Sunday evening, Freedom of New York Head coach Sandy Brondello exuberantly proclaimed that her team’s WNBA championship was going into the history books.
The Liberty had just survived the Minnesota Lynx in a must-win overtime of Game 5 for their first title in the franchise’s 28-year history. It was also New York’s first major professional basketball title in more than four decades. “It makes me very proud,” Brondello said.
But the championship isn’t the only time the history books have been rewritten in a historic 2024. WNBA season.
“The Finals marks the culmination of what I believe to be the most transformational year in WNBA history,” commissioner Cathy Engelbert said last week before the Finals. The fifth game of the series was the most watched final match (2.2 million) in 25 years, with viewership for the entire series up 115 percent from last year’s finale.
Four years after a “existential” momentthe WNBA has entered the public zeitgeist like never before. Viewership (it was the most-watched regular season ever on ESPN platforms with an average of 1.19 million viewers), attendance (up 48 percent league-wide from the year latest), merchandise sales (a 601 percent increase at the WNBA store) and digital engagement (a single-season record with nearly 2 billion video views across the league’s social media platforms ahead of the playoffs playoffs), were all at or near all-time record levels. A historic new media rights deal, worth more than $2 billion over the next 11 years, was signed this summer, a sign of future growth.
Last fall, the WNBA announced Golden State Valkyries will start playing in 2025 as the league’s 13th franchise. Toronto will be home to the league’s 14th franchise, and in September the league announced that Portland would have the 15th team. The Portland franchise, which will begin play in 2026collected an overall fee of $125 million, more than double what the league sought in expansion fees in its early days and what it cost the Golden State Warriors ownership group to purchase it a year earlier.
Last year’s price was not this year’s. And it won’t be next year’s price tag, as Engelbert said 10 to 12 cities would be viable options for a 16th franchise, which the league is in no rush to select while the price tag for ownership groups potential continues to increase.
“They see the economic impact of having a WNBA team in their town, the role model in the community that these players represent,” Engelbert said.
THE Indiana fever written Caitlin Clarkgraduated from Iowa, with the No. 1 pick. Her popularity translated immediately and of course the WNBA. Six league television partners set viewership records for their most-watched WNBA games when broadcasting Fever games during the regular season. As Clark set rookie records en route to his All-Star Game selection and First Team All-WNBA honors, Fever attendance reached new records to lead the league in attendance (17,036 per home game) for the first time.
As Clark has experienced over the past 12 months, the women’s basketball schedule is changing rapidly. In two weeks, the 2024-25 college season begins. When that happens, observers will expect a reprisal of last year’s boom.
While exactly replicating that success may be a high bar to clear (with Clark as pilot, the women’s Final Four was the most watched on record and the title game averaged a record 18.9 million viewers) , the two sports work in synergy. Dave Roberts, head of events and studio production at ESPN, said last April: “We’re merging women’s college basketball into the WNBA, and we couldn’t be in a better position to continue the momentum shown throughout this tournament. »
Logic can be applied to the present as the cycle continues to unfold.
At the college level, a crop of stars is ready to take center stage left by Clark and Angel Reese.
UConn’s Paige Bueckers toured the United States this summer, making appearances at New York Fashion Week, WNBA All-Star Weekend and the ESPYs. USC sophomore JuJu Watkins recently agreed to a lucrative endorsement deal with Nike and announced a partnership with Gatorade.
Both are expected to be prolific when the season begins next month and hope to see their teams contend for a title alongside undefeated defending champion South Carolina. The 2024-25 national championship will once again be broadcast on ABC – for only the third time – and conclude a college season that has its own new media rights package valued at about $65 million a year, a record.
Recently injected into the women’s basketball calendar, another professional league, called Unrivaled, will begin in January. Its concept is different from that of the WNBA – 3 on 3 instead of 5 on 5, six teams not 12 – but it has attracted some of the best players in the world (Breanna Stewart, Napheesa Collier, Kelsey Plum, Rhyne Howard, Arike Ogunbowale, Brittney Griner) and this seems like an attractive option rather than playing overseas during the WNBA offseason. It will be broadcast on TNT two nights a week. Players were given equity in the league and it promised to pay the highest average salary in the history of women’s professional sports.
Its evolution will be closely monitored, but its mere existence is a reflection of the continued transformation of the sport.
“Women’s basketball is booming right now,” said Collier, one of its co-founders.
Challenges remain in women’s basketball, some of which have been heightened this year. The majority of WNBA player compensation is paid off the court, and the players’ association announced this week that it was withdrawing from the league’s CBA “demanding a business model that reflects their true value, encompassing higher wages and better professional working conditions. , increased health benefits and crucial investments needed for long-term growth.
WNBA players also shared that this season’s surge in popularity has brought increase in online harassment and threats. A recently published article NCAA Study on Social Media Abuse athletes found that 80% of abusive messages were directed at March Madness athletes, with female basketball players receiving approximately three times as many abusive messages as their male counterparts.
The WNBA said it will attempt to protect its players from harmful online attacks as the sport’s popularity continues to rise. THE NCAA vowed to do the same.
But with more and more games televised and a growing number of female basketball players becoming marketable stars, there’s no sign the attention will wane.
“Obviously we had a defining moment as we were growing up,” said Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, who coached in the WNBA for more than two decades. “I’m happy to still be coaching during this time because that’s what we did. I always believed in it.
This article was originally published in Athletics.
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