WNBA Athletes Are Done With Being Underpaid
"The North Star is the athlete. Every decision we make has to be built for them.” These are the words of Alex Bazzell, president of Unrivaled, a new player-owned women’s basketball league founded by WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier. The objective of the league is to provide increased domestic opportunity for professional basketball players who for years have been forced to spend their “offseason” not at home with their families but playing in foreign leagues in countries like Turkey, Israel, and China just to make ends meet. One may recall the harrowing saga of ten-time WNBA all-star Brittney Griner, arrested on drug charges for a vape cartridge containing cannabis oil and sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony. She thankfully only served ten months of this sentence after political intervention by the Biden administration led to her release in a prisoner swap.
Salaries double or sometimes triple their American equivalents incentivize players to take their talents overseas. The WNBA’s minimum salary is just over $66,000, a modest figure in a professional sport where the average career spans only five years. As a relatively new league in a sport where female accomplishment is not traditionally prioritized, the WNBA has lagged far behind the NBA in athlete welfare. Amenities often taken for granted in other leagues, such as charter flights and solo hotel rooms, are only recent realities in the WNBA.
Revenue sharing, which has only existed in the WNBA since 2020, is far less generous than it is in the men’s league, where players have a fifty-fifty split with ownership. WNBA athletes end up taking home a paltry 10 percent of league revenue, in part thanks to the unprofitability of the WNBA. And while for years the league has relied on a combination of both NBA and outside investment to stay viable, the recent broadcast rights deal, proposed game additions, increased sponsorship money, and an influx of young talent look poised to change that. However, in comparison to other loss-making sports entities like the UFC — whose fighters get around 18 percent of the promotion’s revenue, albeit with no union and therefore no collective bargaining agreement — the share of income that goes to athletes in the WNBA is abysmal.
The WNBA’s relatively low salaries and poor benefits have opened the door to challengers willing to outbid the women’s league for talent. Unrivaled promises an average salary that will be roughly twice that of the WNBA’s. This will make the new league the highest-paying professional women’s sports outfit in the world. More importantly, all athletes will hold an equity stake in the league, which will likely increase their influence over its direction. Players will also be subject to less arduous travel demands thanks to a fourteen-game schedule — the entirety of which will take place in a single city, complete with free childcare.
Star rookies such as Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink were a windfall for the league. The college-to-pro rivalry of Clark and Reese dominated ESPN’s slate of talking-head shows and headlines. The flurry of media attention the two women garnered drew viewers who had previously never watched a WNBA game. Clark herself became an instant star for the league, resulting in her rookie card recently selling for $234,850 — roughly five grand less than the current max salary for a WNBA player. She even signed a landmark endorsement deal with Wilson, becoming the first athlete to do so since Michael Jordan back in 1980.
But last fall the WNBA’s union opted out of its collective bargaining agreement, which was set to run through 2027. They will instead be renegotiating new terms after the end of this upcoming season. The previous agreement was regarded as a significant step in the right direction for the league, but the growing popularity of the WNBA has strengthened the hand of athletes. Increased salaries, pensions, and benefits are all on the negotiating table. In this context, Unrivaled will be an additional chip with which athletes can negotiate with ownership. Not unlike the fledgling athlete-driven jujitsu tournament CJI — covered in this publication last year — the new women’s league’s main effect may be to force concessions from its rival.
The WNBA’s union has chosen the best possible time to push its advantage. With perhaps the most successful and significant women’s professional basketball season just behind them, and on the back of previously successful contract negations, athletes are in a good position. The terms of these negotiations also serve to dispel misconceptions, advanced by conservative outlets, that women athletes’ calls for better compensation are driven by concerns with equality of outcome between themselves and their male counterparts.
In reality, the WNBA’s players are simply insisting on being allotted the same percentage of the financial pie as men. It’s ultimately not necessarily a question of the raw numbers one gender deserves in relation to another, so much as it is a question of what athletes as workers deserve from their boss.
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Contributors
Jack Bedrosian is a writer and performer based in Los Angeles. He has an MA in global politics from Loyola University Chicago.
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