After its blockbuster 2024 season, here’s what’s next for the WNBA

On Sunday night in Brooklyn, confetti rained down on Barclays Center and the New York Liberty.

Until this past weekend, the Liberty was the only founding WNBA franchise to have never won a championship in 28 seasons. But that’s no longer true, after the team’s Game 5 comeback to beat the Minnesota Lynx, a franchise that already has five rings to its name.

As New York fans and players alike cried happy tears in a packed arena, commissioner Cathy Engelbert awarded the team’s owner, Clara Wu Tsai, the championship trophy, made by Tiffany & Co. Then it was Wu Tsai’s turn to talk—not just about the success of her team, or the growth of women’s sports, but the advancements of women overall.

“When we bought this team four years ago, they were playing in the Westchester County Center to a crowd of 2,000,” she said. “The first thing we wanted to do was to bring the team to Barclays Center so they could have a bigger stage. Then, we wanted to give them facilities and performance and nutrition and everything they deserve, because they are elite professional athletes. And look what can happen when you have an intention and you put resources, care, and attention to it.”

The crowd roared.

Wu Tsai continued. “This is what can happen when you invest in women!”The Liberty isn’t the only team to have a stellar run this year. Sunday concluded a breakout season for the entire league, as the WNBA crushed a number of records, including TV viewership numbers, game attendance, and merchandise sales.

More than 54 million viewers watched the WNBA regular season, an all-time high for the league. The finals broke viewership records. Game attendance overall increased 48%, and WNBA merchandise sales—both online and at the WNBA’s flagship store in New York City—increased a combined 601%, compared to 2023.

Now the league is set to build on this momentum in 2025.

A growing game

By 2026, the WNBA will expand from 12 teams to 15—and potentially to 16 by 2028. The league is also adding more games to its roster. The WNBA’s 2025 regular season will increase from 40 to 44 games per team, and the postseason will be longer as well.

However, some, such as former MVP Candace Parker, have expressed concerns that expanding too quickly could diminish the quality of the players—and, in effect, the game.

“The only thing I’m a little concerned about is the expansion. Because we saw in the ’90s with Michael [Jordan and the NBA], when you expand a little too fast sometimes the talent gets diluted,” Parker told Andscape in July. “Are there going to be enough stars to carry the franchises that we’re expanding to in the next three or four years?”

Others, like James Dolan, CEO of Madison Square Garden Entertainment and owner of the New York Knicks, have flagged concerns about the financial stability of the WNBA, which is reportedly set to lose $40 million this season. (The NBA currently owns 60% of the WNBA.)

This will not be the first time the WNBA has expanded. During the WNBA’s first decade, the league grew quickly, peaking at 16 teams in 2002. By 2008, multiple founding teams (including the Cleveland Rockers, the Houston Comets, and the Charlotte Sting) folded due to financial strains.

But Engelbert says the league is in a significantly different position today. “The league’s growth and increased demand for WNBA basketball made this the ideal time to expand the schedule, lengthen the Finals, and provide fans more opportunities to see the best players in the world compete at the highest level,” she said on October 10 while announcing the league’s extended schedule.

Earlier this year, the league also signed an 11-year $2.2 billion media rights deal that is expected to bring in $200 million annually starting in 2026. (The WNBA’s current media deal brings in just $60 million per year.)

This deal, Engelbert said, “will grow the economics of our league and expand the reach and accessibility of our game for our fans, with additional WNBA media deals to come.”

There is also the new money generated from the WNBA’s expansion fees. The owners of the Golden State Warriors agreed to pay a $50 million expansion fee to launch the upcoming Bay Area WNBA franchise—five times more than the $10 million expansion fee the Atlanta Dream’s owners paid in 2008, the last time a team was added to the league.

The Bay Area team, newly dubbed the Valkyries, will tip off in 2025; new WNBA teams in Portland, Oregon, and Toronto will debut in 2026.

Tight competition

Part of the concern with expansion is whether the league has the necessary depth of talent to grow at this rapid rate. But the 2024 WNBA season was especially competitive, as evidenced by the historically close finals between the Liberty and the Lynx. And with multiple players setting—and then resetting—new records throughout the season, these concerns may finally be put to rest, as fresh talent brings new audiences to the WNBA.

For example, the Las Vegas Ace’s A’ja Wilson became the first player to score more than 1,000 points in a season and unanimously won the regular season’s MVP award. And a new class of rookies are hot on her tail—including Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Aaliyah Edwards, Kamilla Cardoso, and Cameron Brink.

Take Clark, the league’s 2024 Rookie of the Year. She earned the first triple-double by a rookie in WNBA history, became the first player in WNBA history to average at least 25 points and 10 assists over a five-game span, and helped the Indiana Fever break a seven-year playoff drought.

Reese set a new WNBA single-season record for rebounds (446) and for most consecutive double-doubles (15)—even though she was injured for part of the season. But then Wilson went on to beat Reese’s rebound record while Reese was out.

“The surge and the energy and the mainstream appeal that [the 2024 rookie class] brought with them to this league is welcomed—and so appreciated,” says Keia Clarke, CEO of the Liberty.

Then, of course, there are the rising players from the collegiate level. Val Ackerman, founding president of the WNBA, former president of USA Basketball, and current commissioner of the Big East Conference, says that while Clark is uniquely talented, there will undoubtedly be new collegiate talent to follow this fall, and then later those players will join the WNBA. She points to the highly anticipated return of Paige Bueckers, who is set to finish her college career at the University of Connecticut.

Ackerman also suggests that the WNBA’s talent and fan pool remains strong in part because of age minimum requirements (players must be at least 22 to play in the professional league).

“The practical effect of that is players stay in college for roughly four years. And by virtue of that, they develop as players, they mature as women, their personas are built because they’re on national television and they play in the Final Four,” she says. “By the time they get to the pros, they’re known commodities. And I think you saw that in full force with Caitlin Clark.”

She suggests that the talent development “synergy” between collegiate and professional women’s basketball is “one of the factors that is contributing to where the sport is today.”

Clarke shares Ackerman’s enthusiasm. “The most exciting thing is there are players following Caitlin and Angel, and the other incredible players in this rookie class, that will continue this trajectory,” she says.

Team-level growth

A number of teams in the league found (or continued) financial success this season. Multiple teams have posted impressive growth figures, indicating that there is significant demand for WNBA teams and that it is possible for them to drive a profit.

The Liberty, for example, saw a boost in average game attendance, season ticket sales, and merchandise sales this year. An average of 12,729 people attended the Liberty’s 20 regular season home games—a 64% increase from last season. The Liberty’s season ticket membership also increased 152% year over year.

The team now has nine times the number of season ticket holders since moving to Barclays Center in 2021 and recently became the first WNBA team to have a premium seating waitlist. Plus, in-arena merchandise sales rose 99% year over year, and e-commerce merchandise sales spiked 135% year over year.

All of this helped translate into a 60% increase in brand sponsors, which was further boosted by the popularity of the Liberty’s celebrity mascot, Ellie the Elephant.

Meanwhile, in Indiana, with the boost of Clark’s star power, home season attendance for the Fever increased 265% this season compared to last. The Fever estimates that an average of 17,035 attendees came to each home game, an all-time WNBA record. Overall, 186,000 fans attended a Fever home game this season. Joey Graziano, EVP of strategy and new business ventures for Pacers Sports & Entertainment (which owns the Fever) says this figure suggests that the Fever has the highest attendance per capita of any team in the WNBA or NBA.

“We’re just getting started. I’m incredibly bullish on the opportunity here to grow this brand, because we are just starting to break through this year—30% of our social media followers resided outside the United States,” Graziano says. “So you think about not just the opportunity domestically, as we think about expansion in new markets like San Francisco and Toronto that are bringing WNBA teams online, but also the opportunity to grow this internationally.”

More than half of the Fever’s fans came from outside the state of Indiana, including from 57 different countries, according to Graziano.

The increase in interest has been driven by the quality of the modern women’s game, he says, describing the ability of guards like Clark, Kelsey Plum, and Sabrina Ionescu to hit long-distance threes as “product innovation.”

“For so long, people were talking about how part of the reason for the lack of interest [in the WNBA] may have been the quality of the game,” he says. “But they’ve changed the game.”

To be sure, the WNBA is still a relatively new league. The NBA kicks off its 78th season this week and numerous NBA teams have had unprofitable seasons.

“We’re still at 28 seasons,” Clarke says. “We’re a fairly young league. Some have said we expanded too quickly early, so figuring out the right markets that work for this fandom, for this support, took time. I think it’s about doing the work to figure out what works in your market.”

Ultimately, many of the expansion-related fears—that the quality of the game and the demand for the game are not yet ready—appear to be long-standing concerns about women’s sports at large.

“When I was the first president and we were launching the league, we were talking about the quality of the entertainment and the role model appeal of the players and the affordability of the prices and all of that,” Ackerman says. “We had naysayers, but we soldiered on. And now, finally, it seems the core fans who’ve been there all along are being joined by the ones jumping on the bandwagon. And we’re happy to have them.”