued closer to $151 million and is the WNBA’s most valuable team.
Brand partnerships
This is the same argument that a growing number of brands have made when pursuing partnerships with the WNBA, its teams, and its players.
“[Women’s] sports leagues and teams want to be viewed as businesses. It’s not a charity,” says Sarah Lane, chief marketing officer at CarMax. Since 2020, the used car retailer has added more than a dozen new partnerships across women’s sports leagues, teams, and athletes, and has increased their investments in women’s sports by more than tenfold.
CarMax will launch a new campaign during the WNBA season opener starring Bird, as well as WNBA stars A’ja Wilson, Sabrina Ionescu, and Chiney Ogwumike. A longtime sponsor, CarMax is the official auto retailer of both the NBA and the WNBA; and in 2023, CarMax deepened this relationship by signing a multiyear partnership agreement with the WNBA.
Lane says CarMax has continued the sponsorship because, when compared to marketing initiatives in other leagues, marketing with the WNBA has been more cost-effective, provided stronger ROI, and leads to “10% to 20% higher affinity” for the brand.
“We are super pleased that we were in early,” says Lane. “What that affords us is a less cluttered landscape. You turn on an NFL game, or an NBA game, and its logo soup. There are just so many brands involved.” But in the WNBA, she adds, “you can get a lot of visibility.”
Going forward, she expects that marketing with the WNBA “is certainly going to get more expensive, and it’s going to get more cluttered.” Still, Lane stresses that this growth is good for society and for her brand. “As the audience goes up, more brands will come to the table, that’ll mean more demand,” she says. “And we’ll certainly appreciate those bigger audiences, too.”
The WNBA’s fan advantage
A report from Sports Innovation Lab indicates that 83% of brands plan to increase their investment in women’s sports media in 2024. One such brand is La Crema Winery, which last month was named the first official wine partner for the WNBA and the U.S. Women’s National Basketball Team. The four-year agreement with the WNBA will include a digital marketing partnership, a player marketing partnership, and free wine-tasting pop-up events at WNBA matches.
Shilah Salmon, senior vice president of marketing for Jackson Family Wines (which owns La Crema), explains that marketing with the WNBA was a strategic decision because of the league’s audience demographics, which she says are younger, more educated, and more progressive, on average, when compared to other sports audiences.
“Older Gen Z and younger millennials are a really big focus for us and 29% of the W’s consumers are 25 to 34. And 21% of their consumers are 35 to 44,” says Salmon. “That was very enticing for us.”
Plus, her team’s research indicates that 61% of WNBA fans identify as wine drinkers, but just 15% say wine is their favorite alcoholic beverage—which Salmon says poses a tremendous opportunity to bring friendly consumers into the category and establish brand loyalty.
Hailey Jackson Hartford Murray, La Crema’s coproprietor, adds that they’ve made the intentional branding decision to align themselves with the progressive values that the WNBA has come to exemplify under the leadership of Engelbert.
Engelbert’s strategy
Engelbert was appointed CEO of Deloitte in 2015, making her the first woman to hold the position at a Big Four professional services firm. Then in 2019, she became first-ever commissioner of the WNBA. During her tenure, Engelbert has established a reputation as a brand-friendly, business-savvy leader.
Engelbert brings “a lot of business fundamentals to the league, making some tough decisions and tough investments and has navigated no shortage of challenges,” adds Lane, referencing the COVID pandemic, in which Engelbert corralled teams to play inside a “bubble” in order to continue the 2020 season.
“The 2020 season, during the pandemic, was existential for this league,” says Engelbert. “If we don’t have that season, we probably don’t have a place for these generational players like Angel, Caitlin, and Kamilla [Cardoso] to play. If we didn’t get the media and corporate money that year, I’m not sure all our teams would make it. That was a survival moment for the league. Now, we’re going from survive to thrive.”
A new CBA
That year, the WNBA also signed a new collective bargaining agreement with players. Under the leadership of Women’s National Basketball Players Association president Nneka Ogwumike, the deal raised the maximum WNBA salary to $215,000 (up nearly 83%), awarded WNBA players the same share of league revenues (50%) as their NBA counterparts, and secured parental benefits such as full-pay maternity leave and a $5,000 annual childcare stipend.
Last week, Engelbert announced that the WNBA will commit $50 million over the next two years to provide charter flights for WNBA teams, a condition players have been requesting for years. In fact, in 2022, Engelbert said chartering flights for teams would ruin the league’s finances. But the league appears to be emboldened by recent growth and more willing to make big investments. “We have been hard at work to transform the business and build a sustainable economic model to support charter flights,” said Engelbert. “While we still have a lot of work to do to continue to execute our strategic plan, we feel confident that the time is now to institute a full charter program to demonstrate our commitment to leading with a player-first agenda.”
Edison says her team is also doubling down on investments in the live events part of the WNBA’s business, such as halftime shows, All-Star matches, and fan fest pop-ups. She also points to the league’s high-stakes media deal negotiations as a key priority.
Media opportunities
The WNBA negotiated its current media deal, which drives about $60 million in revenue annually, jointly with the NBA. It expires in 2025. Now, the WNBA could push for a new deal worth closer to $80 or $100 million per year, according to reports—and it could even seek its own deal independent of the NBA.
“We will, with our partners at the NBA, do what is best for our league, whether that means negotiating together or negotiating alone,” says Edison. “All that matters, and really at the forefront, is what is going to be best for the WNBA and our athletes.”
Indeed, comparing the WNBA and the NBA directly fails to capture both the historic context of the WNBA, as well as the women’s sports sector’s exponential expansion.
“Our goal is not to be where the NBA is now because the NBA has been in business for 75-plus years, and we’re only heading into our 28th season,” says Edison. “They have a huge head start on us. But we identify ourselves as a growth property that is moving at just such a faster pace, and seeing growth at a much higher rate than any sport out there.”
Historically, she says, people judged women’s sports based on performance, unlike men’s sports, which they judged by potential. “Until those tides can shift, and we can see women’s sports for what they are, and the huge growth potential that they have, the investment levels won’t match.”
Additional reporting by senior staff editor Jeff Beer.