A lot of victim blaming in here, why are y’all blaming the women for wanting better pay?
I made these suggestions in the other thread but I’ll post them here, the WNBA needs to reevaluate its entire business model and the product and the WNBA Players Association in combination with the WNBA need to come together on a plan to raise minimum and max salaries for players (they just recently signed a CBA in Jan 2020 that expires in 2027). So this is what the players agreed to:
**Foremost among the deal terms is
a 53 percent increase in total cash compensation, consisting of base salary, additional performance bonuses, prize pools for newly created in-season competitions, and league and team marketing deals. Under the new CBA, the league’s top players will be able to earn cash compensation in excess of $500,000, representing a more than tripling of the maximum compensation under the prior deal. Other top players will have an opportunity to earn between $200,000 and $300,000. And for the first time in WNBA history,
the average cash compensation for players will exceed six figures, averaging nearly $130,000, resulting in an increase for all players from rookies to veterans.**
So more cash is coming for the league as a whole and for the players. That’s a start.
Besides ticket revenue the TV money is what’s going to be the biggest driver of revenue for the players.
The ESPN deal ends in 2022, CBS and the WNBA signed a deal in 2019. The exposure from both deals has been good, but the WNBA should also look at emerging streaming options (Twitter, Twitch, Amazon, IG) to negotiate more lucrative TV, media and digital rights deals. People are consuming media in more ways than ever now. The WNBA needs to be available in more places for people to engage with the product
So there are logical, reasonable ways to drive player salaries up. It will be a process but within 10 years and as the current CBA ends in 2027, I think we could see multi million dollar contracts in the WNBA for top players and continued growth of the average salary to 200-250K a year