Paying The WNBA What We Owe Them

Are the players underpaid?

Recently, in the New York Times, Claudia Goldin, a Nobel laureate and professor of economics at Harvard, wrote an interesting guest essay titled “How Underpaid Are W.N.B.A. Players? It’s Embarrassing.”

She argued:

Women’s basketball has rapidly become one of the country’s most popular spectator sports. The Indiana Fever, with its star Caitlin Clark, regularly sells out arenas. Several W.N.B.A. games last year attracted more than two million viewers. The 2024 N.C.A.A. women’s championship game drew a larger television audience than the men’s championship.

Yet players in the W.N.B.A. make far less money than many male athletes in less popular sports leagues — and only a sliver of what the average N.B.A. player does. Nothing can justify this extraordinary pay gap.

The ‘“extraordinary pay gap” Goldin speaks of is a popular topic, especially among WNBA players.

One may remember, for example, the stories comparing the NBA’s 2023 #1 draft pick Victor Wembanyama‘s $14 million rookie salary to the $87,000 rookie salary of the WNBA’s 2023 #1 draft pick Caitlin Clark.

Or perhaps one saw Caitlin’s fellow WNBA Angel Reese complaint that her WNBA pay was not enough to pay her rent.

So WNBA players wearing “Pay Us What You Owe Us” t-shirts before this year’s All-Star game was unsurprising.

As CNBC reports,

The declaration came days after more than 40 players met with the WNBA and failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement. The players opted out of their last CBA in October and are negotiating for a better revenue-sharing model, higher salaries, better benefits and a softer salary cap.

The players weren’t satisfied with the progress in negotiations as they head toward a late-October deadline, the Associated Press reports.

They decided to wear the “pay us what you owe us” shirts at a meeting Saturday morning, knowing the All-Star Game was one of the last high-profile events where all players would be in one place before the regular season ends in September.

The notion that WNBA players are not being paid what they are owed is an interesting one, so I did some rough math.

The average salary for a WNBA player is between $116,000 and $147,000, depending on the source. Let’s say it’s $130,000 a year.

On top of this, they receive 9.3 percent of the league’s $200 million revenue, so they earn about $245,000, or about $6,000 a game.

Funny that Angel Reese did not mention how much she earns from revenue sharing when she complained about her salary, or the endorsements that have made her a multimillionaire at 23 years old.

If they receive the same 50 percent of all league revenue as do NBA players, WNBA players would each receive an additional $641,000, bringing their annual total to $770,000, or $19,000 a game.

So, to satisfy these players' demands, the WNBA would have to increase the average player pay by about half a million dollars for each player.

Since there are about 156 WNBA players, that would increase the league payroll (salary + revenue-sharing) by about $80 million.

Instead of losing $40 million a year as the WNBA is reportedly doing currently, the WNBA would then likely lose $120 million a year, more or less.

This assumes there won’t be a massive increase in ticket sales and TV ratings in the near future. The league may be working hard to promote its stars not named Caitlin Clark, but given how precipitously ratings fall whenever Clark doesn’t play, such a spike in WNBA viewership seems as unlikely as Sophie Cunningham accepting one of my numerous online wedding proposals.

Do they “deserve” such an increase? No.

Goldin doesn't mention in her essay that in the 2023-24 season, the NBA generated over $11 billion in revenue. The WNBA, on the other hand, is currently losing $40 million a year. In 2023, the WNBA had a third less viewership than the NBA during the regular season. The viewership of the WNBA Finals that year was less than 7 percent of the viewership of the NBA Finals.

Will they get it? Probably not, but they’ll probably be far richer.

Obviously, WNBA owners aren’t WNBA owners to make a profit, at least not anytime soon. As retired NBA star Gilbert Arenas once pointed out on his podcast, most team owners are billionaires who make their money outside of sports but enjoy the cachet of being a team owner. To them, owning a team is like owning a painting by Vermeer that they can show off for a few decades, then sell for a profit or a tax write-off down the road.

They are losing, on average, about three million dollars a year per team anyway. If WNBA players win their collective bargaining agreement and teams start losing millions more, most of these owners wouldn't even feel it.

The greatest basketball player of all time is Wilt Chamberlain. He dominated the NBA in the 60s, making him the league’s highest-paid player at $65,000 per year. Today, Devin Booker, who is maybe the fifth-best shooting guard in the NBA, recently signed a two-year contract that will earn him $72.5 million a year, nearly $900,000 a game.

The reason why the fifth-best shooting guard will earn more in two games than the greatest player of all-time earned for his entire career is largely thanks to television. Television is a gift that keeps on giving to the NBA, which signed an 11-year, $76 billion media rights deals with Disney, NBCUniversal, and Amazon.

I expect WNBA pay to grow at a similarly meteoric rate for the same reason for a similar reason. The same deal that will make the NBA about $7 billion a year will benefit the WNBA as well. The WNBA will earn $2.2 billion over the 11 years, or $200 million a year.

Unfortunately for the WNBA, much of this money will not go to the pockets of players and owners, as this money will have to be split with the NBA, which owns 42 percent of the WNBA and heavily subsidizes them as well, investors, and past debts accrued

Nonetheless, the women should get a significant bump in pay from the new deal. How much of a bump would depend on how great a percentage of revenue they will be able to wrestle from the league in their new collective bargaining agreement.

I don’t expect the “extraordinary pay gap” between NBA and WNBA players — or male and female athletes in general — to dissipate soon. Not unless the number of WNBA fans increases exponentially. Wearing t-shirts that irritate fans who see earning $245,000 for playing 44 basketball games as a lot of money is not going to help their cause.

— DK