You may suppose a giant paycheque could be a slam dunk.
Basketball participant Paige Bueckers, after serving to UConn win its twelfth nationwide championship on Monday, grew to become the WNBA’s No. 1 draft pick by the Dallas Wings.
The three-time, first-team All-American has achieved the nighttime talk show circuit, made headlines world wide, and in a month Bueckers will make her WNBA debut when the Wings open their season in opposition to the Minnesota Lynx.
“It is a good time to be in girls’s sports activities,” Bueckers instructed Good Morning America on Wednesday.
But basketball’s latest star is projected to earn simply $78,831 US for her rookie yr — about $109,480 Cdn, or less than the real median household income in the States. The No. 1 draft decide for the NBA, by comparability, can anticipate to earn $13.8 million US in his rookie yr, in response to sports salary reporting site Spotrac.
Nonetheless, Bueckers’s wage is not surprising. The main points are proper there within the rookie wage scale system within the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement. And it is a slight uptick from final yr, when first-round decide Caitlin Clark was drafted with a starting salary of $76,535 US for her rookie season.
BREAKING: Paige Bueckers is signing a 3-year cope with Unequalled (per @kendra__andrews). Bueckers’ Unequalled deal, after one yr, is predicted to exceed her total projected 4-year WNBA rookie wage.
“Bueckers’ first-year wage for the 10-week Unequalled season will exceed what… pic.twitter.com/7gv8RWx8AE
However that is coupled with the information that Bueckers can also be signing with the 3-on-3 league Unrivaled, the place she’s going to reportedly earn more in just one year of playing than she may in her total four-year contract with the Wings. And now, some followers and trade observers are calling this a sobering reminder of simply how little WNBA gamers are paid.
“The W must be embarrassed,” mentioned one fan on X.
“The economics of the WNBA simply do not add up… one thing is severely damaged,” wrote another.
“Paige Bueckers’ Unequalled contract places any future WNBA wage to disgrace,” wrote the Pro Football and Sports Network website.
The rise of the WNBA
Girls’s basketball has skilled a dramatic rise in popularity over the previous couple of years, between the emergence of famous person gamers like Clark, the expansion of the WNBA, and a surge in March Madness viewership.
The arrival of Clark supercharged the WNBA final yr, with league attendance practically doubling over 2023. The Indiana Fever in January introduced a brand new $78 million US coaching facility to open in 2027 that can give the staff its personal area aside from the NBA’s Pacers.
“There’s been rising fan momentum round girls’s sports activities for a number of years now, and basketball has been on the heart of it,” wrote the scores firm Nielsen in its 2024 sports wrapup.
Final yr, curiosity within the league elevated by 29 per cent year-over-year in response to Nielsen Fan Insights. Common season viewership elevated 201 per cent in 2024 over the earlier season, and a few 800 per cent in comparison with 2014. About 3.4 million folks tuned into the WNBA All-Star sport in July, Nielsen reported.
And given all this buzz, it isn’t stunning some persons are so shocked by Bueckers’s WNBA wage, says Cheri Bradish, the director of the Way forward for Sport Lab and Chair of Advertising Administration at Toronto Metropolitan College.
“The enterprise of the league has seemingly grown by leaps and bounds with new companions and programming — there may be the presumption this might be mirrored in expertise,” Bradish instructed CBC Information.
“And now with rival leagues, society is conscious that it’s potential to higher compensate these athletes. So the economics don’t seem so as to add up when trying on the enterprise mannequin of salaries.”
The newly employed Tempo normal supervisor talks objectives for the 2026 WNBA season and the way she plans to construct a championship-winning staff.
Why the pay discrepancy?
Unrivaled, the 3-on-3 women’s basketball league, based by WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier, simply accomplished its inaugural season. Gamers had a median wage of greater than $220,000 US — the best common wage for gamers of any skilled girls’s sports activities league and near the utmost base wage within the WNBA, in response to The Related Press.
The Sports Economist web site says that the league “provides a brand new paradigm for a way girls’s basketball can thrive financially,” has a high-profile primetime spot on TNT Sports activities, and generates income by its 3-on-3 video games and with “fan-centric” engagement.
It additionally has some huge backers, with millions of dollars in investments from U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps and Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo, amongst others.
However for many individuals, says Bradish, the shock over WNBA salaries comes from evaluating them to the NBA, the place beginning salaries are within the tens of millions.
“There may be such a big hole between skilled girls’s salaries and males’s salaries,” she mentioned.
Many gamers complement their incomes taking part in abroad in the course of the low season, a problem not too long ago highlighted when WNBA participant Brittney Griner was detained in Russia on drug-related fees that ended with a prisoner swap. She joined Unrivaled last year.
WNBA contract negotiations coming
The WNBA is a younger league, with its first season in 1997, and does not have many years of contract negotiations behind it just like the NBA does. It additionally has a history of under-investment, and with much less sway and worse outcomes in media rights deals.
On prime of that, WNBA gamers get a much smaller share of the league’s total income than their NBA counterparts, though the present collective bargaining settlement expires subsequent season. Talks between the league and gamers’ union are ongoing, and salaries are anticipated to develop.
Girls soccer gamers on the FIFA World Cup will on common earn one fourth of what the lads made in Qatar final yr, in response to numbers launched by the group. What’s behind this pay hole?
Gamers have indicated there might be a lockout if their wage calls for aren’t meet. Bradish says she’s hopeful that salaries will catch up, and higher enterprise modelling for the compensation of girls’s athletes will prevail.
“Little doubt these girls, by advocacy and collective bargaining, will well-represent themselves on the compensation desk,” she mentioned.
However the wage discrepancies prolong past basketball. Gamers within the Professional Women’s Hockey League, as an example, can earn as little as $35,000 US per yr. And final month, a FIFA report on women’s soccer discovered that the common wage for top-tier groups was $24,030 US globally, lower than a dwelling wage in lots of locations.
And regardless of 2024 seeing a surge of viral feminine athletes, similar to U.S. rugby participant Ilona Maher, and gymnast Simone Biles’s Olympic comeback, not one woman made the top 100 list of highest-paid athletes worldwide final yr.
Soccer’s Cristiano Ronaldo topped that record, with a complete revenue of $260 million US in 2024, according to Sportico.
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