The WNBA is something that has been around for over 20 years but yet, a lot of people are finding out for the first time that it is still here and much of this has to do with a couple of players that were recently added to the roster. I don't need to tell you who they are, because that is something that has been talked into the ground. What has been alarming about it though, has been the various administrators refusing to admit that the popularity was spurred by these people (one person in particular) and how they always try to explain it away, hide the stats that back up that these couple of players are the main reason why people were watching, and basically doing everything in their power to deny that these individuals had anything to do with the popularity.
The Finals are over, and I think that most people didn't watch a single game. I didn't.
In case you care, the Las Vegas Aces won the finals with an impressive 4-0 sweep of the Phoenix Mercury. This was not the result that was expected but then again, everyone was surprised that Phoenix made it there at all. Many would have argued that it would have been a much better final had Minnesota made it to the finals like they were expected to the finals like they were heavily favored to do so, but they, like many other teams, ended up plagued with injuries to major players and without them, they just weren't the same.
The actual fan attendance and people watching the games is what we are focused on here though, and it isn't all doom and gloom depending on how you look at it.
In game one nearly 2 million people tuned in to watch and the WNBA correctly claimed that this was the highest turnout for any WNBA finals in league history. In game 2 it dropped to 1.2 million and that is about what it stayed at for the remaining two games as well.
This is actually pretty good stats until you do some sort of comparison and of course a lot of people would say that it is misogynistic to make this comparison but I am going to do it anyway: The 2025 NBA finals had an average viewership figure of over 10 million viewers with the crucial game 7 pulling in 16.5 million viewers. This figure was later adjusted, and I am not going to pretend to know how this is done or why, to very close to 20 million viewers for the final game.
So what is the point that I am trying to make here? Well, sadly, even though I really want the WNBA to become more popular, it really hasn't made that much progress in the grand scheme of things.
Now this isn't to rain on their parade because that graph speaks for itself but at the moment, the WNBA is going through a pivotal moment in time where they actually could end up becoming profitable for the first time since the inception of the league but now we have to face the music on the upcoming CBA (collective bargaining agreement) between the players' union on the league itself. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of progress going on and both sides seem to be unwilling to budge on their standpoint. We are on the cusp of a huge media rights deal that begins next season and is worth $2.2 billion, which is much much more than what they were dealing with previously. I am certain the the players see this as a reason for why they should get more money, but at the same time the players seem to be immune to the stats they are provided with about how the WNBA has lost tens of millions of dollars every single year that it has been around including this year.
It is easy to suggest that the WNBA is lying about much of this information because even when they had a real surge of viewership last year thanks mostly to Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, the league still claimed around a $50 million loss. I guess I just sit back and wonder how that is even possible especially when all the games I watched appeared as though they were well-attended and quite well-viewed globally.
At the same time though, I had been looking at ticket prices to attend these games and they were often under $100 and sometimes just over $10 and this is a crazy low figure to attend and championship match in any sport, is it not?
Who do we believe in this? Because at the end of the day I have said it many times about any sport: Professional sports are rarely about the "love of the game" and they certainly are not charities. They are businesses that are in the game of making money and this begs the question of why the league has bothered to stick around for 28 years if they are always losing money? Basically, i suspect someone is lying.
The WNBA has a novel opportunity to ride this wave and do their best to try to keep people interested going into next year's season but they are going to have to change a lot of things and I think the player's union needs to keep this in mind before they get too greedy when it comes time to put pen to paper for the upcoming contract. I personally feel that if the real people behind keeping this league afloat have for some reason seemed to be rather content not making anything for nearly 30 years, that they would rather let it burn to the ground entirely rather than give in and start losing millions more.
Plus we also need to look at the fact that if the WNBA actually is telling the truth about these losses over the years and the league is just now becoming profitable, shouldn't they have "first dibs" on recouping some of those losses?
I will remain a kind of half-assed fan of the sport because in many ways I enjoy it more than I do the NBA, as silly as that sounds. I enjoy knowing that if I actually do want to go see a game that I can do so for 20 bucks.