You don’t have to look much further to find the blatant sexism in professional sports then the contract Caitlin Clark just signed with the WNBA for $76,000, compared to a man entering his rookie year in the NBA where the league minimum salary for a first-year player for the 2024 season is $1.12 million dollars.
That’s sexism!
Yea, I know it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s still just wrong.
Let’s get into the numbers.
For the 2023 season, the WNBA was projected to bring in between $180 million to $200 million dollars. For the same 2023 season the NBA was projected to bring in around $10.58 billion dollars.
So why the huge difference?
Advertising and viewership!
Here are a few examples of the differences.
1) Ticket prices per game: $94 for an NBA game vs. $47 for a WNBA game
2) Average TV Viewership: 12.4 million viewers for the 2022 NBA Finals vs. 412,000 viewers for the WNBA
3) Average Attendance At Games: 17,184 for NBA games vs. 5,679 for WNBA games
4) Average Team Value: The average NBA team is worth $2.86 billion dollars vs. the $66 million dollars an average WNBA team is worth.
Now let’s talk about advertising. In 2023, the NBA’s sponsorship revenue totaled $1.66 billion dollars, while the WNBA brought in $200 million dollars in 2023.
So the numbers tell the story. The NBA’s viewership and advertising dollars are multiples of the WNBA’s, and the easy answer for why Caitlin Clark is only making 1/10th as a rookie in the NBA makes all comes down to how much each league makes.
If WNBA wants the players to make a comparable salary to NBA fans then they’re going to need to 10X their viewership and advertising revenue in order to even the playing field.
If you’ve ever watched Caitlin Clark play, you know anything is possible!
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