The NFL and NBA pay out about 50% of their revenue to the players. By that metric, the WNBA can afford to double salaries. Presumably, however, economies of scale apply, making a lower revenue league less efficient due to fixed costs taking up a larger percentage of that revenue. The real issue is that the WNBA, and women’s sports in general, are lower revenue than men’s sports. There’s no easy fix for that.
Certainly there are a few lucky ones who’ve been able to leverage their talent and visibility into independent deals for themselves, but that’s true in every sport, and doesn’t do anything for a rookie making league minimum.
Sure. But they get paid based on people paying to watch them. So they need to bring in more revenue.
And, this is the fundamental issue. In the U.S., a lot of sports fans – yeah, particularly male sports fans – are vocal about their disinterest in watching women’s sports. (That is, except apparently for sports like beach volleyball, where the participants aren’t wearing much.)
I note this because the meme below just showed up on the Facebook wall of a friend of mine, who apparently shares that vocal disinterest. The original post on Facebook has tons of comments about ESPN being “woke,” and pandering to liberals, by covering women’s sports so often.
Women’s tennis is another anomaly in the United States. In this era major women’s tennis finals in fact often outdraw male equivalents in terms of TV viewership. It is similar with women’s soccer in the FIFA World Cup, strongly related to the women’s soccer team’s dominance relative to the American men.
In general viewership is increasing for most female sports, WNBA and NCAAW included, where interest has risen sharply the last few years. It’s just male sports, particularly the major professional leagues, have an absolutely massive head start.
I was going to argue that a lot of men might not be interested because the NBA players are so much better than the WNBA players. But the college teams aren’t typically as good as NBA teams and a lot of people enjoy watching them. I don’t watch many sports these days, but when I was younger I watched a lot of NFL football, MLB baseball, collegiate wrestling, and boxing on occasion. I’ll watch women’s UFC on rare occasions, but that’s about the only women’s sport I do watch.
OK, honest question, why would someone watch WNBA when they already watch the NBA? It’s far less visually entertaining because of the height difference of the players.
I’m not a basketball fan, so I can’t answer that. But, I read a lot of comments from male sports fans, along the lines of “WNBA play is no better than boys high school basketball.”
A lot of the showmanship in basketball involves slam dunking the ball. IMO if they raised the hoop 2 feet then both leagues would look similar.
I found the women’s Olympic Soccer Team to be more exciting than the men’s team because of they exhibited a more exciting level of skill.
I do, casually (somewhat more casually than I watch the NBA since I don’t have a local WNBA team). I follow NCAAW basketball some and I don’t follow the men’s side hardly at all (flipside from the above, since we have a very good NCAAW program locally). I’ve never really been a huge fan of above-the-rim basketball, so the lack of dunking means very little to me. I actually tuned out of the NBA for a number of years post-Michael Jordan during those really dominant days of big man basketball, when it seemed like just dumping it into the low post was the preferred offensive scheme. The evolution of the Warriors “pace & space” type of game drew me back in to professional ball.
Basically they WNBA just plays a different game than the NBA. I still find it entertaining because max athleticism is not necessarily the biggest draw of the sport to me. You might as well ask why all those Texas HS boosters go insane for HS football, when it is patently an inferior product to the NFL 
.
Y’all are right; I’m victim-blaming. My bad.
I think it’s that women’s basketball seems to be fundamentally different than men’s basketball due to the differences in athleticism. Not necessarily worse, but definitely different.
I mean, Griner held the WNBA dunk record… with 23 career dunks as of September 2021. 23. Career.
The NBA most dunks in a season is over 300. Most in ONE game is 10.
It’s just… different. Personally I find it unexciting, even relative to college basketball.
They could take up some other job when their playing days are over. It’s not like the money they make while playing has to last them the rest of their lives.
The NBA didn’t spring into existence overnight. It took decades for it to build up teams, rivalries, visibility, TV contracts, a huge fan base, and massive revenues. And the players have gone on strike more than once to get a larger share of that revenue. The millionaires of today owe a lot to the players who came before them. Other major sports are the same. I don’t know that there’s any way to short circuit that process. If the WNBA continues to grow in popularity and revenue, then future players may be set for life after only a year or two in the league.
I’m sure that nearly all of them do/will move into other sorts of jobs. The issue is, especially for the better players, that they are likely able to make far more (on a yearly basis) as a basketball player (even if for a limited time) than they will be able to in a non-athlete job.
For example, endorsements aside, Brittney Griner’s contracts with the WNBA, and with the Russian team she was playing for, grossed over $1.2 million a year. Let’s say that, after her playing career, she moves into broadcasting, or coaching. Those jobs may still be lucrative, compared to a typical job, but she almost undoubtedly won’t make anywhere near what she was making as a professional athlete.
The point I was making is that athletes, as a whole, need to “make hay while the sun shines,” and maximize their income while they can. No, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to make enough money to live the rest of their lives (though a few, like a LeBron James or a Tom Brady, likely can), but it does mean that they’d be foolish to turn down income opportunities that present themselves.
Someday the WNBA might turn a profit. That would be the point that salaries should increase.
Do other professional sports teams, or leagues, show a profit? I thought I’d read something years ago that said some (most?) teams operated at a loss, but the values were going up so much that when an owner sold a team, the profit more than made up for the money they lost while owning it.
Probably hard to know for sure. In the U.S., most of the major leagues are made up of individually-owned teams, rather than the teams being owned by the leagues themselves. As most teams are owned by private individuals or ownership groups, they aren’t really required to “show their books” to the public.
An exception is the Green Bay Packers; they’ve been set up as a public corporation since 1923, and they do publish their annual financial statements. They currently do that reporting at their annual shareholder meeting, which was held two weeks ago; there, they reported that, in the fiscal year ending in March of 2022, they had a profit of $77.7 million, on an operating revenue of $579 million.
They had lost $38.8 million in the previous year, due mostly to COVID reducing several of their revenue sources (e.g., they effectively had no gate revenue, as games in the 2020 season were played in empty stadiums); most years, they do turn a profit.
The WNBA gets a portion of their budget from the NBA, which is very profitable.
Bumping this thread:
$76,500 her first year. The top NBA pick gets $12M/first year. Okay, so Clark does make good money for endorsements, but c’mon, man! I think there just isn’t a lot of money floating around the WNBA, and until the league and the teams have more, it will be like this. I knew there was a disparity here, but I did not appreciate how big it is. Effing ridiculous.
What’s ridiculous here? The WNBA does not generate as much revenue as the NBA and player salaries will reflect this. The article you linked says the WNBA makes $60 million annually from media rights while the NBA makes $2.7 billion annually. What do you think would be fair salary for Clark?