Caitlin Clark's reward for a record-smashing NCAA career: A $76,000 WNBA salary
Caitlin Clark's reward for a record-smashing NCAA career: A $76,000 WNBA salary
Women’s basketball has soared in popularity in recent years, with this year’s March Madness tournament dwarfing its men’s counterpart. There are plenty of reasons for this, but one of them is that the game is just fun to watch.
This should result in more media money, which should result in higher salaries. We'll see. Football really does suck a lot of the oxygen out of the room, financially speaking.
Another part of the discussion is that popularity is sort of meeting in the middle, since as women's basketball rises, men's college basketball has been gutted by (among other things) stars leaving after one year, as well as court-forced rule changes (completely reasonable, IMHO, because players should get agency) that have everyone else playing musical chairs as they switch schools to pursue their financial and athletic dreams rather than buckle down to get a degree, which is often nerfed anyway.
College athletics in general, and "revenue sports" in particular, try to meet the letter of the "Student Athlete" rules without giving a single shit about graduating players who have the same level of mastery and accountability as even a garden variety liberal arts major. It's not really a new thing, either. I muddled my way through an English degree, learning study skills as I went, and while I'm under no delusions that meeting the minimum standards was as hard as it would have been in an engineering program, there weren't exactly any athletes in my classes on Elizabethan Drama or the History of the English Language, either.
There are plenty of reasons for this, but one of them is that the game is just fun to watch.
I encourage everyone who takes the "it's just fun to watch" rhetoric to heart to look at NASCAR. There was a period where it was "cool" to watch NASCAR, once that hype faded and only the people who actually cared about the sport were left, they started having massive declines in spectators.
I expect women's basketball to have the same result. It'll be fun to watch for a year or two to please the feminists, but after that people will realize they don't actually care and focus more on other things.
It should, but hasn’t. That’s why this is newsworthy
It hasn't? Women's Final Four broke records in 2023. ESPN inked a $920m deal in Jan. 2024. None of this is instant. If it keeps building people will keep investing.
Hey that's about what most engineers graduating from college get. And they won't be able to do sponsorships and ad deals. I would say $76k is a much more appropriate salary to start with than what the men make in basketball. That is just crazy
She has north of 3m in sponsorship deals right now, and we can only assume that number will go up in the WNBA
It may go down in the WNBA. Caitlin Clark isn't the first player who was expected to make the WNBA popular (Maya Moore, Brittany Griner, etc). It's far too early to tell if she will have any impact on WNBA viewership.
The issue is that NIL money is also a way for boosters to pay players to stay instead of the shadowy back door deals that used to happen. Now NIL just allows boosters to pay players through a legitimate channel.
76k is barely enough to get by in a lot of urban areas ... this is a shameful compensation for one of the best players.
.....and millions in sponsorship deals
It's up to us to keep watching the WNBA to keep their salaries raising
Damn. You can’t force higher wages if the revenue isn’t coming in though. Maybe make a mixed gender league with co-ed teams.
It'd probably be dominated by the men.
While you do make a fair point...
I imagine the rules would be somewhat similar to my co-ed soccer rec league team. At least every third pass has to be to a girl etc etc.
There's ways to keep it competitive and fun for a co-ed non-contact sport. Not sure how that translates to any kind of professional setting though.
I imagine "soaring in popularity" would also mean more revenue...
The article says the women's college tournament 'dwarfed the men's tournament', but the ratings numbers I've seen show the men's tournament has had 5x the viewership. So someone's not doing their research. Plus, this is college, not the pros. If the WNBA viewership increases, then,yes, more revenue should come with the next media contract. But that remains to be seen.
The world will be just fine when we stop worshiping athletes. Hopefully this news turns more people off to it.
She already got a 5 million a year offer from big 3. Ice cube did an interview about it.
The rapper? I hate it here.
Ya but what's Ja Rule sayin?
Yeah he runs a basketball league. You can hate him for other stuff but this is legit lol
To join a joke of a league though. Much better sponsorships available if she goes into a legit league
Play for 1 year, cash 5mil for a very short season and then go do the WNBA. Sponsorship will be there regardless
Liv has entered the chat
I'm curious now what Ice Cube was offering her to join his league
I thought it was more than she'd make in her career.
I didn't say that anyone else didn't deserve more money.
hey I caught this on ABC the same parent company of ESPN
Cue useful idiots saying she doesn't make enough money for... checks notes playing sports.
You know there are doctors who make less than her?
In fact, there are countless people who work harder than her for less while actually doing something useful to society.
Well yeah sure, but these quote unquote useful idiots aren't so much complaining about the absolute dollar number, but about the discrepancy in salary with her male counterparts. I for one would be more than OK with male athletes taking pay cuts to drop to her salary level.
It's not about how much she makes, it's about the disparity in pay between men and women doing the same thing. Her making $76k for playing sports wouldn't be a callout if LeBron (or whomever) were also making $76k.
While it's fair to consider the pay disparity between men and women, you have to take it with a grain of salt. The NBA makes so much more money than the WNBA it would be crazy to think WNBA players should be paid the same when one product clearly generates more money than the other product.
They're not "doing the same" thing, though.
Playing in the WNBA is not the same as playing as in the NBA.
How many women sit down every weekend together to watch WNBA games the way the guys do though? How many fans do they have? How much merch do they sell? Seems like they want equal pay to the men but there's no equal demand
When the NBA sells a jersey with Curry's name on it, Curry gets a cut of the profit. When the WNBA sells a Breanna Stewart jersey she gets $0. This isn't complicated, they are obviously getting fucked over if you've read anything about how the business actually runs.
Very few.
How much money is put in advertising NBA vs WNBA?
Women sports get shit coverage no matter what.
The reason there is so many ads everywhere is because it works.
The women’s final four games were the most watched ESPN sporting events in history lol. At least look it up before you make inane comments
No they weren't. They were the second best non-football event on ESPN. The game on Friday was the best basketball game ever on ESPN, but it had roughly half the viewership of the highest rated Monday Night Football game and about the same as the lowest rated Monday Night Football game. You are also comparing the final two games of a one-and-done tournament to non-final best of 7 series games (ESPN doesn't show NBA Finals). The NBA Finals games average almost twice what this NCAAW Final Four had per game.
At least look it up before you make inane comments.
Also, the person asked about WNBA viewership on a weekly basis, not about a single NCAAW tournament final.
Well with fans like you no wonder people refuse to join and watch
Take a look at this. https://www.vogue.com/article/rise-of-womens-sports-bars
That's a good paying job straight out of college. Man, I wish I had a job like that first thing. She worked hard and I wish her well. Dang......76K.....just dang.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable salary to.play a child's game for a living
I wish Lemmy had a feature that let us see censored posts without sifting through the modlogs.
Yes, this comment was removed for saying "That seems like a perfectly reasonable salary to.play a child's game for a living"
I guess we're not allowed to call basketball a child's game, lol.
Lemmy mods are really competing with reddit for the most censored platform at this point.
Agreed. Unless it's something like porn or spam, I don't see much point in removing it. Hiding by default should be the extent of filtering subjectively offensive words. Or just let the community hide it via downvotes.
I find the mods here to be too overbearing. I will block users myself if all they're bringing to the table is "offensive" remarks.
I always find the forced interest in women sport weird.
There are men that train and work just as hard as professional women and don't get paid for it. We don't owe them anything just because they play a game and you can't even say it's because amateur men aren't as good because amateur men are better than professional women.
The fact there is money there at all is because of entertainment and entertainment alone and I don't like being told I need to enjoy any type of entertainment.
If I do watch a sport I'm going to want to watch the most entertaining version of that sport which will be the top mens league. If I want to watch more sport I'll watch other mens leagues around the world. If i want to wathc more then the youth teams are good because you ca follow people up through the ranks. If I really want to watch more sport I'll go support my local club which is probably still higher quality than the women's game.
The way I see it is you can either watch a oscar winning movie or you can watch some b rated poor quality movie. Watching either is fine, enjoying either is fine. But don't act like a b movie needs to make the same at box office just because a women made it.
Forced interest? Again, the recent game was the most watched basketball game in ESPN history. There’s no forced interest. The women just want the same share of revenues that men get
The NCAA isn't paying her professional salary, the WNBA is. Yearly revenue of the WNBA is $60 million. The NBA is $10 BILLION. Average viewership for WNBA games about 400,000 people; NBA is 12.4 million.
The highest NBA rookie contract is 12 Million/year. That is .0012% of NBA revenue.
76K/year is .00126% of WNBA revenue. Technically she's getting a bigger percentage of WNBA revenue than Wembamyama is of the NBA's.
It's like complaining that the Canadian Football League players aren't being paid as much as NFL players.
Bill Burr had a good take on this one. Basically, how many of the people complaining about the pay disparity in women’s basketball actually watch women’s basketball? If you want them to get paid more, you need to watch their sport so they will bring in higher ticket sales and ad revenues. His take is a lot women are complaining about this pay disparity and few of them actually even watch the WNBA, so it’s kind of hypocritical since they’re not doing the very thing that would help increase their salaries.
Joke's on Bill, I don't watch men's sports either
Closest thing to a sport that I watch is pro wrestling, and I greatly enjoy women's wrestling, so....
No, but billions of others do.
Same. I'd rather participate than be a spectator.
But participation doesn't make rich people more money, so we know what all the useful idiots are going to prefer.
Except WNBA players don't get revenue shares like NBA players do. That's what they're asking for.
Well, they should get it. I imagine some of the things NBA players have now were won through bargaining and negotiations.
And I love that he says that as someone who watches many sports regularly and spends money on everything from going to games to merchandise to even giving them air time in announcing specific events that he's interestend in during his podcast.
I don't know what the finances of the WNBA are but people should be paid by their talent and expertise. Someone preforming at a high enough level to make it into the WNBA is exceptionally rare and their salary should reflect that. Else, soon enough there won't be any WNBA players.