Why The WNBA’s Next Contract Negotiation Could Change Women’s Sports Forever

Caitlin Clark, Sabrina Ionescu and the league’s top players want to be paid like the superstars they are following the highest-rated season in women’s basketball history. Other leagues are watching closely.

Four athletes, two coaches, one owner and a top agent from women’s basketball made it onto Forbes’ 2025 list of America’s Most Powerful Women in Sports, more than any other league or sport.

Given the WNBA’s surging cultural and financial clout in the last few years, this relative dominance makes sense. An 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal will begin with the 2026 season, quadrupling the value of the league’s previous contracts. Teams that were purchased for $2 million at the beginning of this decade—like the Las Vegas Aces, which earlier this month took home its third championship in four years—are today worth more than $300 million. In fact, the franchises on the Forbes list of most valuable WNBA teams carry a $272 million average valuation, a figure that is 14.4 times average revenue—far higher than the multiple in the National Women’s Soccer League (8.8x) as well as in men’s leagues like the NBA (11.7x), MLS (9.3x) and the NFL (9x).

Those numbers go a long way to explain why W stars like Caitlin Clark and Sabrina Ionescu proudly wore “Pay Us What You Owe Us” shirts during the 2025 WNBA All-Star Weekend this summer—and why power players across all of women’s sports are watching to see what happens when the W’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) expires on October 31.

According to NBA commissioner Adam Silver, a big pay raise is coming. “They are going to get a big increase in this cycle of collective bargaining,” Silver said on the Today show Tuesday. “And they deserve it.” However, Silver also noted that revenue share “isn’t the right way to look at it because there’s so much more revenue in the NBA. You should look at it in absolute numbers in terms of what they’re making.”

The WNBA’s current CBA, signed in 2020, was historic in its time; it raised the average playing salary to $130,000 and added maternity and childcare benefits, laying the groundwork for the league’s current stage of growth. But it predates the rise of talents like Caitlin Clark (No. 4 on the Forbes Power list), and both sides are now negotiating in a dramatically different environment. Despite record revenues, WNBA players still receive just 9.3% of league income, according to Bloomberg—compared with roughly 50% for NBA players and 48% for the NFL.

“The league has a buzzword that they’ve rolled out as talking points for the CBA as to why they can’t pay the players what we’re worth, and that word is sustainability,” Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier said during her barn-burner of a season-ending press conference earlier this month. Collier, along with her Unrivaled league cofounder and New York Liberty forward Breanna Stewart, sits at No. 9 on the Forbes Power list because of their combined influence in the market as players and cofounders. (Full disclosure: Forbes EVP Moira Forbes invested in an early fundraising round for Unrivaled, and Ally Financial, which sponsors the Most Powerful Women In Sports list, was an early investor in the league but had no input in this inaugural ranking.)

“We have more leverage now than we ever had as women’s athletes, and [are] using that to our advantage,” Collier said at a CNBC event in May. “We’re preparing ourselves in that we know our worth, and we know when to put our foot down.”

Collier and her peers know their worth because of the way they’ve seen the money flow in recent years. WNBA executives see it, too.

“The power that this league holds is one of the most powerful sports leagues in the world, let alone a women’s sports league,” Jess Smith, the president of the Golden State Valkyries, tells Forbes. The Valkyries are the W’s newest franchise and already poised to become its most valuable club, with revenue for its first year hitting $55 million (not including income from national media and sponsorship deals or merchandise sales). That sum is higher than what eight teams from the MLS, a more established men’s league, recorded last season.

While pay negotiations aren’t unique to women’s basketball, the WNBA’s moment has become a benchmark for the broader women’s sports landscape. Tori Huster, deputy executive director of the NWSL Players Association, helped negotiate two landmark NWSL CBAs, including a 2024 deal that abolished the draft, established unrestricted free agency and increased player compensation. “Certainly because of the growth of women’s sports—and you have so many of the players elevating visibility and viewership—it’s obvious that coming back to the table is in everybody’s best interest,” she says. “The [W] just needs to realize that.”

Huster also says that other players’ unions look to the WNBA as a blueprint for collective action. “The W has been around for so long, and they are a fierce collective group,” Huster says. “When we are looking at trying to have solidarity amongst our members, they are a prime example. No matter how many Caitlin Clarks or Breanna Stewarts have made their own name, they are stuck together, and they do an excellent job of understanding what the collective needs of their members are.”

The league’s success and the players’ power to command attention have made tension between the two camps difficult to ignore. But Smith, the Valkyries’ president, cautions against drawing too many conclusions about all women’s sports leagues from the ins and outs of bargaining at the W.

“First and foremost, no one is like, ‘Well, the NFL’s success is dependent on the NBA’s success,’” Smith says. “There can be multiple women’s sports leagues that are successful in many different and measurable ways. … The WNBA is already one of the most powerful sports leagues in the world, and by far, in my opinion, leading the charge for how to commercialize the business around women’s sports.”

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