When basketball phenom Caitlin Clark made her professional debut this week, it drew the largest television audience for a Women’s National Basketball Association game since 2001.
As Clark and other members of this year’s superstar rookie class begin the season, expectations are rising that the league is poised to catapult from niche fandom to mainstream success.
More than 2.1mn people watched Clark’s first game on Tuesday night with the Indiana Fever, in which she scored 20 points and recorded three assists. The game, which aired on ESPN2, drew more viewers than the National Hockey League playoffs airing at the same time on ESPN.
Clark is among a vanguard of 2024 WNBA rookies, including Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardoso, who found unprecedented success at university, driving viewership records at many of their games, signing lucrative endorsement deals with Nike and Reebok, and attracting millions of followers on social media.
A month ago Clark and Cardoso’s battle in the college basketball national championships drew 19mn viewers, on par with the Academy Awards, making it the most-watched sporting event in the US in five years outside of American football.
The WNBA, now in its 28th season, is hoping to import that popularity to a league that has historically struggled to compete with other professional sports.
Early results have been encouraging. More than 2.4mn people tuned in to watch last month’s player draft in which the Fever selected Clark first overall, quadruple the previous broadcast record. The league sold more jerseys in April than it did in the entire 2023 season, a boost of 34 per cent, and each of its 12 teams are on pace to set franchise records in ticket sales.
“I’ll be the first to tell anyone that this did not happen overnight,” Colie Edison, chief growth officer of the WNBA, told the Financial Times. Known as the W, executives are in the midst of adding teams, negotiating new media rights contracts with distributors and expanding access to chartered flights for clubs. And last month’s college championship gave the league a new crop of viewers to chase: about half of the national title game audience weren’t already fans of the W, Edison said.
This week, the W introduced the name of its next franchise, the Golden State Valkyries, which is expected to begin competing in 2025. The league is looking to expand to 16 teams by 2028. While comprehensive valuations for each current franchise are not tracked publicly, the Seattle Storm were valued at $151mn last year when it sold several minority stakes, up from about $10mn in the 2000s.
Both the men’s National Basketball Association and the WNBA are in the market for their next round of media rights contracts. Edison would not comment on the W’s existing broadcast value — worth a reported $60mn — or how much she believed its next contracts could fetch, but said the league was open to partnering with the NBA or pursuing negotiations independently to reach the best deal.
“The time is now to right-size those [media] valuations, to numbers that reflect the true value of our league,” she said.
Ted Leonsis, who has owned the WNBA’s Washington Mystics since 2005, said he has heard from media executives about renewed interest in the WNBA especially after the women’s college ratings success. Leonsis emphasised that the league was not just looking for an increase in rights fees.
“Money is not everything. It is, how are you going to promote the game? How are you going to tell stories of the players and the coaches and management? How are you going to curate All-Star Games? Are you going to get vested in the success of the league?” he said.
The WNBA has been on an upward trajectory prior to the arrival of Clark and others in her draft class — total viewership of the 2023 season rose 21 per cent over the year before. Still, it lags behind its men’s counterpart. The W averaged 505,000 viewers during its regular season last year, while the NBA averaged 1.1mn viewers in its 2023-24 regular season, according to Sports Media Watch.
Some see similarities between the Clark-Reese moment in the WNBA and a formative period for the men’s game. Basketball struggled to attract mainstream attention in the US until a pair of college rivals entered the NBA in the late 1970s — generational superstars Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, who brought along college fans and helped usher in a new era for the league.
The comparatively under-resourced W has been at times caught flat-footed by the surge of interest. A pre-season game between the Minnesota Lynx and Chicago Sky — featuring the professional debuts of Reese and Cardoso — went untelevised earlier this month, leaving a fan in attendance to stream the match on her phone. More than 400,000 people watched the stream live, and to date it has amassed more than 2.5mn views.
Ryan Tanke, chief operating officer for the Lynx, said the team had already been working on improving what it calls its “direct to fan access”.
“This is not business as usual, we’ve got to make sure we’re meeting this movement,” Tanke said, adding that the team added more than 10 new staffers to its front office in the past year alone.
Meanwhile, the WNBA announced last week that it would roll out the use of chartered flights to teams for transport between fixtures. It is a standard offering in other professional leagues but has been a hot-button issue within the W for years, as the league’s relatively weaker financial position made the use of chartered flights untenable. The owners of the New York Liberty — Alibaba chair Joe Tsai and his wife Clara — were fined $500,000 in 2022 for breaking rules that gave their squad an unfair competitive advantage.
The rollout has not been uniform, however, with some teams flying private this week while others have been stuck using charter buses. Asked about the backlash, Edison said “there’s going to be growing pains, but plans are all in place to get things going as soon as possible”.
There may be similar growing pains for Clark, who in addition to her prolific scoring debut also got into foul trouble early in the game and recorded 10 turnovers. Still, the star has said she is focused on the future: “I would have liked to play a little better tonight,” she said of her performance. “I think the biggest thing is to learn from it and move on.”
