With the current WNBA media rights deal set to expire in 2025, the league reached an 11-year agreement with ESPN, Amazon and NBC worth $2.2 billion. The megadeal was first reported by The Athletic on July 16 before it came to fruition on Wednesday.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!The deal will net the WNBA $200 million a season, a substantial jump from $60 million this year. The Athletic also reported that all three media companies and the league will reconvene after three seasons to discuss and reevaluate the deal.
The trio of Disney, Amazon Prime Video, and NBCUniversal will broadcast and distribute over 125 regular-season and playoff games beginning in the 2026 season and will run through 2036. As for the semifinals and WNBA Finals, it will rotate between the platforms.
In a press release according to ESPN‘s Alexa Philippou, a minimum of 25 regular-season games will be on Disney platforms – including ESPN, 50 on NBC Universal platforms and 30 on Amazon Prime Video. Disney will have games through ABC, ESPN or ESPN2 while streaming them through their direct-to-consumer service. NBCUniversal’s broadcasts will be on NBC, USA Network and their streaming service, Peacock. Amazon Prime Video will strictly stream direct-to-consumer.
For the playoffs, Disney will have two first-round playoff series, with NBCUniversal and Prime showing one of the other two. Disney will distribute eight semifinal series and five Finals while Prime Video and NBCUniversal will have seven semifinals and three Finals each.
Disney will still broadcast both the WNBA All-Star events and the WNBA Draft, and Prime will continue covering the Commissioner’s Cup Championship Game.
While this is good news for the league which has garnered a massive amount of attention compared to previous years, there is still work to be done in the future regarding the salary cap and expansion.
Under the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), salaries fluctuate from $64,000 to $252,000 and the salary cap for each team is $1,463,200. This new, multi-billion dollar deal is presumably going to cause changes in the financial structure, flexibility and overall pay of players from each team including San Francisco and Toronto who will soon be expansion teams in the next few years.
Time will tell if the deal will benefit the league just right or if the WNBA deserves more, but there will be arguments from both sides for years to come no matter what.
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Reporter Alec Cipollini covers ASU Athletics, Phoenix Mercury and more for Burn City Sports. You can follow him on his X account, @AlecCipollini
