WNBA Inks Historic Media Deal

Fresh off their highest-rated ever All-Star Game broadcast, the WNBA has closed a record-setting media rights deal that will carry them into the next decade. On July 24th, the WNBA announced a new media rights agreement that has been estimated to be worth $2.2 billion over 11 years. The rights will be shared across Disney (ESPN), NBCUniversal and Amazon.

If those partners and contract length sound familiar to NBA followers, they should. The NBA owns the WNBA, and they negotiated both leagues’ media rights in tandem. The NBA deal was approved by the NBA’s board of governors earlier in July and totals approximately $76 billion over 11 years and includes coverage on the same partners: Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon. Warner Bros. Discovery (whose TNT network is a long-time NBA broadcaster) argued that they have rights to match the Amazon offer, but the NBA rejected Warner Bros.’s proposal. Warner Bros. Discovery filed a suit against the NBA over the dispute, so there may still be a chance they retain some rights to NBA and WNBA games.

Assuming the current agreements hold, the deal skyrockets the WNBA rights valuation past their previous media rights package. At an average of $200 million per year, the new deal is already four times the previous contract. However, the new deal leaves room for the WNBA to add more media partners— projected to bring in an additional $60 million annually—giving the new contract a likely multiple of five times their current rights package. Before the beginning of the season, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Englebert had said her goal was to at least double the league’s rights fees, and this deal shatters that goal.

The new contract will include some changes to the WNBA coverage landscape:

• Current WNBA broadcast partners are Disney, ION, CBS, and Amazon, but only Disney and Amazon are included in the new 11-year package, with NBCU as the new player.
• The WNBA is expected to bring in up to two additional partners, and ION is rumored to be one of them. ION currently broadcasts both the WNBA and the NWSL, so retaining the WNBA would bolster their goal of being a destination for women’s sports.
• Currently there is no word as to whether CBS will be bidding for the other position or if the league will have another new media partner for the 2026 season.
• With more streaming services scrambling to get live sports rights, it is always possible that another streamer (Netflix?) will be the final partner in the mix.

In an unusual move, the deal is also reported to contain some protection for the league if their audience continues to grow and the rights become undervalued. The media partners have agreed to revisit the rights package after three years with good faith talks that could lead to an even higher valuation. Given the astronomical growth that the WNBA has seen this year (a.k.a., the “Caitlin Clark effect”) it is quite possible that those renegotiations will be necessary.

This article is featured in Media Impact Report No. 57. View the full report here.