Is It Really True That the WNBA Has Never Turned a Profit? The Answer Is Complicated

Although it's never commanded an audience as large as the NBA, the WNBA has seen massive growth in recent years thanks to a generation of rising stars and new interest in women's sports more generally. As the players in the league attempt to negotiate a new agreement with the league itself, things are getting fairly contentious, with players at the All-Star Game wearing shirts calling out how underpaid they are.

Every time players try to negotiate new contracts in the WNBA, though, the WNBA claims that the league has never turned a profit. Now, we're tyring to figure out whether that's actually true:

The true answer seems to be that we really don't know. According to an article in Sherwood News, the finances of the WNBA have been quite intentionally left mysterious, perhaps in part because that allows the league to have power over players. The league certainly isn't as profitable as the NBA, but the salary comparisons are insane.

The average WNBA salary is roughly $120,000, while the average NBA salary is literally 100 times larger at $12 million.

Players in the WNBA do play roughly half as many games, but even so, that doesn't account for a difference that large. And we know that the league signed a new TV rights deal in 2024 that tripled the amount of money they're making each year for broadcasting rights from $60 million to $200 million. All of this new money and interest suggests, not wrongly, that the WNBA is on the upswing.

Even so, the league reported losses in 2024, as it has done historically. Adam Silver said in 2018 that the league loses an average of $10 million a year, which is not a crazy number. Although they report this profit and loss information, it's hard to know where these numbers are coming from.

And in 2024, a year when the WNBA made more money than ever, it reported $50 million in losses, which simply doesn't make much sense.

It seems possible, then, that the WNBA is using clever accounting to claim losses on a business that might not be losing money after all.

The W would hardly be the first business to do this, as it comes with major tax benefits. However, it also helps them get public subsidies for things like arenas and gives them leverage in contract negotiations with their players.

The players, who naturally feel that they are undervalued because they make about as much money as your average marketing manager, are then told by the league that they aren't being underpaid at all, because the league as a whole isn't actually turning a profit.

How this ultimately plays out is an unfinished story. While it might be true that the league has lost money on paper every year, the story might not be that simple. There's more than one reason to report a loss, and not all of them involve actually losing money.