Consequently, it is not surprising to learn that in 1970-71, NBA players were paid 27 percent of league revenue. The WNBA has reached an agreement with the players union to phase in pay rises, getting the average up to $130,000 and the top players over $500,000 by 2027. Theyre making the most of it while they can. Why WNBA players are not paid as much as NBA players? And it's in the runup to that deadline that the two sides will collide again over the even bigger issues at hand. The U.S.-Netherlands final reached an average live audience of 82.2 million, up 56%. This year, all of the major professional sports leagues had a presence. In an interview with comedian Adam Ray on his "About Last Night Podcast," the legendary Seattle Storm point guard and four-time WNBA champion explained her stance on equality in basketball. | by Yannick Ondoa | Medium Write Sign up Sign In 500 Apologies, but something went wrong on our end. (Including the very greatest: From 1997 to 2000, the Houston Comets won four straight WNBA championships with a core of Cynthia Cooper, Sheryl Swoopes and Tina Thompson, all top-shelf Hall of Famers. The WNBA players clearly are not getting that much. As Phoenix Mercurys Brittney Griner wrote on Instagram earlier this year, I do believe we should get paid more in the WNBA before players decide to only play overseas and rest our bodies during the summer.. This per game mark is more than 10,000 fans below the per game mark seen in the NBA in 2016-17. The U.S. womens national soccer team has been fighting for equal pay since 2016, and spring training for Major League Baseball is delayed due to issues surrounding the collective bargaining agreement between players and owners. While the NBA pays its players roughly 50 percent of the total, the WNBA players are making less than 25 percent of league revenue. "Have investments been equal? Meanwhile, Steph Curry, the highest-paid player in the NBA, will make $45.7 million this season. Clearly, the WNBA still needs to work on establishing its long-term viability, and some might argue that the players shouldnt request raises until the league has become more financially stable. "These are businesses, and none of us are out there saying we want to be paid the exact same as the men," says 17-year WNBA veteran Sue Bird of the Seattle Storm. It was an unprecedented moment for a commissioner of a professional sports league and a head of a union: The labor deal they were about to negotiate could become a major platform for women's empowerment. At the end of the day, people will still complain that the WNBA is boring, less competitive and that theres no dunking. One might argue that male players produce more points. what happened to oleg penkovsky family. This year, the WNBA gave companies the opportunity to sponsor a second jersey patch, while offering sponsors the chance to include a logo on the court during games that dont air on ESPN. From 1990 to 2012, for instance, MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL teams got a mammoth $17 billion in public funds for new homes, according to research by economists Robert Baade and Victor Matheson. Kelseys been in the WNBA for 5 seasons with a career average of 12.4ppg but she put up an average of 20.2 points/game in the 2022 season. The NBA commissioner complained publicly that the WNBA was losing more than $10 million a year, but that number said more about how the women's game was still small scale than about any . The WNBA has been demanding justice for Black lives. Why hasn't anyone Charles Barkley appeared on The Bird and Taurasi Show during the 2023 womens national title game on Sunday and didnt hold back his thoughts on what WNBA players go through in comparison to other sports leagues. Now, as the league begins a 25th season of soldiering on in the face of those tired arguments, perhaps the time has. Kelsey Plum currently makes $200,000/year as a point guard for the Las Vegas Aces. Since most major sports are at around 50%, you could look at that and say the players are still leaving considerable cash on the table. Silver was ready to hear about investment and commitment and even empowerment. The State . "If players are talking ridiculous salaries ," Silver began. So not only are the players taking home 30% less than their NBA counterparts its 20% of a much smaller pie. Its so much wear and tear. Critically, they have called on U.S. Soccer to spend more on marketing, in part by investing much more in the NWSL. Low investment and media coverage have led to limited viewership, rights deals and sponsorships, which leads to low pay, which hampers the development of new talent and initiatives, which leads to low investment and media coverage. In recent years, players, teams and even athletes in other sports ice hockey Olympic gold medalists, Canadian soccer pros and W.N.B.A. In the court of public opinion, however, something snapped after those March filings. And he'll get paid this massive sum to go championship-chasing with an in . That risk/reward ratio, combined with restricted-free-agency rules, has created more incentive to tank for teams in the WNBA than for those in any other major sport. "We're just like 'Could I get the same media coverage, and the corporate sponsor looks, and things like that?'" This new reality will only be reflected in our future financial results.". The NFL was the same age in 1943, a year when it fielded only eight teams, including the Brooklyn Dodgers, and averaged a third of its 2019 per-game attendance. In 2017, for example, a majority of the most popular sports sites on the Internet didn't dedicate even one page to a women's sport or league, according to research by Berri. "That meme has just made my comments, like, on another level," she said. Meanwhile, Leandro Barbosa is scheduled to earn $500,000 from the Phoenix Suns in 2017-18. It's not about the amount of effort or the quantity of inputs. Total revenue for the NBA hit $7.4 billion in 2022. The answer is that reward is not necessarily proportional to effort. The Russian media isnt being particularly forthcoming with information about her detainment, but as of March 8, shes still in Russia. The Daily Nebraskan (@dailynebraskan) Instagram photos and videos. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. Many of the women dont get lucrative endorsements, and getting into broadcasting or some other sports-adjacent field once they retire is not guaranteed. ", The WNBA legend said people "think we think that when we say things like 'We want equality,'" but that, in actuality, she and her colleagues want "the same media coverage and the corporate sponsor looks.". I do not know if the difference in demand for mens and womens basketball is because of a difference in the quality of the product or because of sexism on the part of consumers. Jessica Luther is a freelance journalist, an author and a co-host of the feminist sports podcast Burn It All Down.. It sounds unarguable. 1 pick in the NBA draft in 2012. But a generation is still a generation. John Phelan is an economist at the Center of the American Experiment and fellow of The Cobden Centre. They kept telling her, "This is the legacy we want to protect.". So what's really at stake? "We have to consider why the revenue is different, what bias and discrimination are in play," says Lindsay Kagawa Colas, senior vice president for women's sports at Wasserman, whose clients include a bevy of the WNBA's biggest stars, such as Diana Taurasi and Maya Moore, as well as gymnast Katelyn Ohashi and swimmer Simone Manuel. Griners current yearly salary in the WNBA is $227,900, which is just about a fourth of what she made in Russia this winter, and there are only three players in the WNBA who make more than Griner by $194. Steph Curry's salary ($40 million) is more than three times as much as what every player in the WNBA earned in 2019 combined ($12.5 million). And make no mistake, fans today have more access than ever to the games played by female athletes, because a burgeoning number of networks and apps, hungry to acquire and offer new content, are programming all kinds of formerly "niche" sports. They could make the WNBA season longer than 36 games, which might allow for more time for fans to become invested in teams. I know this is a controversial statement because women are never supposed to ask for more than they have, lest they be ungrateful for whatever theyve been given thus far. "The good news is that folks outside the federation, from sponsors to broadcasters to partners, are incredibly bullish on the U.S. women's national team and on women's football," Levinson says. In a way, this strategy makes perfect sense. CBS Sports Network struck a deal in 2019 to show 40 WNBA games a year, increasing the number of regular-season contests on national television by more than 60%. By entering your email and clicking Sign Up, you're agreeing to let us send you customized marketing messages about us and our advertising partners. "I think they're going to all drag the federation along, hopefully to a place where there's equal pay and beyond.". The WNBA players get paid less than $80,000 averagely in 2019-20, while NBA players earned $7.4 million averagely in the same period (Berri, 2020). From the highest-paid athletes to the newest rookies, professional male athletes are still making significantly more money than women. These women should be paid more. From 2005 to 2018, municipalities in the U.S. forked over a combined $738 million in subsidies for new Major League Soccer fields. Women's professional soccer was actually banned in Germany until 1970, England until 1971 and Brazil until 1979; the NWSL, its latest and longest-lived incarnation in the U.S., has now been playing for seven years. Many. Another argument is that women's national teams for sports like soccer have far more success than the men's national team. He certainly was right about that. Just maybe, however, that cycle is breaking at this moment, because women athletes are changing the terms of business in two of the world's biggest sports. [Harrison Barnes, the highest paid player on the Dallas Mavericks, made $24 million last season. Refresh the page, check Medium 's. And that's led to more viewers (Women's College World Series ratings have increased by nearly 40% since 2000), more revenues (up 360% from 2003 to 2016) and, in turn, more broadcasts (more than 1,600 games, including all of the playoffs, were scheduled for this season before the pandemic struck). Leading WNBA players were stunned, but they took note of the NBA's terminology, which was full of words like "development," "programmatic opportunities," "supporting infrastructure" and "tools for top young players to grow." A WNBA spokesperson reached out to HuffPost after this op-ed was published, however, and said the WNBA has lost significant money every year and has shared its financials with the Players Association. Sustained exposure has certainly been a boon to college softball, to which ESPN has held the rights for 40 years. Las Vegas Aces point guard Kelsey Plum wants to change that. Demanding that female players be paid what they deserve is not about comparing the WNBA to the NBA as apples-to-apples salaries. Even compared with other fields traditionally dominated by men, it's far harder for women to break into the upper ranks of compensation in sports. More recently, men's soccer clubs have kept the gravy train rolling. 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Compare that to the NFL average of $2.7 million (median is $860K), $4.41 million in the MLB, $3.5 million in the NHL, and the average NBA salary is a whopping $9.662 million for the 2022-23 season. I thought the main issue in women's sports was equal pay. I was wrong In 1881, Freidrich Engels wrote an article for the Labour Standard titled A Fair Day's Wages for a Fair Day's Work. You still hear the phrase today. New arenas allow teams to improve their game experience, hike prices and build up adjoining land. In 2015, the WNBA averaged 202,000 viewers on ESPN and ESPN2. As demands for equal pay spark across arenas, boardrooms, TV screens, Twitter feeds and even presidential campaigns, it's time to take a deeper look. Just as the Bangladeshis arent poor because they are lazy, Americans arent rich because of hard work. Under side-by-side photos of Bird and James, the photo compared the ballers' seasons in their respective leagues, number of championships, annual salary, and bonus for winning the Finals. As important as the equal pay lawsuit is for the players who are seeking back pay and damages, it's essentially about the past. From the point of view of the team owners, the measure of output that matters is the revenue the players generate. ESPN, for instance, dedicated more than 16,000 hours across all its platforms and partners to the programming of women's sporting events last year, up from 7,500 in 2015 and just 1,500 in 2010. And while companies have shown more interest in backing female athletes recently, men's leagues and teams still captured 93% of the $31 billion that corporations around the globe spent on sports last year, according to a November 2019 report by the German research firm Statista. "I believed," he said, "the WNT was much more likely to qualify for and succeed in their tournament than the MNT was.". The highest-paid players in the WNBA make less than 14 percent of that. What Should Be Done About the Gender Pay Gap in Sports? Bird and Ray's conversation stemmed from graphics that began circulating on social media after both Bird, and Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James won their fourth WNBA and NBA titles, respectively, during the 2020 season. And I dont want to lose the WNBA or miss out on seeing the best female basketball players playing in the league. "People think we think that when we say things like 'We want equality.'". This is something that the 150-ish WNBA players have been fighting to change for quite some time. Sue Bird is one of the greatest players in WNBA history, but that doesn't mean she thinks she and her colleagues in the W should be paid the same as their male counterparts. Sabreena Merchant is a women's basketball Staff Writer for The Athletic. The WNBA is a great product but yall should not have to do to these crap countries to make money, Barkley said. The league confirmed that all WNBA players other than Griner are out of Russia and Ukraine. Id love to have Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi on commercials. Investment includes public money too, usually in the form of taxpayer-financed stadiums. We had incredibly thrilling semifinals series that went a full five games apiece. Realizing that FIFA awards much bigger prizes in men's events, the federation gave greater incentives and rewards to the men's national team, hoping they would bring home more cash. On the other hand, sports news and highlight segments have historically focused overwhelmingly on men. They may exert the same physical effort, but far more money is handed over by consumers to the NBA than the WNBA in return for all this. Just five WNBA teams were playing in NBA arenas, with two others at college campuses, two at casinos, two in G League gyms and the New York Liberty shunted to a 5,000-seat facility in Westchester County, 30 miles from Manhattan. News coverage of women's sports seems to have shifted considerably in just the past few years, though there aren't any published studies yet to say by just how much. "The bar is pretty f---ing low," says one executive close to the team, noting that U.S. Soccer contributed less than $850,000 to the NWSL's administrative costs last year. Should the WNBA Be Paid Like NBA Players? - Medium THE CHANTS BEGAN almost as soon as the U.S. women's soccer team won the World Cup last July. And yet, they do it, in large part, for the financial security it provides. I just got the same amount of rings, maybe more. But once two sides establish good faith in a negotiation, both can see spending -- or sacrifice -- as an investment. ", The salary gap between men and women athletes echoes the huge difference in revenues between men's and women's sports. As a result of all this, merchandise sales grew by 18 percent in 2017, attendance has increased, more people are tuning in, and players are acquiring significant social media followings. But using league revenue, economics professor Dave Berri was recently able to calculate a significant gender wage gap in another respect. The financial disparities between the leagues are undeniable. Those are honorable reasons to stick with the WNBA, but players shouldnt have to choose between these personal anchors to the league and their need to make a living. Male vs Female Professional Sports Salary Comparison Therefore, it is not surprising the WNBA pays lower salariesIn 2017, the WNBA posted its highest attendance in six years. A league requires seed money to grow. And if Russian police detaining one of the most prolific dunkers in womens basketball who makes four times her U.S. salary by playing overseas in the offseason isn't enough to make people realize we need to be paying WNBA players more, I dont know what will. They could, for example, have tighter shorts." The new CBA raises the WNBA salary cap by 30% and boosts maximum annual salaries from $117,500 to $215,000. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
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