Why Cathy Engelbert Should Be Grateful for Caitlin Clark, Napheesa Collier, WNBA Stars
On Tuesday, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert found herself in the news cycle for all the wrong reasons.
Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier kicked off her season-ending press conference with an explosive statement in which she said the WNBA had the "worst leadership in the world." Collier shared an anecdote from this past February, when she allegedly asked Engelbert how she planned to fix rookie-scale contracts for players such as Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers, all of whom earned less than $80,000 this season but are "clearly driving massive revenue for the league."
"Her response was, '[Clark] should be grateful," Collier said. "She makes $16 million off the court because without the platform that the WNBA gives her, she wouldn't make anything.' And in that same conversation, she told me, 'Players should be on their knees, thanking their lucky stars for the media rights deal that I got them.'"
The WNBA signed an 11-year deal with Disney, Amazon Prime Video and NBCUniversal in 2024 valued at roughly $2.2 billion, according to Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic. That was a sixfold increase over the league's previous deal with ESPN, per Kurt Badenhausen of Sportico, which speaks to the explosive growth the W has experienced in the past few years.
Engelbert, who took office in 2019, has it backward, though. Those media rights deals wouldn't be possible without stars like Collier, Clark and others. They shouldn't be thanking their lucky stars for Engelbert; Engelbert should be thanking their lucky stars for them.
After all, the Caitlin Clark phenomenon began long before she entered the WNBA.
TV Ratings Setting Records Across the Board
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Before Clark ever set foot on a WNBA court, she was already a dynamo when it came to TV ratings. In May 2024, Rachel Bachman of the Wall Street Journal "looked at a sampling of top athletes to determine how much their presence increased television audiences" and found that Clark "provided both a bigger boost than nearly any other athlete and a more transformative one."
"Iowa's back-to-back runs to the NCAA women's tournament final resulted in a nearly four-fold increase in viewership for the title game in two years, to a record 18.9 million last month," Bachman wrote. "But Clark didn't just push up the audience of her own games. She also elevated the expectations for her sport as a televised product. Even viewership of non-Iowa games in the tournament jumped 76 percent year-over-year."
That carried right over to the WNBA. The 2024 draft averaged a record 2.45 million viewers on ESPN, which was more than four times as many than the 2023 draft. The previous record was 601,000 in 2004, which was the year that the Phoenix Mercury selected UConn's Diana Taurasi with the No. 1 overall pick.
The W has continued smashing ratings records ever since. Clark's debut with the Indiana Fever was the most-watched WNBA game since 2001, per Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch. The 2024 regular season drew a record 1.19 million viewers on average on ESPN, which was a 170 percent increase from the 2023 campaign. The 2024 All-Star Game had a record 3.4 million viewers, an increase of more than 300 percent compared to the 2023 edition.
That momentum didn't slow down amid Clark's injury-ravaged sophomore campaign, either. The 2025 regular season was the most-watched one since 1998 with an average of 969,000 viewers for nationally televised games, per Josh Sim of SportsPro. ESPN's 25 regular-season games drew an average of 1.3 million viewers, which was a 6 percent increase from 2024.
WNBA Attendance Has Never Been Higher
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Ratings weren't the only metric of engagement that skyrocketed for the WNBA in recent years, though. The league's attendance has also soared over the past two seasons.
Roughly 2.35 million fans attended games in 2024, which was a 22-year high and nearly surpassed the record set in 2002 (2.365 million). The league averaged 9,807 fans per game, a 48 percent increase from 2023, and had 154 sellouts in 2024 compared to 45 in 2023. The Fever also set a single-season home attendance record with 340,715 fans in total, which was nearly a 319 percent increase from 2023, per David Broughton of Sports Business Journal.
Even though Clark played only 13 games this past season, the league's attendance continued to soar. It broke its single-season record with two-and-a-half weeks left in the season and finished with a record 3.1 million fans. The WNBA played more games than ever before (286), which helped juice the numbers, but even the average attendance (10,986) set a record over the league's previous heyday from the early 2000s.
The Golden State Valkyries, who just finished their inaugural season, were a godsend in that regard. They set the WNBA's all-time single-season records for average attendance (18,064) and total attendance (397,408) after selling out all 22 regular-season home games.
With five more expansion teams set to join the W within the next five years, that stratospheric growth figures to continue over the remainder of the decade.
Franchise Valuations Have Reached Record Highs
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The Valkyries are perhaps the premier example of how the WNBA has taken off in recent years.
In 2023, the Golden State Warriors' ownership group paid a WNBA-record $50 million expansion fee to bring the Valkyries into existence, per Scott Soshnick and Eben Novy-Williams of Sportico. Two years later, Sportico estimated the Valkyries to be worth a league-high $500 million.
Franchise valuations across the league rose by 180 percent compared to 2024, per Kurt Badenhausen of Sportico, which was "more than double the previous biggest year-over-year gain from a major sports league." That's showing no signs of slowing, either, as the ownership groups of the new franchises in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia each paid a reported $250 million expansion fee.
"We have known that [women's sports] was an undervalued asset, right?" Peter Georgio, the head of Deloitte's global sports group, told ESPN's Michele Steele in March 2025. "And that markets, that investors, that brands were going to wake up to that. And I think that's what we're seeing right now, people waking up to it. The percentage increase in value of women's teams will continue to outpace men's...the men's [teams] are on a much bigger base at this point, women's will catch up."
Merchandise and Sponsorship Revenue Are Hitting New Highs As Well
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Beyond the soaring TV ratings and in-person attendance, franchise valuations are also increasing because of additional revenue streams.
In 2024, the WNBA said merchandise sales "both online at WNBAStore.com and the flagship location in New York City" increased by 601 percent from 2023. Meanwhile, merchandise sales at Dick's Sporting Goods rose by 233 percent compared to 2023.
The league hasn't released merchandise data yet for this season, but Sportico estimated that the Indiana Fever "generated $34 million in revenue last season—a nearly 300 percent jump—and should increase another 30 percent this year before any potential playoff bump."
Sponsorship revenue is also flooding into the WNBA like never before. According to a July 2025 report from SponsorUnited, team sponsorship revenue reached a record $76 million in 2024 across 450 total brands. Teams averaged 44 deals, which was a 52 percent increase from 2022.
Many of the WNBA's newcomers are fueling that explosive growth. Angel Reese, Cameron Brink, Kamilla Cardoso and Paige Bueckers, all of whom just finished either their first or second season in the WNBA, were four of the league's five most-endorsed athletes this year, according to SponsorUnited.
Where Engelbert and the Players Go from Here
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The timing of Collier's comments about Engelbert are particularly notable, as the players and the league are locked in contentious negotiations over the WNBA's next collective bargaining agreement.
"There's been multiple proposals that have gone back and forth, and neither is close," WNBPA first vice president Kelsey Plum recently said, per Sabreena Merchant of The Athletic. "It feels almost the more that we have presented, the further away we are, which is just unfortunate. But at the end of the day, I think it's just about the principle of not budging. And we have leverage, we have unity, we have a common goal, particularly in salary, and we're just not where we want to be."
The players are pushing for a more equitable split of the rapidly expanding revenue pie. Currently, WNBA players earn about 9.4 percent of the WNBA's revenue, whereas NBA players receive roughly 50 percent of the NBA's basketball-related income. WNBA Players Association president Nneka Ogwumike told ESPN's Michael Voepel and Kevin Pelton that the players are "adamant that we get a percentage of revenue that grows with the business, which perhaps includes team revenue, and that's just a part of the conversation."
The current CBA expires Oct. 31, although the two sides could agree to extend the deadline to avoid a lockout. Multiple sources told Tom Friend of Sports Business Journal that Engelbert "would likely exit as commissioner" sometime after the new CBA gets resolved.
"The sources said Engelbert's presumed departure, six years after arriving from Deloitte, is relationship-driven, tied to the way she has dealt with colleagues and players amid unprecedented growth within the league," Friend wrote. He added that Collier's comments 'presumably wont' help Engelbert's unstable public standing and most likely exacerbated it."
A WNBA spokeperson responded, telling Friend that the rumors were "categorically false," yet the damage is done.
Players across the WNBA rushed to Collier's defense and echoed her comments. Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham said Engelbert was "the most delusional leader our league has seen," while Las Vegas Aces star forward A'ja Wilson said she was "disgusted" by Engelbert's alleged remarks about Clark and WNBA's other young stars.
Clark even weighed in Thursday:
Although Engelbert's tenure as commissioner may be winding to a close either way, her lack of outright appreciation for the players who are helping to fuel the WNBA's explosive growth likely won't help at the CBA negotiating table.
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