With the WNBA recently seeing a new media rights deal come to fruition before the current one expires in 2025, the league is set to receive about $2.2 billion, according to The Athletic, over the next 11 years, but a Phoenix Mercury legend is disappointed that the valuation is way too low.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Cheryl Miller, the first-ever head coach in Mercury franchise history and a coach for Team WNBA in the 2024 All-Star Game, blasted the report at an All-Star media availability on Friday and believes it should be almost quadrupled or even more.
“I am not great with numbers, lowball,” Miller said. “Not enough, not even close. Now I am not trying to inflate it a whole lot, two [billion] is nice and eight would be better. That’s what I am talking about because they know, and we have certainly come a long way. I am not about gouging but it is a long time overdue, and we are going to continue to get better and better. All you have to do is look at college basketball and what’s coming next, the next wave of excitement. Women’s basketball is in a great place right now.”
The deal would net the WNBA $200 million a season, a jump from $60 million this year. ESPN, Amazon and NBC have the agreements for this all ready to go, and it also gives the league an opportunity to earn more than that. The Athletic reported that the partners have agreed to evaluate the valuation after three years.
During these negotiations, the NBA, which owns 60% of the WNBA, spearheaded these talks and is getting backlash for how they came up with this valuation due to the rise of popularity in the league. While this number is a spike from years past, the game has never been bigger and will continue to grow exponentially.
Wanting the current players to receive the correct salary that they deserve off of this agreement, Miller is unsatisfied and wants people who will fight for what the players and the league are truly worth in her opinion.
“We need tough and fair negotiators and visionaries,” Miller said. “We need to bully, we need to bully behind the table. That’s going to say we are going to break up the pieces and go from there. There is a certain number bigger than two that we want.”
Under the current Collective Bargaining Agreement, salaries can fluctuate from $64,000 to $252,000 and the salary cap for each team tops out at $1,463,200. While this new, multi-billion dollar deal is presumably going to see changes to the financial structure and flexibility of each team ahead of San Francisco and Toronto who will be expansion franchises coming soon, there is still a lot of work to be done going into the future of the WNBA.
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Reporter Alec Cipollini covers ASU Athletics, the Phoenix Mercury and more for Burn City Sports. You can follow him on his X account, @AlecCipollini
