「经济学人」Holding court

Already wildly popular, women’s basketball still has room to grow

WHEN THE Dallas Wings tip off against the Minnesota Lynx on May 16th, it will mark the start of the most anticipated season of women’s sport in history. The schedulers of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) have picked a game with muscle. The Lynx have won four titles, a joint record. The Wings, meanwhile, have snapped up this year’s most exciting recruit in Paige Bueckers, a 23-year-old point guard. Thanks to her, the Wings’ ticket sales so far are up almost 350% from last season.

The WNBA is powering forward. Last year a total of 54m viewers tuned in to watch the regular season, almost double the number that watched in 2022. Games broadcast on espn attracted an average of 1.2m viewers in America; 1.5m watched the equivalent matches in the men’s league across all channels. (Men make up 60% of the WNBA’s audience, in part because the league plays when the NBA does not.) And next year a new media-rights deal will come into effect, worth $200m a year. This will make the WNBA the most valuable women’s sports league in the world, surpassing the National Women’s Soccer League. How did it get so popular?

In the past decade, women’s basketball has become easier to find and watch. WNBA matches used to be broadcast sporadically, on obscure channels and at random times of the day. In 2015 ESPN televised only 11 games in the season. “You had to guess when it would be on,” remembers David Berri of Southern Utah University.

In 2021, to mark the league’s 25th anniversary season, mainstream networks agreed to increase their programming and broadcast at least 100 games. (This season more than 175 will be televised or streamed.) ESPN began offering more coverage of women’s college basketball too. Viewers could tune in for the annual “March Madness” knockout tournament as well as the draft, in which wnba teams select new players. “It’s not a magic trick to get people to watch women’s sports,” says Howard Megdal, a sports writer. “You simply need to give people access.”

As in other leagues, stars have played a vital role in winning the sport new fans. Athletes such as Cameron Brink and Angel Reese have shone on the court. The brightest talent is Caitlin Clark (pictured, left), a point guard for Indiana Fever, who scored 122 three-pointers in her debut season last year, after finishing college in Iowa. Much as people watch the Premier League to see spectacular goals, fans want to watch Ms Clark effortlessly float a ball into the basket from a great distance. She has greatly accelerated interest in the league, argues Mr Megdal: “An incline on a graph turned more or less into a straight [vertical] line.”

All of which means that money is flowing in. Last year companies jumped to sponsor the league and its players. (Ms Clark made $11m.) Investors are spying opportunities. New teams in Portland, San Francisco and Toronto will have joined by 2026, and rumours swirl around several more cities. In February a bid of $250m was made to add a franchise in Cleveland. Consider that in 1975, at roughly the same point in the NBA’s history, the Boston Celtics sold for $4m ($24m in today’s prices). That team is now worth $6bn.

To follow a similar trajectory, the WNBA will need to find more foreign viewers—and household names. Today the NBA has the most followers on social media of any domestic sports league in the world. Almost 70% of fans who engage with it online live outside America. Many of the league’s stars learned the game elsewhere. Giannis Antetokounmpo grew up in Greece to Nigerian parents. Joel Embiid was born in Cameroon. The international male talent pool is such that the United States finished fourth at the most recent World Cup, behind Germany, Serbia and Canada. By contrast, the American women’s team has lost just one match at the Olympics and World Cup in three decades. For Indiana Fever to catch on globally, it would help for the next Ms Clark to turn up not in Des Moines, but Dakar, Dalian or Dortmund.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Holding court”(May 15th 2025)

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