3.3 million people tuned into the New York Liberty’s overtime championship win against the Minnesota Lynx in this year’s WNBA finals. That was a 114% boost over last year’s finals and the most viewers in 25 years.
Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan, said the WNBA has been on a sharp rise since about 2021.
“But what we saw in the last year, it just catapulted them to a new level,” Armstrong said.
WNBA games smashed viewership records. Teams sold more tickets and merchandise than ever. The league inked a landmark $200-million-per-year media rights deal with Disney, Amazon and NBC.
With all this money pouring into the league, Armstrong said it’s not surprising the athletes are looking to revisit their collective bargaining agreement two years ahead of schedule.
“If you’re a part of producing that product, this is a unique moment,” Armstrong said. “This is a unique strategic window of opportunity to capitalize on the energy and the synergy and the momentum.”
In 2020, the women of the “W” made historic gains in a new collective bargaining agreement with the league. That contract raised the average pay of a WNBA player into the six figures for the first time, guaranteed new benefits like parental leave, and required the NBA, which owns more than half of the W, to ramp up marketing spending.
But after a historic 2024 season, 90% of WNBA players voted to opt out of that contract and negotiate a new one ahead of an October 31, 2025 deadline.
Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, said even the stars of this year’s finals have been eager to get to the table.
“Napheesa Collier, Breanna Stewart, I had separate calls with them around about game three, going into game four, going to game five,” Carmichael Jackson said. “They’re saying, ‘Okay, when do we get the results of the [opt-out] vote? We’re ready.’”
At the top of the players’ contract wishlist are higher salaries.
“We’re in a hard cap system. And when I [say] hard cap, I mean hard, really pretty restrictive,” Carmichael Jackson said. “We’ve got to address that.”
Under the current salary cap, some of the best players in the world play overseas in the off-season to supplement their income, and even superstar rookies can’t crack six figures.
The players’ union is also after a larger cut of the league’s profits. Under the current agreement, players split less than 10% of WNBA revenue.
“We’ve got to look at a revenue share provision that comes closer to what the NBPA and the NBA have,” Carmichael Jackson said, adding that the union is shooting for “as close to 50% as possible.”
The WNBPA will also bargain for better family planning, childcare and retirement benefits, as well as higher professional standards for team travel and practice facilities.
Ceyda Mumcu, who studies the business of sports at the University of New Haven, said these negotiations come at a busy time of expansion.
“The league is moving from 40 games to 44 games, moving finals from five games to seven games. The league is moving from 12 teams to 15,” Mumcu said, with new teams launching in San Francisco, Toronto and Portland, Oregon in the next two years. “All of these add to the league’s inventory. These are all assets they are selling to corporate partners.”
Mumcu said the WNBPA should be able to leverage that expansion in negotiations with the league and avoid an impasse.
“Maybe selfishly, I really hope there’s no stoppage and that we can continue watching the exciting games,” Mumcu said.
Mumcu has been watching crowds grow at Connecticut Sun games these last few years. She said the WNBA doesn’t want to see that momentum stall with a players’ strike.
