There’s still something about making a million dollars. It remains a milestone, even as time and inflation reduce its financial might.
You cannot retire your parents on a $1 million salary. You won’t even qualify as super-rich in some parts of the country. Nevertheless, the money is a significant indicator of worth. It doesn’t define your value, but it does make your work seem oh so important.
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In sports history, that threshold has often marked a kind of arrival. When Nolan Ryan crossed it in 1979, his salary symbolized that a fledgling free agency era in Major League Baseball was about to crack the sport open. When Moses Malone and Bill Walton reached $1 million per season around the same time, it signaled the beginning of the NBA as a superstar-driven modern entertainment force. The number is about what the math represents: the moment when a sports labor force graduates from being grateful for its existence to being shrewd about its business potential.
After 30 years, the WNBA is poised to have its own watershed moment. The league and its players have reached a new collective bargaining agreement that needs only a few procedural touches to become official. Months of long and difficult negotiations resulted in a historic pact. The deal has many layers beyond the top-end salaries, but most notable is that veteran superstars will be able to sign contracts that start at $1.4 million.
This revolutionary agreement doesn’t just create a higher ceiling. It lifts every player in the system. Minimum salaries are expected to exceed $300,000. The average player salary will be about $600,000. The seven-figure athletes will be celebrated, but the greater context is that the league will be full of contracts that reflect full-time, elite professional status, lessening players’ need to supplement their income elsewhere.
This isn’t merely a raise. It’s a correction.
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The WNBA’s path to this landmark CBA is a different story than some of those older, male pro leagues. Until recently, the idea of a million-dollar player wasn’t just unlikely; it was structurally incomprehensible.
During the inaugural season in 1997, top players earned about $50,000. The league was designed to survive, not explode. It was a vanity project for NBA owners. Many of them looked at it as subsidizing women’s basketball rather than growing a viable business. Salaries were flattened. Stars were contained. There was no sincere ownership dream of building a robust economic engine.
When I reflect on those days, I think about league pioneers such as Yolanda Griffith and the stories she told about the years before there was an American women’s basketball league. She repossessed cars as a side gig. Before there was a market, there was just labor waiting to be valued.
This moment reveals more than how far the money has come. It shows how far the idea had to travel first. The WNBA never lacked stars. It lacked the infrastructure to pay women like stars.
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The money existed, but it had to be found elsewhere: in Russian club contracts, in Turkish leagues, in players sacrificing their bodies to play basketball year-round and split themselves across multiple continents.
In a documentary about her career, Diana Taurasi expressed frustration about being spread so thin. WNBA team. Overseas team. Team USA. Players seldom took a break. They played in the WNBA for love, in Europe for money, on the national team for pride. In everything, they prioritized growing the game. It’s an admirable mission. But it’s exhausting.
“One time, I came back (to the United States) and I was like, ‘Man, my parents have just gotten older, and I’ve missed a big part of it,’” Taurasi said in the documentary. “We weren’t making that much money, so generational wealth was coming from going to Russia every year. Now we have to come back home and get paid nothing to play in a harder league, in worse conditions, against the best competition in the world?”
It led to one of the strangest economic quirks in sports. Over the past five years, as the game has experienced explosive growth and as ownership groups largely unbound from NBA franchises have invested in the product, a few WNBA coaches have exceeded $1 million in compensation before the players. It wasn’t because the coaches were more valuable. It was that their market could circumvent the system’s restrictions.
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For WNBA players, this new reality won’t feel like an explosion. It’s more of a release valve. It’s a long-delayed acknowledgment that the league’s most visible labor is indeed its most valuable.
In the NBA or MLB, the arrival of millionaire athletes once meant they made it. It hits differently here. It’s a statement that the system has finally started to make room.
Business has transformed with two monumental CBA negotiations over the last six years. In 2020, the agreement essentially doubled max salaries. It laid the groundwork for novel revenue-sharing mechanisms and marketing deals. This new deal appears primed to reinforce the belief that players are the drivers of growth, not just participants in a game.
The money seems big, maybe even risky. The shift underneath it is a much bigger story.
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For years, the WNBA operated with careful restraint. It limited risk, even if that meant minimizing reward. Players were asked to be patient as the league hedged against its future. Now it is pricing in the future.
Growth isn’t an aspiration anymore. It isn’t a projection. The rise in attention created pressure for a great vision. The audience is here. The momentum is real.
All parties — owners, players, the league office — are ready to maximize the moment. So the million-dollar milestone, while still powerful, isn’t really the story. It’s a marker, an important one, but just a marker. For the players, the goal was always to push for a deal that allowed them greater compensation as the business evolved. They’re looking up at a higher ceiling today.
The league used to ask the players to give more than they could. It is beginning, finally, to give something back.
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It can’t give them everything they deserve. Not yet. Incremental change is necessary. But this is an appropriate business deal for where the league is right now, as well as where it’s headed.
As the athletes strive for more, this is enough to suggest that the future their predecessors imagined — between flights around the world, between seasons, between second jobs — was never out of reach. It was only ahead of its time.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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