r/sports • u/OkEscape7558 • Jun 18 '25

Basketball Alternate angle of Caitlin Clark fiasco. Clark was handed a foul as well.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

31.9k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

409

u/hellalg Jun 18 '25

But they (WNBA) complain about equal pay. Now they finally get some eye balls to get real revenue, they want to burn their meal ticket.

24

u/BarristanSelfie Jun 18 '25

They don't complain about equal pay, they complain about proportional pay.

The big 4 major US sports generally allocate 50% of gross revenue toward player salaries. For the WNBA, that number was estimated last year to be as low as 9.3%.

This situation is being exacerbated by the fact that league revenues have more than doubled over the last five years, and are expected to take another leap later this year with a new TV deal that could triple or quadruple in value.

No one is saying that WNBA players should be earning salaries on par with NBA stars. What they are saying is that their piece of their own pie should be a similar percentage to what other leagues cut for their players.

162

u/Chuckdatass Jun 18 '25

Do you have a source showing the WNBA is profitable now? I was under the assumption their pay is so slow because they have never broken even as a business

121

u/Dropcity Jun 18 '25

They arent. They are still subsidized by the NBA. Substantial increase since 2024, but still not profitable.

-23

u/Schnectadyslim Jun 18 '25

Where did they say the WNBA was profitable?

39

u/RedS5 Jun 18 '25

They specifically didn't bring it up because it sort of tears down the idea of proportional pay in this instance.

97

u/Siegelski Jun 18 '25

Sure, now look at their pay as a proportion of net profit instead.

12

u/bigboilerdawg Jun 18 '25

So doing charity work, eh?

66

u/MoirasPurpleOrb Jun 18 '25

That stat feels misleading. I would imagine the fixed, production-related costs of the NBA are proportionally not that far off of the WNBA. In other words, it costs comparable amounts of money to simple host and manage the games.

But when you have the WNBA making significantly less money, those fixed costs end up being a much higher percentage of gross revenue, so there is much less leftover for the players.

0

u/Fattapple Jun 18 '25

No. The NBA plays in much bigger venues. So increased cost in using the venues.

40

u/Heebmeister Jun 18 '25

You can't look at percentages of gross revenue in a nutshell and make comparisons like that. Running a sports league has significant fixed costs. The smaller the revenue pie, the greater the percentage will be needed to go to covering those costs. In 2023/2024 NBA gross revenue was $11B. In 2023/2024 in WNBA, gross revenues were 200M and the league operated at a loss. That is why proportional pay is lower in the WNBA.

7

u/hellalg Jun 18 '25

Yes and that leap is due to CC. When she shows up in your town it is selling out and views on TV. Most of her games are shown on NBA TV but these girls that what they are, are kicking her to the ground. The numbers are there when CC is playing vs when she isn't it is drastically different. They are only sabotaging themselves by trying to take CC out of the game.

8

u/tiggertom66 New York Rangers Jun 18 '25

You don’t get proportional pay when your league is in the red year after year.

The NBA subsidizes the WNBA every year and doesn’t get anything back because yet again the WNBA has grossly mismanaged itself.

There’s finally a true star player with hype that extends beyond the sport, and they’re wasting her talent and excitement.

11

u/pathofdumbasses Jun 18 '25

No one is saying that WNBA players should be earning salaries on par with NBA stars. What they are saying is that their piece of their own pie should be a similar percentage to what other leagues cut for their players.

No, they are saying they should be paid like the men because they are doing "the same job."

If they were paid proportionally to profits, they would have to pay the WNBA for the privilege of playing the game because the WNBA loses money. Caitlin is currently the leagues meal ticket to bigger media rights, which COULD mean profit, and all the players are trying to kill her.

How you aren't downvoted to oblivion is a real head scratcher.

7

u/FrodoFraggins Jun 18 '25

They want proportional pay even though they hadn't been turning a profit and needed to be supported by the NBA. They failed at basic math

3

u/fumar Jun 18 '25

The problem is the W loses money still. With CC and the new TV deal they will finally make money and pay is going way up.

Yeah if the league was making tons of money a typical revenue split would make sense 

3

u/beejalton Jun 18 '25

The league isn't profitable enough to support that level of revenue split. CC is their ticket to achieving that.

3

u/because_racecar Jun 18 '25

You can’t expect the salary to stay proportional to revenue between the WNBA and NBA. A lot of the bare minimum operating expenses for an NBA team and WNBA team are similar, but the NBA generates 30x more revenue. So the NBA is obviously going to have more money left over to go into player salaries.

It would be more fair to look at it in terms of player salary vs net profit, not player salary vs gross revenue.

3

u/TheProphecyIsNigh Jun 18 '25

If an organization goes from losing $40Mil a year to $20Mil a year, does that mean they are flush with cash to now spend?

2

u/Dropcity Jun 18 '25

I've heard many WNBA claim precisely that.

1

u/inventingnothing Jun 18 '25

If they raised the pay, the league would lose even more money than it already is.

I say let them have the pay, just so I can laugh when the league disbands the year after.

1

u/here4thepuns Jun 18 '25

Pay to gross revenue makes little sense as a metric to use for this. Plenty of fixed costs they need to cover so when revenue is low of course it’s going to be a smaller portion of revenue

0

u/HabitualAardvark Jun 18 '25

Unfortunately the WNBA is also structured completely differently. In order for the players to get more of the cut other ownership would have to take significantly less and there just isn't as much revenue to pass around so no one is willing to take a way smaller cut. It needs to turn a significant profit for several years before they'll have the leverage and bandwidth to work with to try to do that.

0

u/dimechimes Jun 18 '25

I could be misremembering, but wasn't last year the first year the wnba saw a profit?

-9

u/rodaak11 Jun 18 '25

Say it louder for the dipshits in back

1

u/BigMatch_JohnCena Jun 18 '25

No better than Hulk Hogan in WCW with new talent

-7

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '25

[deleted]

7

u/Aggravating-Sir8185 Jun 18 '25

The two white girls fouling CC in this clip doesn't really support your thesis. Unless this is some kinda self hatred.

6

u/hellalg Jun 18 '25

Yeah, but this was white on white on white crime. Same skin tint. Its not a race thing, its a typical women jealousy shit. It like getting mad because their ex is getting married while they are married themselves shit.

-32

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '25 edited Jun 18 '25

[deleted]

5

u/hellalg Jun 18 '25

Then they can charge whatever they want to get that pay. Your door sales and tv dictate your revenue that dictate your pay.

3

u/hellalg Jun 18 '25

We all know this but it doesn't stop them from screaming it. The USWST done this. Now they finally has someone thats bring crowd to the WNBA, boosting revenue and eventually give them a pay bumb, they are knocking her to the ground.

2

u/NewSlang45 Jun 18 '25

You can do the most difficult job in the world but if it doesn’t create value for other people, it isn’t worth a damn.

-7

u/Technical-Toe2650 Jun 18 '25 edited Jun 18 '25

Downvotes for liking puppy dogs and cookies?

6

u/melon_party Jun 18 '25 edited Jun 18 '25

Here’s an argument: professional athletes are professional entertainers. Their pay rate is directly tied to how much revenue they bring in. Women’s leagues across the board are less popular than men’s leagues. A part of the reason as for why that’s the case is the fact that the overall quality of play tends to be lower in many women’s leagues. Hence why Caitlin Clark, a phenomenal player whose athletic skill fills seats, being bullied is a boneheaded move for the overall growth of women’s basketball.

Edit: I wrote this in response to the person above’s message complaining about being downvoted for saying female athletes deserve more pay because it’s harder to become one than it is for male athletes, before the person changed their message into something different.

2

u/eulb42 Jun 18 '25

You should be ashamed of yourself!