On Sunday night, New York Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello proclaimed with exuberance that her team’s WNBA championship was one for the history books.
The Liberty had just outlasted the Minnesota Lynx in a must-win Game 5 overtime for their first title in the franchise’s 28-year history. It also marked the first major professional basketball title in New York City in more than four decades. “That makes me very proud,” Brondello said.
But the championship wasn’t the only time the history books were re-written during a landmark 2024 WNBA season.
“The finals mark the culmination of what I think is the most transformational year in the WNBA’s history,” commissioner Cathy Engelbert said last week before the finals. The series’ fifth game was the most-viewed finals game (2.2 million) in 25 years with viewership for the entire series up 115 percent compared to last year’s finals.
Four years after an “existential” moment, the WNBA ascended into the public zeitgeist like never before. Viewership (it was the most-viewed regular season ever across ESPN platforms with an average of 1.19 million viewers), attendance (up 48 percent league-wide from last year), merchandise sales (a 601 percent increase at the WNBA Store) and digital engagement (a single-season record with nearly 2 billion video views across league social media platforms entering the playoffs), were all at or near all-time record levels. A new landmark media rights deal that will be worth more than $2 billion over the next 11 years was signed this summer as a sign of future growth.
Last fall, the WNBA announced the Golden State Valkyries will begin play in 2025 as the league’s 13th franchise. Toronto will be home to the league’s 14th franchise, and in September, the league announced Portland will have the 15th team. Portland’s franchise, which will begin play in 2026, drew an all-in fee of $125 million, more than doubling what the league sought in expansion fees when it started and what it cost the Golden State Warriors ownership group to buy in a year earlier.
Last year’s price was not this year’s price. And it won’t be next year’s price as Engelbert has said 10 to 12 cities are viable options for a 16th franchise, which the league is in no rush to select as the price for prospective ownership groups continues to increase.
“They see the economic impact of having a WNBA team in their city, the role model in the community these players represent,” Engelbert said.
The Indiana Fever drafted Caitlin Clark, who graduated from Iowa, with the No. 1 pick. Her popularity translated immediately and naturally to the WNBA. Six league television partners set viewership records for their highest viewed WNBA games when airing Fever games during the regular season. As Clark set rookie records en route to her All-Star Game selection and All-WNBA first-team honors, Fever attendance hit new marks to lead the league in attendance (17,036 per home game) for the first time.
As Clark experienced over the last 12 months, the women’s basketball calendar moves quickly. In two weeks, the 2024-25 college season begins. When it does, onlookers are expecting a reprisal of last year’s boom.
Though replicating that success exactly might be a high bar to clear (with Clark as its driver, the women’s Final Four was the most-viewed on record and the title game averaged a record 18.9 million viewers), the two sports work synergistically. Dave Roberts, ESPN’s head of event and studio production at ESPN told last April,“We merge from women’s college basketball to the WNBA, and we could not be in a better position to continue the momentum that was exemplified throughout this tournament.”
The logic can be applied to the present as the cycle continues flowing.
At the college level, a crop of stars is ready for the spotlight left by Clark and Angel Reese.
UConn’s Paige Bueckers toured the U.S. this summer, making appearances at New York City Fashion Week, WNBA All-Star Weekend and the ESPYs. USC star 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 have their teams contending for a title alongside reigning undefeated champion South Carolina. The 2024-25 national championship will again air on ABC — for just the third time — and conclude a college season which has its own new media rights package valued at around a record $65 million annually.
Newly injected into the women’s basketball calendar is another professional league, called Unrivaled, which will tipoff in January. It’s concept is different than the WNBA — 3-on-3 instead of 5-on-5, six teams not 12 — but it has drawn in some of the world’s best players (Breanna Stewart, Napheesa Collier, Kelsey Plum, Rhyne Howard, Arike Ogunbowale, Brittney Griner) and it appears to be an attractive option rather than playing overseas during the WNBA offseason. It will air on TNT two nights per week. Players received equity in the league, and it promised to pay the highest average salary in women’s professional sports history.
How it fares will be watched closely, but its mere existence is a reflection of the sport’s ongoing transformation.
“Women’s basketball’s on such a rise right now,” said Collier, one of its co-founders.
Challenges remain across women’s basketball, some of which were augmented this year. The majority of WNBA players’ compensation is made off the court, and the players association announced it is opting out of the league’s CBA this week “demand(ing) a business model that reflects their true value, encompassing higher salaries, enhanced professional working conditions, expanded health benefits, and crucial investments needed for long-term growth.”
WNBA players also shared that this season’s surge in popularity brought upticks in online harassment and threats. A recently published NCAA study on social media abuse of athletes found that 80 percent of abusive posts were directed at March Madness athletes, with women basketball players receiving about three times more abusive messages than their male counterparts.
The WNBA has noted 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 games televised and women’s basketball players frequently becoming marketable stars, there’s no hint that the attention will wane.
“Clearly we’ve had our watershed moment as we were growing,” said Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, who has coached in the WNBA for more than two decades “I’m glad I’m still coaching during this because it’s what we’ve always believed in.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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