The WNBA's Billion-Dollar Bargain: Why Valuations Made the Players' Case for Them

SK Lee — Sports & consumer desk

In late 2023, the venture capitalist Joe Lacob paid $50 million for the right to enter the WNBA with an expansion franchise in San Francisco. Last weekend, two separate valuation reports — one from Sportico, one from CNBC — put the Golden State Valkyries between $850 million and $1 billion in their second season of existence, the first women’s sports team to touch a ten-figure mark. That is a 17- to 20-fold mark-up in roughly thirty months. It is also, on the same set of books, a league that lost an estimated $40 million in 2025 and that pays its players, by the players’ own accounting, around 9.3% of revenue. The contradiction is not an accounting quirk. It is the entire story of the women’s sports investment thesis right now, and it is about to be argued out at the bargaining table.

The macro picture, before the political one. Sportico’s third annual WNBA franchise valuations, published May 1, peg the average team at $427 million, up 59% in a single year. CNBC’s parallel exercise put the league’s 15 franchises at an average of $460 million. The thirteen teams that competed in 2025 are now collectively worth $5.55 billion on Sportico’s math. Between 2024 and 2026, average franchise value has climbed 345%. New York Liberty is valued at $600 million. Indiana Fever, at $560 million. The Las Vegas Aces, who won the 2025 title in a 12,000-seat arena, are worth $500 million. The Atlanta Dream, the league’s cheapest team, is still worth $280 million — a group led by Larry Gottesdiener bought it for around $5 million in 2021.

The mechanism behind those numbers is by now well understood, but worth restating because it is the source of the contradiction. Three step-ups are happening simultaneously. The first is the new 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal that begins this season, locked in at the same time as the NBA’s much larger renewal in mid-2024; the WNBA piece is worth roughly $200 million a year, more than four times the prior deal, with a broader broadcast and streaming bundle pushing reported total media revenue toward $281 million annually. The second is the expansion fee curve, which has gone vertical: from $50 million for Golden State in late 2023, to $115 million for Toronto in 2024, to $75 million for Portland, and finally to $250 million each for Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia — deals announced in mid-2025 and formally approved this April, with the Detroit and Cleveland ownership groups reportedly raising materially more than the fee itself. The third is the entry of NBA owner consortia and Hollywood capital — Tilman Fertitta paid $300 million in March to acquire the Connecticut Sun for relocation to Houston, and Will Smith has joined an expansion ownership group — bringing balance sheets and tax structures that NBA cap arithmetic has long taught how to absorb.

“And so that all drives into the multiple, ultimately, and the valuation evaluations have gone from 5 to 260, 270 million on average.” — Cathy Engelbert, WNBA Commissioner, on CNBC’s Money Movers, July 2025

Engelbert’s framing, accurate as far as it goes, is the bull case in compressed form: media revenue plus expansion math feeds a valuation multiple. Kurt Badenhausen, who has run Sportico’s valuation work and discussed the 2026 release at length this month, has been explicit that the 59% one-year jump is being driven primarily by the TV deal kicking in alongside the record expansion-fee print and by attendance and corporate-partnership trends that the league has not had to manufacture. The investor demand is real. So is the data.

The number that does not fit

What does not fit on the same page is the operating loss. Reporting from Sportico and others puts league-wide losses at roughly $40 million in 2025, even as combined revenues approached $400 million. The league has been candid that profitability is a 2026-2027 question at best, contingent on the media deal mechanics, expansion-fee accretion, and a meaningful reduction in player travel and operations costs. None of those tailwinds runs through the players’ share of revenue, which sits at the 9.3% figure the union has been citing through this CBA cycle. The NBA, MLB and NFL pay closer to half of league revenue to their athletes. The WNBA pays less than a fifth of that.

That is the gap the union has been working in. Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the WNBPA, has called the existing structure a system “designed to undervalue” the players and has framed the talks publicly as a “labor fight,” not a routine negotiation. After NBA Commissioner Adam Silver suggested last fall that players deserved a “significant” pay increase — while continuing to defend the league’s preferred bargaining frame — Jackson’s response was uncharacteristically pointed.

“You know they recognize it’s problematic when the best they can propose is more of the same: fixed salary and a separate revenue-sharing plan that only allows for a fraction of the overall revenue, prioritizing their own returns first.” — Terri Carmichael Jackson, WNBPA Executive Director, statement to The Athletic, October 2025

The current proposal on the table preserves a fixed salary cap structure even as that cap is set to step up dramatically — from $1.5 million per team in 2025 to $7 million per team this season under terms Engelbert has publicly described. From the players’ side, the issue is not the absolute number on the salary line but the structural decision that the upside captured by the media deal and the expansion-fee waterfall flows almost entirely to ownership equity rather than to athlete compensation. The WNBPA has been deliberate about positioning these talks not as a fight over a wage but as a fight over a model.

The math the next CBA has to resolve

Three things follow from the data, and they are the things sports investors, league counsel and macro allocators interested in entertainment-economy exposure should be focused on between now and the next CBA print.

First, the valuation surge is a labor argument, not a counter-argument. The conventional retort from league side — that you cannot pay players from valuations because valuations are not cash — is technically right and politically thin. The math the WNBPA is now in a position to make publicly is that NBA ownership groups paying $250 million expansion fees are paying that price because they price in the same media-deal step-up the league claims it cannot afford to share. The very fact that ten-figure exits are being modelled into the franchise market — with anonymous WNBA investors quoted in CNBC last week saying “well-managed WNBA teams will be valued at $1 billion within five years” — gives the players a number-based, not sentiment-based, claim on revenue share.

Second, the league’s leverage shrinks the longer it stays unprofitable. Once the WNBA crosses into operating profit — which the media-deal and expansion-fee math should deliver inside two or three seasons — the union loses its strongest single talking point, which is that ownership is monetising future cash flows through equity sales while denying current cash flow to players. The window in which players have maximum leverage to fix the revenue-share architecture is now.

Third, the new-money owners will not all behave like the old ones. Fertitta in Houston, Lacob in Golden State, the NBA-linked consortia in Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, and the Hollywood capital flowing into Toronto and Portland are operators who understand premium pricing, dynamic ticketing, sponsorship monetisation and arena economics from the men’s side. Several of them will quietly conclude that a marginally higher player revenue share is a small price for labor peace and a stable broadcast product, and that calculus is what gets a deal done. Expect the public posture to lag the private math by months.

Our view

The WNBA is the most interesting financial story in sports right now, and it is being told almost entirely through the wrong lens. Valuations of $850 million to $1 billion for a franchise built on a $50 million expansion fee three seasons ago are a fact. So is the $40 million operating loss. So is the 9.3% revenue share. The market reads the first number and ignores the second two. The bargaining table reads all three.

The trade, for investors who can hold it, is that the franchise-value step-up has further to run — Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia open in 2028, 2029 and 2030, and three more expansion seats are pencilled in by 2031 — but that the next CBA is the moment at which terminal value gets re-divided. A revenue-share floor anywhere in the 20% to 25% range would not derail the multiple; it would calibrate it to a structure that survives the next bargaining cycle and the one after. The risk case is the opposite outcome: another fixed-salary deal that pushes the conflict into 2030 and invites the kind of work stoppage that has historically erased a discount on entry valuations everywhere it has occurred. For the league’s sake, and for the franchise prices to mean what they currently mean, the deal that needs to get done is the one that nobody has yet been willing to draft.

This note is for information and discussion only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer to buy or sell any security. Quotes are sourced from public statements; positions and views are the author’s and may change without notice.