Achi news desk-
New York –
Caitlin Clark, who became the leading scorer in NCAA basketball history and the first pick in the WNBA draft this week, will earn a salary of $76,535 this year. The top NBA pick will earn $10.5 million.
Clark’s salary compared to the top female players in the National Basketball Association draws attention to the salaries of women’s National Basketball Association players and the often huge gender gap in professional sports salaries. The highest paid WNBA player made a salary of $242,000, while the league minimum salary in the NBA is over $1 million in 2023.
Clark, who dominated at the University of Iowa, as well as other college-turned-pro stars like Louisiana State University’s Angel Reese, took women’s college basketball to unprecedented heights. Clark helped draw record-breaking television audiences and sellout crowds in arenas across the country in her final collegiate season.
But Clark isn’t just the first pick in the draft. She is so popular that a ticket to her Final Four game in this year’s NCAA tournament cost more than a ticket to a men’s Final Four game. The 22-year-old is the all-time leader in men’s and women’s NCAA Division I history.
However, the WNBA stars are not seeking to receive an equal dollar amount to NBA players. Not right now, anyway. They recognize the reality of being in a league with a smaller pool of revenue to go around, and one that’s much younger — without the previous 50 years of contract negotiations and the hard-won worker protections and salaries that come with that longevity.
What they want is more of a matter of fairness, they say.
“W players want to be invested, properly valued and paid fairly like other professionals,” Terry Jackson, head of the WNBA Players Association, the union that represents the players, told CNN.
Women receive about 10 percent of the WNBA’s total revenue, while the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement gives players 50 percent of the revenue, said David Berry, an economics professor at Southern Utah University and author of a forthcoming book on women and sports.
“We’re not asking to be paid what the men are getting. We’re asking to be paid the same percentage of the shared revenue,” Las Vegas star Kelsey Plum said in a 2022 interview.
Even the top athletes in the WNBA sometimes run the risk of playing in overseas leagues—where there is no salary cap and players can make double or triple their U.S. Salary – WNBA offseason to supplement their income.
Phoenix Mercury star center Brittany Griner was traveling to Russia to play in the 2022 WNBA offseason when she was illegally detained in Russia for 10 months. Griner was eventually released as part of a prisoner exchange. (The WNBA says it invested to ensure players stay in the state in the offseason.)
How contracts are determined
Rookie salaries and player contracts in both the NBA and WNBA are determined by the leagues’ respective collective bargaining agreements with their players’ union. The agreements include an annual salary cap for the teams – $136 million in the NBA and $1.5 million for the WNBA. But the NBA has what’s known as a “soft salary cap,” in that there are some exceptions that help players bring in more money. The WNBA, on the other hand, has a hard salary cap, meaning there are very few exceptions.
A WNBA spokesman said Clark stands to earn more than $500,000 in total compensation, including cash from player marketing agreements with league and team deals.
But Jackson said the inclusion of severance “blurred the lines” because few players are eligible for those deals.
WNBA players have advanced in salary since 2020, when they reached their last collective bargaining agreement with the league. But the wide gap is a result of the economic differences between the two leagues; years of underinvestment in the WNBA; And the lack of bargaining power women have traditionally had to negotiate wages, benefits and other issues such as travel and lodging with the league.
“When you talk about salary equity, you’re talking about resources, the level of investment, what the strategic plan is and how much it intends to grow. [the WNBA] in a sustainable way,” said Jackson. “This is a model that has been under-resourced for so long.”
The NBA is 50 years older than the WNBA, has more than double the number of teams and games per season, and brings in $10 billion in annual revenue, compared to a reported $200 million for the WNBA.
The WNBA was also paid less by broadcasters and advertisers than the NBA. The NBA’s national media deals pay it $2.8 billion, while the WNBA gets about $65 million this year for its media rights.
“It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. It comes down to where this league is in its business cycle,” said Alicia Jessup, associate professor of sports administration at Pepperdine University.
Sharing the revenue pie
Because it’s a smaller, younger league, women players have had less bargaining power with team owners over their wages than men.
While NBA players receive 50 percent of the NBA’s total revenue, the WNBA must reach a certain revenue threshold each year before revenue-sharing agreements kick in. This hindered women’s wages.
“It’s a league choice. They shouldn’t do it that way,” David Berry said. But the players got stuck.
“They can’t just go out and create a new league with new teams. It takes a long time to develop a relationship with professional sports teams.”
If the WNBA paid 50 percent of its revenue to players, top players would earn more than $3 million in salary, he said.
A pivotal moment for the WNBA
The WNBA was launched in 1997, led by veteran NBA commissioner David Stern, who believed that creating a women’s league would grow the game overall.
But some critics say the NBA could have done more for the WNBA.
“The NBA is bad at negotiating for women. The women end up being shots at their own businesses,” Berry said.
WNBA players want to see more investment from the NBA, broadcasters and corporate partners into the league. The WNBA shouldn’t be an afterthought to the men’s league, Jackson added.
WNBA player salaries can to increase in the coming years as the interest of fans and advertisers increases. The WNBA is coming off its most-watched regular season in 21 years, and attendance at games last season reached its highest level in 13 years.
WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert recently told CNN that the next few years of the WNBA will define the league for the next 30-40 years.
The league plans to expand to 16 teams by 2028. It is negotiating new media rights that are expected to bring in millions of dollars in additional revenue and increased visibility for star players and teams. And according to reports, the WNBA hopes to receive up to $100 million per season from broadcast partners in its new deals.
The players’ union is expected to opt out at the end of the 2025 season. With a new media rights agreement and a new collective bargaining agreement, salaries could rise and expand — as they did after the players left the last agreement in 2018.
“If we have games that earn 18 million viewers, fine, let’s pick things up a little bit more. The salaries will go up, the benefits will go up,” Brianna Stewart of the New York Liberty and vice president of the players union said in a recent interview.
