Original Article: Bloomberg, by Ira Boudway, May 10th, 2024

Ticket sales are way up, new TV deals are coming—and the players might actually start getting paid like pros.

On a Monday at the end of April, Caitlin Clark is on the practice court at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. It’s her second day of training camp as a rookie with the Indiana Fever. During a scrimmage against a squad of male players, she dribbles up the floor, crosses over from her right hand to her left, steps back, and sinks a deep three. It’s a signature shot for Clark, one she made hundreds of times in her career at the University of Iowa, seen on SportsCenter highlights and in State Farm ads. Now the Fever, whose season begins on May 14 when the team opens on the road against the Connecticut Sun, expect it to become a fixture in the WNBA.

Clark is already the biggest thing to happen to the Fever. At the end of February, when she declared her intention to enter this year’s WNBA draft, the phone lines at the team’s ticket office began ringing immediately and didn’t stop for days. “Everybody was here all weekend long just answering phones,” says Todd Taylor, president and chief commercial officer at Pacers Sports & Entertainment, the ownership group for the Fever and the Indiana Pacers, the team’s NBA counterpart.

The Fever, who finished at the bottom of the Eastern Conference last year with a record of 13-27, won the rights to the first pick through the WNBA’s draft lottery in December. It was a foregone conclusion that the team would take Clark, who, in her four years as a Hawkeye, had become the all-time leading scorer in college basketball (men’s or women’s) and a national star unlike any before her.

After averaging 4,067 fans at Gainbridge Fieldhouse last year, second to last in the league, the Fever expect to be at or near a capacity crowd of 17,254 for each of their 20 home games this season. “We used to play in a barn with six fans,” NaLyssa Smith, a third-year forward, says after practice, referring to a stretch in 2021 when the team played at Indiana Farmers Coliseum on the state fairgrounds while the fieldhouse was undergoing renovations. “Now we’re going to be playing in sold-out arenas.”

On draft night in mid-April, a sellout crowd of 1,000 raucous fans showed up to watch Clark and the league’s other top soon-to-be rookies cross the stage and shake hands with Commissioner Cathy Engelbert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Another 6,000 showed up at Gainbridge to watch on the big screen, part of an audience of more than 2.4 million who viewed it on ESPN—four times the previous record for a WNBA draft.

In Brooklyn, Clark sat in a white satin blazer and miniskirt from Prada, with her parents and two brothers seated with her at one of the 15 tables arrayed on stage—each with a purple tablecloth and a white-and-silver basketball centerpiece. When Engelbert announced the first pick, Clark told reporters afterward, the moment was no less gratifying for its lack of suspense. “When you’re kind of just sitting at a table waiting for your name to be called,” she said, “I think that really allows the emotions to feed you.”

This time around, the draft was more than a sorting of talent across the league’s 12 franchises; it was a formal kick-off for Clark’s professional career and a celebration of what promises to be a transformational season for the league. “Thank you to those who have been witness to the past 27 WNBA seasons,” Engelbert said during her opening remarks, “and welcome to all of you who will become WNBA fans from today on.”

Clark’s arrival comes at a key moment for the league. The WNBA is currently in talks over the TV rights for many of its games, with the remainder coming up for negotiation in the next 18 months. A new labor agreement with its players is also likely to be on the table during that span. If Clark thrives at the professional level—and if her millions of fans make the transition with her—it will change the math for everybody.

Her rise at Iowa bears echoes from 45 years ago, when the rivalry between Magic Johnson, then at Michigan State University, and Larry Bird, then at Indiana State University, drew record-breaking viewership for college basketball. That audience followed the pair to the NBA, where they took up their rivalry with the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics, respectively, helping to lift the league to its current status as a multibillion-dollar business and home to some of the most famous athletes in the world. Johnson and Bird gave way to Michael Jordan, who gave way to Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, who gave way to LeBron James and Steph Curry, and so on. “That’s what we have coming,” Engelbert says during an interview in the league’s Manhattan offices in March. “I really believe that.”

For the moment, Clark has no peer in the WNBA when it comes to star power. But the league is full of would-be rivals. Over 40 games this summer, the Fever will face some of the best players in the world—a cast of pros who will try to bump the celebrated rookie from the spotlight. Clark’s challenge will be to keep draining those deep threes. The league’s will be to showcase its other stars, turning Clark fans into WNBA fans.

CLARK’S IMPACT ON THE COLLEGE GAME IS HARD TO OVERSTATE. AS a Hawkeye, she played in the four most-watched games in the history of women’s college basketball. Iowa’s loss to the University of South Carolina in this year’s national championship game drew nearly 19 million viewers, outpacing the most-watched non-Clark game of all time by about 10 million—and topping this year’s men’s final.

“I don’t know that we’ve ever seen anything exactly like it,” says Michael Mulvihill, president of insights and analytics at Fox Corp., whose networks carried dozens of Iowa games during Clark’s career. At the beginning of her freshman year, an Iowa game on Fox’s Big Ten Network drew about 50,000 viewers. By the end of her senior year, in a game against Ohio State on Fox’s national broadcast station, 3.4 million viewers watched her break Pete Maravich’s 54-year-old scoring record. “We’re still trying to figure out, how exactly did that happen?” Mulvihill says. According to John Kosner, a sports media consultant and former executive with the NBA and ESPN, Clark belongs on a short list of athletes who can draw in casual fans by the millions. “In my lifetime,” he says, “that’s Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.”

In October, in an outdoor preseason exhibition at Iowa’s football stadium, more than 55,000 people watched Clark play, a record number for women’s basketball. Virtually everywhere the Hawkeyes played last season, they matched or set records, boosting their visitors’ attendance by an average of 150%, according to the Associated Press, while their home games consistently drew sellout crowds of nearly 15,000. “She’s building women’s basketball,” says Angela Ruggiero, co-founder of the market consultant Sports Innovation Lab, a four-time Olympic medalist with the US Women’s National Ice Hockey Team and a WNBA investor. “She’s building women’s sports. She’s so much bigger than just basketball.”

While the WNBA has seen strong growth in viewership and attendance since the pandemic—with women’s sports in general experiencing a boom in interest and investment—Clark’s Iowa numbers far outpace the league’s. Last year’s finals between the defending champion, the Las Vegas Aces, and the New York Liberty drew an average of 728,000 viewers per game, making it the most-watched in 20 years. Regular season attendance was the highest it’s been since 2018, at an average of 6,615 fans per game.

Women’s college basketball has a more than 100-year headstart on the WNBA. It enjoys spillover from the deeply ingrained allegiances and large followings of other college sports. Mulvihill at Fox Sports says his company’s networks plan to pivot from promoting Clark to other stars still in college such as JuJu Watkins of the University of Southern California and Paige Bueckers of the University of Connecticut. “If you just ask sports fans, ‘Have you ever heard of the USC Trojans? Have you ever heard of the Connecticut Huskies?’ Everybody has,” he says. “The WNBA has a challenge in front of them just in terms of establishing their brands to a general sports audience.”

In the final months of Clark’s senior season, the gap between the size of her Hawkeye following and the WNBA’s audience led to a public debate about whether she’d be better off staying in college another year. Clark had the option to do so, because the National Collegiate Athletic Association had granted an extra year of eligibility to athletes whose careers had been disrupted by the pandemic. Because the NCAA had also abolished its longstanding prohibition on athletes profiting from their name, image and likeness (NIL), Clark had assembled a multimillion-dollar portfolio of marketing deals with blue-chip brands including State Farm Insurance, Gatorade and Nike.

“I am probably speaking stupidity here when I say this,” Tony Kornheiser, co-host of the ESPN talk show Pardon the Interruption, said on air in January before suggesting that Clark stay at Iowa for another year “because of the pay cut she is going to have to take to go to the WNBA compared with the NIL money.”

The self-doubt was justified. Clark is, of course, free to sign marketing deals as a WNBA player and has only added to her off-the-court income since turning pro. In March, just a few days after she declared for the draft, the Indiana-based financial services company Gainbridge, which owns naming rights to the arena where the Fever and Pacers play, announced it had signed her for an undisclosed amount. A month later, Clark agreed to a new deal with Nike Inc. for $28 million over eight years, the biggest endorsement contract for a women’s basketball player.

The “pay cut” discourse got started because of Clark’s rookie salary with the Fever. According to the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with its players, she’ll take home a base pay of $76,535 in her first year. As new fans turned their attention to the league, this figure—less than a hundredth of the $12.2 million salary of the first pick in the 2023 NBA draft, Victor Wembanyama—went viral and became a rallying cry for equal pay in women’s sports. “It’s time that we give our daughters the same opportunities as our sons and ensure women are paid what they deserve,” wrote President Joe Biden in a post on X the day after the draft.

“Look, it’s low,” says Engelbert of Clark’s base pay. “It’s low for a reason.” In 2020, when the WNBA entered the current agreement, she says, the league’s economics weren’t where they needed to be to pay more. That, she says, is changing.

THE WNBA HIRED ENGELBERT AS ITS FIRST COMMISSIONER IN 2019. (Though she was the first to get the title, Engelbert, like WNBA presidents before her, reports to the NBA commissioner.) As an undergraduate at Lehigh University, she captained the lacrosse and basketball teams. Before taking the WNBA job, she’d spent 33 years at Deloitte, where she rose to become the first female chief executive officer of a Big Four accounting firm. It was a “bit of a shock” to go from running a 100,000-person company to “a league of 144 players,” she says. The WNBA she inherited, she adds, needed a “total transformation.”

The NBA formed its sister league in 1996 to fill in summer broadcast and arena schedules. It began with eight teams the following year and, by 2000, had expanded to 16. Four teams folded within the next nine years. Over its first two decades, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told the AP in 2018, the league operated at a modest loss of about $10 million per year. “It’s not a secret that we haven’t cracked the code on how to make money in women’s basketball,” Silver said.

Such losses are normal for a startup sports league. But while the WNBA was steadily increasing revenue and, more important, building the allegiances that are the lifeblood of professional sports, it wasn’t clear, at least to Silver, that the venture was sustainable. Engelbert was hired to make it so. Her first task: negotiate a new pay package with players.

In January 2020 the league struck an eight-year collective bargaining agreement. For the first time in WNBA history, the association boasted, average compensation would exceed six figures—a landmark that mainly underscored how low the baseline was. In the first season of the deal, the maximum salary was set at $215,000, up from $117,500 in the last year of the expiring deal. It’s this agreement’s rookie wage scale—established while Clark was a senior at Dowling Catholic High School in West Des Moines—that set her 2024 salary at a rate more fitting for an entry-level accountant than a once-in-a-generation basketball talent.

The 2020 CBA also created incentives for players to help the business grow. Every off-season, a handful of stars can make up to $250,000 each through marketing agreements with the league. Instead of going to play in Australia or Italy, as many players do to make extra money, they spend their fall and winter training in the US—and occasionally make promotional appearances for league sponsors such as CarMax, Deloitte and Google. (Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner was returning to Russia to play for club team UMMC Ekaterinburg when she was detained in Moscow in February 2022.) “It’s not a heavy lift to do a league marketing agreement,” Engelbert says, “but they can make some good money.” Between this program and a similar arrangement available from each franchise—plus salaries and a handful of performance incentives—top players can make as much as $500,000.

On top of that, if league revenue increases by 20% each year—using 2019 as the baseline—it triggers small payouts for all players. Pandemic disruptions, however, put that target out of reach. In 2020, the WNBA had $56.2 million in sales, according to internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg News—only an 8.5% growth rate.

Read more: Women’s Basketball Is Raking in More Cash Than Ever, But the Players Aren’t

Players have yet to receive payouts even four years later. Now, however, the incentive is basically moot; at the end of this season, players can abandon the agreement early, making 2025 its final year. Everything indicates they plan to do so. (The WNBA players’ union didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Once the CBA was done, Engelbert went out to raise money. After a pandemic delay, the WNBA announced in early 2022 that it had brought in $75 million from a group including Michael Dell, Condoleezza Rice, Laurene Powell Jobs, Ruggiero and Nike. The deal valued the league and its teams at about $1 billion. Engelbert used the funds to go on a hiring spree, adding software engineers to revamp the league’s app and beefing up the marketing department. Clark’s arrival is perfectly timed. While she was making a name for herself at Iowa, Engelbert was laying the groundwork for the WNBA to better sell itself.

The formula for a good product, Engelbert says, has three parts: household names, rivalries and games of consequence. Clark checks the first box. The upside of the women’s game is that schools still do much of the work of identifying, developing and promoting young talent. The WNBA doesn’t allow US players to enter the league before age 22, ensuring that most spend four years in college. “You don’t have to create the identities for the players,” says Taylor of Pacers Sports & Entertainment. “They’re already bringing them.” And their fans are especially devoted. “Women athletes drive engagement at very, very high levels,” says Lindsay Kagawa Colas, an agent for Griner and other WNBA stars at talent management agency Wasserman Media Group. “There is a stickiness to their fandom, to the way that people love them and follow them, that is unique to women’s sports.”

In the men’s game, the chances of someone having a record-breaking college career like Clark’s are increasingly slim. The NBA’s minimum age of 19 means many top players spend only a year in school, if they attend at all. Startup leagues such as OTE, founded in 2021 for players as young as 16, offer alternative paths to the NBA, and many top prospects come from Europe. For casual fans, this means that rookies often arrive out of nowhere. The projected top pick in June’s NBA draft is Alexandre Sarr, a 7-foot-1 Frenchman who plays in Australia.

For the rivalry piece, the WNBA is full of players ready to oblige. In Las Vegas, the league has a budding dynasty in the two-time defending champion Aces, who are led by A’ja Wilson, a center with flawless footwork. In their home opener on May 16, the Fever will face the New York Liberty, who lost to the Aces in last year’s finals, which has a cast of stars including sharpshooter Sabrina Ionescu and reigning league MVP Breanna Stewart. Once household names and rivalries are in place, games of consequence follow.

During this year’s March Madness women’s tournament, the WNBA ran ads featuring veteran players with the tagline “Welcome to the W.” In one, Dallas Wings guard Arike Ogunbowale recommends that rookies use a “No Shade” lotion for “guaranteed thicker skin.” In another, Stewart sits down to eat a bowl of “Rookie-O’s” cereal “packed with first round draft pick flavor.” The tongue-in-cheek spots, created with ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, were both an invitation for college fans to follow their favorite players to the WNBA and a warning to those players—a way to build anticipation for Clark’s arrival while turning the spotlight onto the league’s broader talent pool. “It can’t just be about Caitlin,” Engelbert says.

Still, the WNBA’s national TV schedule, announced just before the draft, is suddenly Fever heavy. Of the team’s 40 regular season games this year, 36 will air nationally, including two on ABC, two on CBS and five on ESPN. Last year, the team had one national TV game, with some games only available on its Facebook stream.

Even before setting foot on the court in a WNBA game, Clark has helped give the league leverage in its TV rights negotiations. The association currently pulls in about $60 million annually from Disney’s ESPN, Paramount Global’s CBS Sports, the Scripps-owned network Ion and Amazon’s Prime Video. Engelbert has said she hopes to double that revenue. That goal, says Daniel Cohen, a media rights consultant at Octagon Inc., would’ve been out of reach before Clark, but it’s now achievable. “The Caitlin Clark effect is real,” Cohen says. “She is a generational talent and could not have come at a better time for the W.”

In April, the WNBA extended its deals with Amazon.com Inc. and CBS through the end of the 2025 season, coinciding with the expiration of its agreements with Ion and, most importantly, ESPN. The majority of the WNBA’s TV revenue is derived from ESPN, which broadcasts 25 regular-season games along with the playoffs on its cable networks and ABC. ESPN acquired WNBA games as part of a nine-year, $12.6 billion deal with the NBA that began in 2016.

Both leagues are poised to renew their contracts with ESPN in an 11-year deal projected to generate about $2.6 billion annually, according to Bloomberg News, nearly doubling the NBA’s current annual revenue from the network. Additionally, the WNBA is involved in a new agreement between the NBA and Amazon, which will contribute $1.8 billion annually over 11 years to augment Amazon’s existing WNBA package. The WNBA’s share of both deals, neither of which is finalized, is reported to signify a significant increase in rights fees for the league, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

Engelbert notes that the conversation surrounding women’s sports has evolved. Previously, broadcasters and corporate sponsors regarded the WNBA as a marketing expense—a means to earn goodwill by demonstrating support for gender equality. However, in recent years, they have come to perceive women’s sports as a legitimate entertainment asset offering the potential for a meaningful return on investment. Engelbert remarks, “When I came in, people were viewing women’s sports as a charity. We’re far from that.”

Any increase in TV revenue for the WNBA will enhance the leverage players possess at the bargaining table with the league. Player salaries typically lag behind. For instance, Michael Jordan's rookie salary in 1986 was $550,000. Even a decade later, amidst a dynasty with the Chicago Bulls, he earned only $3.9 million annually. However, due to Jordan’s influence in reshaping the NBA’s economics from a league generating revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars to one with billions, even average players now earn tens of millions annually.

But even when compared to the historical standards of their male counterparts, WNBA players are considered underpaid. According to data compiled by sports economist Rodney Fort, during the 1972-73 NBA season, which was the league's 27th season, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of the Milwaukee Bucks was the highest-paid player, earning $350,000. Adjusting for inflation, that amount would equate to about $2.6 million in today's currency. In contrast, the highest-paid WNBA player today earns only about $242,000 in salary. Former ice hockey player Ruggiero expresses hope for a future where gender becomes irrelevant in determining pay, emphasizing that the focus should be on who brings the best entertainment value.

Engelbert, whose primary responsibility is to safeguard the interests of the owners, has a long-term objective of increasing franchise values and expanding the league. In February 2023, the ownership of the Seattle Storm sold a minority stake in the team at a franchise valuation of $151 million, as reported by Sports Business Journal, nearly ten times the previous record for a WNBA team sale. Additionally, in October, according to Sportico, the NBA's Golden State Warriors paid a record $50 million expansion fee for a new WNBA team in San Francisco set to commence play in 2025. Engelbert highlights the inadequacy of being a league present in only 12 cities within a country of 330 million people, stating, "that’s not enough." She outlines her aim of expanding to 24 teams in the next decade.

EARLY RETURNS SUGGEST MANY OF CLARK’S FANS ARE, IN FACT, following her to the WNBA. Even after raising ticket prices twice in the past six months—once when they won the draft lottery and again when Clark said she was going pro—the Fever will soon have a waitlist, Taylor says, for season tickets in its lower bowl. The team used to remove about 800 seats behind one basket for Fever games to make room for a giant inflatable slide and other carnival games. The “Family Fun Zone” is gone now. The team needs the seats for paying customers.

The Aces and Washington Mystics have moved home games against the Fever to larger venues to account for the unusual demand—the Aces from their usual home at the 12,000-seat Michelob Ultra Arena to the 18,000-seat T-Mobile Arena and the Mystics from the 4,200-seat Entertainment & Sports Arena to the 20,000-seat Capital One Arena. Overall WNBA ticket sales are up 93% over last year at this time, according to online marketplace StubHub.

Clark’s fame is such that the league is scrapping its policy of having teams fly commercial between games, a hassle that Clark didn’t have to endure at Iowa. Video of Clark on the flight to Dallas for the Fever’s first preseason game against the Wings in early May became a news story, complete with footage of her by the baggage carousel and eyewitness testimony from a passenger in her row. Four days later, Engelbert said the WNBA would be moving to charter travel for players “as soon as we can get the planes in place.”

For those who’ve followed the league—and for the players who’ve helped build it—the attention that follows Clark feels both welcome and long overdue. “I, of course, feel elated and vindicated and energized,” Lindsay Gibbs, a reporter who has covered the WNBA and women’s sports for more than a decade, wrote in her Power Plays newsletter, “but I also feel angry that it didn’t happen sooner.” In a league in which many of the biggest stars and nearly 80% of players are people of color, there’s also the question of why it’s taken a White player to galvanize interest.

Colas at Wasserman points out that much of the media gushing over Clark has been ignoring the league for decades. “This wave that feels like it’s cresting has been building energy over many, many, many years,” she says.

However it happened, the wave is here. Clark has lifted nearly every measure of demand by an order of magnitude. She begins her WNBA career with unprecedented attention, sky-high expectations and proud veterans waiting to welcome her to the W. “Reality is coming,” Diana Taurasi, the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer, now entering her 20th season with the Phoenix Mercury, said on ESPN in April. “You look superhuman playing against 18-year-olds, but you’re going to come [play] with some grown women that have been playing professional basketball for a long time.”

Clark isn’t shying away. “There is kind of a target on our back,” she says after Fever practice in April. “That’s something you embrace and you love. You wouldn’t want it any other way.” The Fever lost that preseason game against the Wings at a sold-out College Park Center in Arlington, Texas, with Ogunbowale hitting the game-winning three, but Clark led her team with 21 points, including five threes—a promising start to her pro career. “Give her the ball, and let her do her thing,” Ruggiero says. “She wouldn’t be this popular if she wasn’t that good.” —With Randall Williams