The WNBA Used to Be a Joke. Now It’s a Billion Dollar Business

For most of its history, the WNBA was the butt of every joke in American sports. The league had a handful of talented players, few fans, but the financial backing of the NBA. Until recently, it never came close to generating the kind of money associated with the country’s major professional sports leagues. Television audiences were small, attendance was modest and the league routinely relied on financial support from the NBA to keep operating. For years, the WNBA existed largely because the NBA wanted it to exist.

That is changing rapidly. The WNBA is still not consistently profitable, but investors are now placing extraordinary valuations on its franchises, with some teams worth hundreds of millions of dollars and the Golden State Valkyries reaching a reported valuation of approximately $1 billion after only one season of existence. The league’s transformation has been dramatic enough that the question facing investors is increasingly about how large the WNBA can become and how quickly it can turn its rapidly growing revenues into actual profits.

The numbers behind that bet are difficult to ignore. In 2017, the WNBA averaged only about 171,000 viewers for its nationally televised games, down from approximately 224,000 the previous season. The league had a small television audience and little reason to believe that it was about to become a major media property.

The audience began climbing in the years that followed. The league averaged approximately 231,000 viewers in 2018, 246,000 in 2019 and 306,000 in 2021 after the pandemic season. Viewership reached 379,000 in 2022 and 505,000 in 2023, setting the stage for the explosion that followed.

Then came 2024, when the WNBA averaged roughly 657,000 viewers per game during the regular season, its strongest television performance in more than two decades. The league also experienced a surge in attendance, merchandise sales, sponsorships and social media attention. Caitlin Clark’s arrival was an enormous part of that growth, while players such as Angel Reese and A’ja Wilson helped broaden the attention surrounding the league and introduced new audiences to women’s professional basketball, and broad hero v villain storylines with them.

The growth continued in 2025, when the league averaged approximately 969,000 viewers across its national television partners. The average national audience had increased by more than five times from the 2017 low, and the WNBA was suddenly attracting television audiences that would have seemed almost unimaginable during the league’s earlier years.

For decades, one of the biggest problems facing the WNBA was that it simply did not have enough television revenue to support the business on its own. Its old media agreements were worth only tens of millions of dollars annually, while the new agreements are worth billions over their terms, with the initial 11-year package valued at roughly $2.2 billion and additional agreements pushing the league’s total media commitments even higher.

Television networks are now paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the right to broadcast the league, while advertisers and corporate sponsors are following the audience. The WNBA is also expanding into new markets, creating additional teams, additional games and additional opportunities to sell tickets, sponsorships and merchandise.

That helps explain why someone would pay $1 billion for a basketball team that is not currently producing anything close to $1 billion in profits. The buyer is looking at the asset five, 10 or 20 years into the future and betting that the franchise will be considerably more valuable once the league matures.

A WNBA franchise is also an unusually scarce asset in the financial sense. The league controls expansion, and an ownership group cannot simply decide to create another WNBA team without approval from the league. There are only a limited number of opportunities to own one, and that scarcity gives existing franchises considerable value even before their operating profits reach the levels investors ultimately want.

When an ownership group pays hundreds of millions of dollars for the right to establish a new franchise, that transaction becomes a useful comparison for the value of existing teams. As expansion fees rise, existing franchises become more valuable by comparison, giving current owners another reason to hold onto their teams.

The television deals could make today’s valuations look considerably more reasonable if the WNBA continues to grow. A league that was once struggling to attract a few hundred thousand television viewers is now approaching one million viewers per nationally televised game, and investors are betting that the audience will continue expanding as women’s basketball becomes more established in American sports culture.

The WNBA has spent decades building a sports property with substantial assistance from the NBA, and it is finally beginning to monetize the audience that has been created. If attendance, television ratings, sponsorships and merchandise sales continue increasing, the league should have considerably more negotiating power when its media agreements are eventually renegotiated.

There is still a major problem standing between the WNBA and the enormous valuations being placed on its teams: the league has not yet demonstrated that it can consistently make money. The WNBA generated roughly $200 million in annual revenue around 2023 and 2024 by many industry estimates, but the league continued to carry substantial expenses for player compensation, travel, arenas, marketing, administration and other operations. Publicly available information does not establish that the league as a whole has reached sustained profitability.

Investors are nevertheless willing to pay high prices because they are purchasing an asset based on expected future earnings rather than today’s income statement. Professional sports franchises have historically been valued this way, with owners accepting relatively modest annual operating returns because the underlying asset can appreciate dramatically as the league grows, media rights become more valuable and the scarcity of franchises increases.

The NBA’s relationship with the WNBA makes that calculation even more interesting. The NBA owns a majority stake in the WNBA and has spent decades subsidizing the league, allowing it to survive long enough to reach the point where its commercial prospects have changed dramatically. Investors buying WNBA teams therefore have reason to believe that the league’s most powerful backer has a substantial interest in making sure the business succeeds.

There is also a broader cultural and political calculation taking place. The debate over men in women’s sports has become one of the most contentious issues in America, and the WNBA is the country’s most prominent professional women’s sports league. Investors who believe the NBA will continue protecting the league’s long-term viability can reasonably view that institutional support as an additional layer of security around their investment, particularly at a time when there is strong political pressure to preserve women’s sports as female-only competitions.

That does not guarantee profitability, and it does not mean the NBA would write an unlimited check to cover losses indefinitely. It does mean that an investor purchasing a WNBA franchise is buying into a league backed by one of the most powerful sports organizations in the world, with an established financial and institutional interest in maintaining a viable professional women’s basketball league.

The business is also beginning to show signs that it may eventually be able to stand on its own. The WNBA’s 2025 revenues were sufficient to trigger the first revenue-sharing payment to players under the league’s collective bargaining structure, resulting in millions of dollars being distributed to players.

The real bet being made by today’s investors is that the WNBA can complete that transition over the next five years. If the league can maintain its recent television audience, continue filling arenas, attract more corporate sponsors and eventually negotiate even larger media contracts, the revenue growth could eventually overwhelm the costs that have kept the league in the red. An 18-team league with dramatically higher media revenue and substantially larger commercial partnerships could look very different financially from the smaller league that struggled to generate enough revenue to cover its expenses just a few years ago.

There is certainly risk involved. The recent explosion in interest has coincided with an unusually strong generation of players, and investors have to determine how much of that audience will remain once today’s biggest stars eventually leave the league. If television ratings retreat substantially, some of the valuations being placed on franchises today could prove overly optimistic.

The other possibility is that the WNBA has finally reached the point that NBA owners and investors have been waiting for since the league was founded. The audience is growing, television networks are paying substantially more for the product, new cities are competing for franchises and billionaires are willing to pay enormous sums for the limited number of teams available. The league has a much clearer path toward profitability than it did even five years ago.

The WNBA may still lose money today, but the market is clearly betting that will not be the case forever. Investors are looking at a league with rapidly rising revenues, dramatically larger media contracts, expanding audiences, scarce franchises and the financial backing of the NBA, and they are betting that those factors will eventually produce a profitable business.

That is how a league that was once routinely dismissed as a money-losing side project of the NBA has arrived at a point where a brand-new franchise can be valued at $1 billion, even while the teams still lose money. But hey, I guess that’s why they call it “girl math.”