‘They’re absolutely underpaid’: Economists weigh in on WNBA labor showdown

They chatted over breakfast the morning of the WNBA all-star game.

Some of the players who have led the fight to overhaul the WNBA’s financial structure held an impromptu meeting early last Saturday to air out their frustrations over how labor negotiations with the league had stalled.

Out of that conversation came the idea for a bold new approach to the WNBA’s labor standoff. Players decided that it was time to stop bargaining primarily behind closed doors and to instead bring their message to the masses.

Later that same day, players union leaders gave every WNBA all-star a black T-shirt with the slogan “Pay Us What You Owe Us” emblazoned in white letters across the front. The all-stars unanimously donned those shirts during pregame warmups in front of a sellout crowd of nearly 17,000 and millions more viewers watching from home on ABC.

“The players are what is building this brand,” all-star game MVP and players union vice president Napheesa Collier said Saturday. “We feel like we’re owed a piece of that pie that we helped create.”

Collier’s comments come at a time of unprecedented growth for the WNBA, accelerated by the popularity of Caitlin Clark and other recent high-profile college stars. The league had a record 2024 season with historic viewership, attendance and merchandise sales. Expansion teams will debut in Toronto, Portland, Philadelphia, Detroit and Cleveland over the next five years. In 2026, the league will begin an 11-year media rights deal worth a reported $2.2 billion.

Eager to cash in on that influx of revenue, the players union opted out of its collective bargaining agreement with the league last year and now must negotiate a new deal before the current one expires on October 31. Players are seeking a drastically improved revenue sharing model that would allow their salaries to grow as the league does. The league has scarcely acknowledged those proposals during early bargaining sessions, players have complained.

The distance between the union and the league is vast enough that it raises the question: Who’s right? Are WNBA players as grossly underpaid as they claim? Or are they asking for too much given the WNBA’s history of unprofitability and the potential fragility of its recent rapid surge in popularity?

For the past year, Harvard economics professor and 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin has been advising the WNBA players union in collective bargaining. Last month, Goldin penned a guest essay in the New York Times entitled “How Underpaid Are WNBA Players? It’s Embarrassing.”

After examining TV ratings, attendance data and other metrics, Goldin estimated that the average WNBA salary should be “roughly one-quarter to one-third of the average NBA salary to achieve pay equity.” In reality, WNBA salaries currently range from the league minimum of $66,079 to a maximum of $249,244. That’s not in the same stratosphere as the NBA, where the league minimum is $1.27 million and the highest-paid superstars will earn more than $50 million apiece next season.

“How could that be?” wrote Goldin. “The most likely explanation is that the WNBA is not receiving the full value it contributes to the combined NBA and WNBA enterprise revenue.”

Steph Chambers via Getty Images

Three other sports economists who spoke to Yahoo Sports agreed with Goldin’s assessment that WNBA players are not being paid what they deserve. As evidence, they pointed to the fact that about 50% of the NBA’s revenue goes to player salary and that WNBA players take home a miniscule percentage of their league’s revenue by comparison.

“Even without knowing the exact revenues of the WNBA, we know they’re certainly not making even close to 50%,” University of San Francisco professor of sports management Nola Agha told Yahoo Sports. “So they’re absolutely underpaid.”

The WNBA will make at least $500 million in revenue next year, argues David Berri, an economics professor at Southern Utah and the co-author of “Slaying the Trolls: Why the Trolls are Very, Very Wrong About Women and Sports.” Berri bases that estimate on a report from Forbes that places the league’s 2024 revenue at $226 million, another report from Sportico that the expansion Golden State Valkyries are bringing in $75 million in their inaugural season and the WNBA’s media rights deal with Disney that will provide $200 million annually.

Say that WNBA players negotiate the right to take 50% of that $500 million, a revenue sharing percentage similar to what their counterparts in the NBA, NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball get. In that scenario, the 168 players on 2026 WNBA rosters would earn an average of $1.49 million — more than 10 times the league’s current average salary.

“Clearly, if the league is going to treat WNBA players like they do the NBA players, there has to be a substantial increase in pay,” Berri told Yahoo Sports.

Of course, evaluating how much revenue any league makes is notoriously tricky because sports accounting always includes some sleight of hand tricks and deception. That’s particularly true in the case of the WNBA, whose deeply intertwined financial relationship with the NBA makes it hard to decipher where one league’s revenue ends and the other’s begins.

The NBA founded the WNBA nearly 30 years ago, provides financial support to cover losses and remains a significant stakeholder to this day. Seven of the WNBA’s 13 teams are owned by NBA ownership groups. Last year, the NBA negotiated joint television contracts for the leagues.

Back in 2018, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said that the WNBA annually loses roughly $10 million per year. Those losses allegedly quadrupled last year, sources told the New York Post, citing a rise in expenses like full-time charter flights and the fact that the WNBA’s new media rights deal would not kick in for another two years.

Count Andrew Zimbalist among those skeptical of those figures. Zimbalist, a professor at Smith College and a leading sports economist, served as an advisor to the NBA Players Association during multiple previous collective bargaining sessions. He remembers the NBA claiming losses each time in an effort to gain public support and extract further concessions from the players.

“They might claim they’re making a loss but when you look closely at their books they’re not really making a loss,” Zimbalist told Yahoo Sports.

“There are lots of shenanigans they can use to play with the books, so one would have to look very carefully at how they’re doing their accounting before you even enter into discussions. The women’s union needs to have some financially adept people at the bargaining table so the owners can’t pull the wool over their eyes.”

The lack of transparency regarding the WNBA’s finances is a huge issue, according to union president Nneka Ogwumike of the Seattle Storm. In a 2018 Players Tribune essay, Ogwumike wrote that the union just wants “information about where the league is as a business, so that we can come together and make sound decisions for the future of the game.”

“As players, we never get to see the numbers,” Ogwumike added. “We don’t know how the league is doing. As the kids say nowadays, we just want to see the receipts.”

Last Thursday, on the eve of WNBA All-Star Weekend, many of the league’s most recognizable players crammed into an Indianapolis hotel elevator and smiled for a picture. They were on their way to a rare in-person bargaining session between the players union and league owners.

The mood was not so upbeat several hours later when those same players emerged from that meeting. While WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert characterized the talks as constructive and expressed confidence a deal would get done, players seethed over how far apart the two sides remained.

“A wasted opportunity,” Breanna Stewart called it.

“Disrespectful,” was how Angel Reese described the league’s counterproposal.

“We have a long way to go,” Kelsey Plum admitted.

Forty-eight hours later, “Pay Us What You Owe Us” was born. By the end of the night, fans chanting “pay them” drowned out Engelbert presenting Collier with the all-star game’s MVP award at mid-court.

“That gave me chills,” Collier said later.

To sports economists, the biggest challenge for WNBA players will be keeping supportive fans on their side and winning over those who already feel they’re asking for too much. They have to be very clear with the public about what the numbers say and about why they’re asking for a much larger piece of the pie.

“You can’t let the NBA frame it to the media that we’re willing to double their pay or something like that,” Berri said. “You’ve got to come back and say, ‘Look, I know what the revenue is. I know what the math says. We’re partners in this and you owe us money.’”