The WNBA Is Done Being Left Behind in Media Rights Deals

The WNBA headed into the playoffs in 2022 with its most-watched regular season in 14 years. As the longest-tenured women’s sports league in the country, it boasts elite talent, draws hundreds of thousands of viewers per game and raised $75 million in capital in February in its first-ever funding round. However, despite the exponential growth in popularity and viewership, the WNBA’s media rights deals are far less valuable than comparable national leagues like Major League Soccer and the NHL, and the league knows it. The WNBA's deal with Disney, its largest broadcast partner, runs through 2025 and was worth $27 million in 2021. The 12-team league plays 36 games a season. MLS, which plays 34 games a season across its 28 teams, just signed a 10-year, $250 million per year exclusive streaming deal with Apple. MLS averaged 285,000 viewers in the 2021 season. The WNBA just finished its regular season in 2022 averaging 379,000 viewers. ESPN Leverages New March Madness Branding to Grow Women’s Basketball Audience “If you look at our viewership this year and you look at MLS and the NHL, we’re actually above them,” WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert told Adweek. “We’re above MLS by 100,000 average viewers, and yet they just signed that $2.5 billion ten-year deal with Apple TV. Why would you leave a league that's having the viewership and the quality of [our] game on the floor, and the great storylines and the other content we can put around it? Why would we be left behind? That's what I'm focused on.” There’s no doubt the WNBA is experiencing unprecedented viewership growth. This year’s playoff semi-finals are up 56% versus the 2021 semi-finals through six games, and through 16 games, the WNBA Playoffs are up 42% year over year. The league just saw its most-viewed opening round in 15 years, up 50% and averaging 392,000 viewers. Additionally, the Sept. 4 match between the now-finals bound Las Vegas Aces and the Seattle Storm peaked at 1.4 million viewers on ABC, the network’s second most-watched WNBA postseason game ever. And the organization will look to continue those numbers during its finals, which start Sunday and showcase a matchup between the Aces and the winner of Thursday night's Game 5 between the Chicago Sky and Connecticut Sun. Despite the growing viewership, the WNBA is reportedly targeting a deal worth around $100 million per year in its next negotiations, which is well below the $250 million deal MLS snagged. But more opportunities may be ahead. The league currently has rights deals with Disney, Paramount, Amazon Prime Video, Facebook and Twitch, and a priority for the organization heading into its next negotiations is to increase its value. According to Engelbert, that means moving away from the way deals are traditionally negotiated. “We’re working on making sure we understand how these media rights are being valued, what the key levers are, how each of the different broadcast media companies and streamers are looking at the value and how it’s all being disrupted,” Engelbert said. “The No. 1 disparity [between men and women’s sports] is media rights and the valuation, and I do believe that [companies are] so focused on a decades-old spreadsheet model that was good for men’s sports. Because women’s sports is so underinvested in and less than 5% of all media coverage of sports is women’s sports, there’s this disparity, and I’m working on changing that." Engelbert noted that the marketplace is changing quickly, so the way negotiations ran in the past is moot. “We have a great narrative and a lot of data to support why we deserve a multidimensional media deal with several partners in the next round," Engelbert said. Growing the game The WNBA is coming off its biggest season yet, playing the most games (36) and expanding to 40 games per team next season. The league had 160 games air on national platforms this year, a record, and expanded playoffs from a single elimination format in the first rounds to a best-of-three series. “If you build it, they will come. We’re building it, and they’re coming. And then we’re seeing all kinds of record trends,” Engelbert said. And the WNBA is putting “a ton” more marketing dollars behind it too. “There’s been this inflection point coming off the 2020 season in the bubble,” Englebert said, also referencing the multiple documentaries focused on the WNBA this year, including ESPN’s Dream On about the 1996 Olympic team. Part of that growth comes from brand partnerships, including marquee deals the league calls Changemakers. “We signed Google as a WNBA Changemaker in ’21, and then Google partnered with ESPN to bring more games. I think we’re doing better at partnering in the sports ecosystem to make sure that ESPN is co-marketing with us, especially when we’re on ABC,” Engelbert said. The league is constantly trying to add more windows on ABC and saw a record nine on the broadcast network this season. “Honestly, I’d like to see more marketing by our broadcast partners more broadly. We’re also on CBS and Amazon Prime Video and Twitter and Facebook,” she added. The WNBA's social media engagement reached 186 million video views in 2022, up 36% year over year. Web traffic nearly doubled from last year for unique visitors (5.4 million, up 99%), and League Pass, the WNBA’s out-of-market live game package, saw subscribers grow 10% this season. Key partners For ESPN’s part, the company heavily values the WNBA. Though ESPN’s media rights deal with the WNBA is up in 2025, the Disney-owned company has no intentions of letting the league go. The company has been a partner of the WNBA since its inception 26 years ago and “are 100% partners in every way that you can define the word partner,” said Ashley O’Connor, ESPN’s senior director of programming and acquisitions. “We are in constant conversation about the good, the bad and the ugly and trying to figure out what we can do collectively to continue to raise the profile of the WNBA in our coverage of the league," she added. “We value our partnership and intend for that to continue to grow." Celebrating 50 Years of Title IX: The Evolution and Impact For ESPN and the WNBA, it isn’t just about putting the games on TV. The league is seeing growth across all areas. This year’s draft averaged 403,000 viewers on ESPN, up 20% year over year and the most-watched since 2004. “In the traditional marketing space, it’s the same marketing concept that you would assume, it’s telling people why this is the game that you should watch,” O’Connor said. “Outside of the traditional marketing, we’ve been integrating WNBA into so much of content in general. It has a regular appearance on NBA Today… or any sort of organic coverage, which ultimately is a way to market the league.” ESPN also added WNBA Countdown, a dedicated pregame show during these playoffs, in its increased coverage efforts. What’s next? Though the WNBA reportedly isn't seeking a deal as valuable as the agreement that the MLS signed, it's also not seeking an exclusive offer. The league prefers a broader rights deal to reach more viewers. “Broadcast deals aren’t any longer with one partner, you have to be on several,” Engelbert said. "You have to be on a streamer, Twitter and Facebook are just different formats, and then people like watching the old-fashioned way. We have to be everywhere and meet our fans where they are.” The league is also considering the ways people watch, with Engelbert pointing to the broader disruptive media landscape. WNBA League Pass launched on Roku devices for the first time this year towards the end of the season, which required a new deployment of capital. “It’s different technology and it’s fascinating to even learn [about] the cost of a native application and the development of that, the engineers you need for an iPhone versus an iPad versus Roku versus Apple TV, they're all different. Those are the types of things I'm thinking about strategically as we get into the future,” she said. While League Pass will stick around “for now,” Engelbert is also considering a larger streaming package as an option for the WNBA. “[It’s] important for the out-of-market live game package, but we have to think about what does League Pass look like in the future. Streaming is such an easier way to place your games on,” Engelbert said. “As everything’s changing, as a direct-to-consumer product, how many subscribers can we, the WNBA, pull in on that platform versus partnering with someone who already comes in with tens of millions of subscribers?” The next round of negotiations represents a massive opportunity for the WNBA to continue to grow and for media companies to capitalize on the growing value of women’s sports. “We’re doing this well with 36 games in only 12 cities,” Engelbert said. "Can you imagine next year when we're going to play 40 games, and if we expand longer term, and we're in 16 cities or whatever the number will be? It's going to be great.”