Net revenue?
I’m assuming it’s net revenue rather than profit.
Is there a difference between net revenue and profit?
Anyway, never ask for percentage of net revenue. Always ask for percentage of gross revenue, even if the percentage is a lot lower. If the league is losing money, the net revenue is negative.
The reason this is coming up is that the WNBA just signed a new 11-yr TV contract that approximately triples their previous TV revenue and that’s before further add-ons to be negotiated that should raise that figure even higher. The players are arguing that “hey, that increased valuation is down in part to us working hard for peanuts for decades, so we deserve a piece of the pie - a rising tide should lift all boats.” Hard to argue with IMHO.
Meanwhile the minority owner of the Boston Celtics is trying to buy and move the Connecticut Sun for $325 million, more than 4x what the last WNBA team sold for. The WNBA is still just a fraction of the NBA (the Boston Celtics themselves last sold for $6.1 billion), but a larger fraction than when they were just an accounting error. Little by little the economics of the situation are shifting.
That probably is an issue, but it’s certainly not the only issue. The US Women’s Soccer Team brings in several times as much revenue as the men’s team, but until very recently, the players were paid a small fraction of what the men were. The US Soccer Federation, the employer of both teams, justified the disparity, basically, as “Of course they don’t deserve as much; they’re women”.
And does the women’s league spend as much on those things as the men’s league does?
Do you have a cite for that last bit?
The women had been offered the same contract as the men but the women refused it. They wanted guaranteed money, so that’s what they collectively bargained for. Then, years into that collectively bargained contract, they pointed to the men’s incentive-based contract and complained that the women would have earned more if they had signed the original incentive-based contract they were offered. Unsurprisingly, a Judge ruled against that argument.
“The WNT [Women’s National Team] rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the MNT [Men’s National Team] and … the WNT was willing to forgo higher bonuses for other benefits, such as greater base compensation and the guarantee of a higher number of contracted players,” Klausner wrote. “Accordingly, Plaintiffs cannot now retroactively deem their CBA worse than the MNT CBA by reference to what they would have made had they been paid under the MNT’s pay-to-play structure when they themselves rejected such a structure.”
Two years later US Soccer voluntarily settled due to increasing public pressure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/sports/soccer/us-womens-soccer-equal-pay.html
For U.S. Soccer, the settlement is an expensive end to a conflict that had battered its reputation, damaged its ties with sponsors and soured its relationship with some of its most popular stars, including Morgan, Megan Rapinoe and Carli Lloyd, who retired last year. U.S. Soccer was under no obligation to settle with the women’s team; a federal judge in 2020 had dismissed the players’ equal pay arguments, stripping them of nearly all of their legal leverage, and the players’ appeal was not certain to succeed.
That offer never actually happened. The women’s team did agree to a different contract, but only because it was the best contract they were offered. I’ve returned the book to the library, so I can’t give detailed cites, but it was A Greater Goal, by Elizabeth Rusch.
Well, I quoted a cite from a judge issuing a legal ruling that says they were offered the same contract. Said ruling was based on that very fact. That seems more compelling to me than “trust me, bro.”
So no cite for the following claim either?
The judge found that the agreement wasn’t unfair because the players had agreed to it (a ludicrous standard, when applied to any unfair-employment claim, and why the team was appealing). The judge did not find that they had been offered the same deal as the men.
And I already gave my cite. I apologize that it’s not as easy to reference a book in an online discussion, but that’s the cite I have.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but this quote from EllisDee seems to say exactly that:
“The WNT [Women’s National Team] rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the MNT [Men’s National Team] and … the WNT was willing to forgo higher bonuses for other benefits, such as greater base compensation and the guarantee of a higher number of contracted players,” Klausner wrote.
I don’t think it is hard to argue with if the league is still losing money, which is the situation that the public is presented with at least. I mean, if the average salary was $100k before and the league was losing $400 million a year (these are all hypothetical numbers, I don’t know the actual numbers), and now they are only losing $200 million a year after the new TV deal, then yes the gross revenue is going up, but you are still not out of the red. You’re still “losing money”. Paying the players more is still a difficult ask.
I put “losing money” in quotes because the NBA (and all professional leagues for that matter) engage in some funky accounting practices, making it very difficult for the public at least to get an accurate idea of the profitability of the teams and the league. For example, if the WNBA has lost and continues to lose money, what accounts for this:
Clearly there is value to an WNBA team, it’s just difficult for an outsider to see where that value lies. The value is probably not derived from a strict cash-flow analysis though.
Supposedly the league lost $50 million last year (2024). The last tv deal was worth $60 million/year. The new deal signed a couple of weeks ago will ultimately be worth ~$200+ million/year. Presumably the profitability issue may be about to alter.
Presumably and may, because you are correct:
It’s very hard to say just what the actual valuations mean. However when the largest revenue source more than triples over night, I think it is perfectly reasonable for the players to ask for something. What that something should be is the sticking point.
ETA: As I noted earlier in this thread owners can make creative use of losses to offset taxes. So whether the league actually lost money for anyone in 2024 is very hard to say.
This is completely false.
It did seem likely, but women’s soccer is more popular than men’s soccer in the US so I didn’t question it.
Based on what? Men’s attendance is higher (although it was significantly closer than I was expecting over 2024-2025). I’m fairly certain that viewership is much higher as well although numbers for that are harder to come by. The WWC does extremely well, obviously and I think individual matches probably exceed what the men see.
It will inevitably result in players making more in free agency, absent actual collusion. If the league makes more money, the value of teams winning and going on playoff runs goes up, which means they are incentivized to pay more money to the better players to make it likelier they win.
The LA Dodgers didn’t give Shohei Ohtani a huge deal because of a percentage of revenue deal, they did it because he’s worth it. 50 years ago (even adjusting for inflation) they wouldn’t have given him as much, because ballplayers weren’t worth as much.