If Caitlin Clark's worth a ‘billion' to WNBA, why is she paid only a fraction of that?

New York Times

2 days ago

In 1997, economists from MIT and Cambridge co-authored a paper on the economic value of NBA superstars, focusing on Chicago Bulls' icon Michael Jordan. At the time, Jordan had already won four NBA championships, briefly retired, then returned to the league. The window in which Jordan was away from the NBA provided a clearer glimpse into the value he brought to it.
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Beyond what he meant to the Bulls, the two economists, Jerry Hausman and Gregory K. Leonard, found that Jordan generated $53 million to other teams during the 1991-92 season — around $121 million today — through analyzing star-powered factors such as gate revenue, and local and national TV revenues. Jordan was making around $3 million in salary at the time — around $7 million today. 'A significant portion of an NBA team's revenue can be traced to Michael Jordan,' they wrote.
Caitlin Clark has produced a similar financial effect on the WNBA. Since she entered the league as the top draft pick in May 2024, the Indiana Fever have become the WNBA's equivalent of The Beatles. Everywhere Clark goes, eyes follow: when she attends Pacers games, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour concert or a Kansas City Chiefs game. Even when she played in an LPGA Tour pro-am, fans flocked to the course. Clark and the Fever have set WNBA viewership records, consistently sell out Gainbridge Fieldhouse and prompt some opponents to move their games to larger-capacity NBA arenas. The Fever unveiled T-shirts this season with the tag-line 'Every Game is a Home Game.'
'To see the influence that she has on people, bringing people out here, and to see how amazing of an influence she is for sports, (that) was really cool to see firsthand,' said Nelly Korda, the world's No. 1 golfer after playing nine holes with Clark this past November.
Usually, where such attention is attracted, money follows to an athlete's pocket. Clark has gained millions in endorsement deals with Gatorade, State Farm, Nike and others (valued at $11 million in 2024, per Sportico), but it's obvious her value to the WNBA — and women's sports, more broadly — is significantly higher than the $78,066 salary she is contracted to receive.
'In my lifetime, we had Muhammad Ali, we had Michael Jordan, we had Tiger Woods, and to me, it's early, but we have Caitlin Clark,' said John Kosner, a former ESPN executive turned industry consultant. 'People who don't care and don't follow the sport that she plays (in) have been driven not just to watch, but to watch avidly.'
.@CaitlinClark22 delights fans in Dallas 👏@IndianaFever | #IONWNBA pic.twitter.com/e5KfTNFQMA
— WNBA on ION (@IONWNBA) June 27, 2025
However, she doesn't receive compensation like sport's other Mount Rushmore figures. She's unlikely to ever be paid even close to what she is really worth to the league. Her agent, Excel's Erin Kane, said she didn't think that would ever be possible.
So what is Clark worth to the WNBA?
'It's hard to believe she's not worth close to a billion to the league,' said one industry source not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
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Clark, of course, is just one of many WNBA players who is vastly underpaid — a key prompt for players currently renegotiating their collective bargaining agreement with the league. But because of how much Clark drives the league's economy, the delta between her salary, which is two-thirds the league average of $117,133 (as of opening night), and her actual value is especially stark. Consider that her salary is around 0.02 percent of the Fever's recent valuation by Forbes of $340 million.
Television ratings, attendance and merchandise sales are just some factors economists use to assess an athlete's value. That was the focus of the Jordan study three decades ago and remains relevant today.
The Caitlin Clark Effect is well-documented and taps into such categories for analysis. But Judd Cramer, an economics lecturer at Harvard, also cites the dramatic increases in both media rights deal valuations and franchise valuations across women's sports since Clark's senior year at Iowa when thinking about her value. The Fever's valuation increased 273 percent from 2024 to 2025, according to Sportico, and the average valuation of WNBA franchises rose 180 percent in that span, too.
'The idea that she (is) maybe worth 1,000 times her salary in franchise value is not inconceivable,' Cramer said.
Under the current CBA, the WNBA supermax contract is $249,244 and Clark would have to finish her rookie contract (four years) before earning that. A lot would have to change in the women's basketball landscape for her to earn 1,000 times her current salary of $78,000 — $78 million would be about $20 million more than the highest-paid NBA player (Stephen Curry) this past season. Merely multiplying Clark's salary by 10x would be a leap under the WNBA's current salary structure.
As was the case for Jordan when he stepped away from the game from 1993-95, Clark's absence — she missed five games over nearly three weeks with a quad injury — demonstrated how much she moves the needle.
Two games on NBA TV had viewership drop by 40 percent compared to the Fever's first game on the network with Clark, though one still ranked in the channel's top-10 broadcasts. Although the Fever's game against the Chicago Sky reached 1.9 million viewers – the third most for a WNBA game on CBS — it was 30 percent fewer than watched the Sky-Fever game with Clark on ABC. The resale tickets for the game at the United Center also dropped about 70 percent after Clark's injury was announced, yet it still drew a Sky-record 19,496 fans.
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'She's going to be massively underpaid because it's not just what she's doing for her team but what she's doing for the other teams,' said Michael Leeds, a professor of economics at Temple University.
Said the aforementioned industry source: 'She's making opposing owners seven figures when she shows up.'
Clark entered the WNBA at an opportune time after growing her brand at Iowa, profiting off modern name, image and likeness rules and more television exposure for women's basketball players. The WNBA was already entering a substantial growth period, too, with league revenues doubling from 2019 to 2023, per Bloomberg.
Yet, while Clark was jet fuel for the moment, the structures of the sport have stopped her from capturing her full worth.
The WNBA's ownership model prevents players from receiving the bulk of its revenue. The NBA owned half of the league before 2022, when the WNBA sold 16 percent of its equity in a $75 million capital raise, a transaction that diluted the then-12 teams' total stake to 42 percent.
NBA players take home 50 percent of basketball-related income, while the other half goes to the owners. In the WNBA, the league's owners don't even control 50 percent of the league, so a theoretical 50/50 split of total revenue would leave only 21 percent of the pie each to both the owners and the players. Beyond the realm of the hypothetical, no such splitting provision even exists in the current collective bargaining agreement; player salaries presently account for less than 10 percent of revenue.
'The WNBA is hamstrung by this, because if they tell the amazing story of what's going on in their league in terms of revenue, then they have to explain why the players are paid so badly,' said David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University.
The CBA has a mechanism for revenue sharing if certain targets are reached. However, that agreement was created in 2020, when the league played a pandemic-impacted bubble season and essentially made no money. Because the revenue targets are cumulative, the WNBA hasn't caught up despite recent rapid growth, preventing all players from benefiting from financial gains.
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The league also has a hard cap per team that limits individual salaries. The cap is currently $1.5 million, a total spread among 11 to 12 players per team. To increase the cap, and thus increase salaries, the league needs a massive growth in revenue. And the biggest driver of revenue across sports leagues is media rights.
Last year, the league signed the richest media rights deal in women's sports league history. The value of what commissioner Cathy Engelbert has called the WNBA's 'tranche 1' deals — around $200 million annually over 11 years with Disney/ESPN, NBC and Amazon as of 2026 — jumped from $33 million with ESPN in 2025. (The total value of the W's current media rights with all of its partners is about $50 million this year.)
But the uptick in value was agreed upon before Clark-mania officially began in the WNBA. The NBA and WNBA did not announce the terms of the new media rights deal until July 2024, but a source with knowledge of the agreement, who was not authorized to discuss the deal publicly, said the details were agreed upon before the start of the 2024 WNBA season, and before the announcement of the Toronto and Portland expansion teams.
At a congressional hearing this May, Bill Koenig, the NBA's president of global content and media distribution, said the WNBA was mindful of the league's growth trajectory and put in provisions to reflect the league's upside. The WNBA can still sell additional media rights as part of its 'tranche 2' deals; it currently has deals with ION and CBS, for instance, and just extended its agreement with ION in June. There is also a revenue-sharing provision in the 'tranche 1' agreement, in which the WNBA would benefit incrementally if advertising revenue exceeds a certain level.
Perhaps most importantly to the league's future revenue is an opportunity for the WNBA to initiate a 'look-in' provision in three years to increase the value of the agreement.
But experts said it's still unclear how much renegotiated media rights deals would be worth. Leeds, the Temple professor, said that it is difficult to ascribe broadcast rights effects directly to a single player, because the negotiation involves a broader, multi-year package. Furthermore, while the WNBA's national regular-season ratings are comparable to those of major men's leagues and set records (or near records) on an almost weekly basis, WNBA playoff ratings still lag.
'Media value is not something that is particularly precise and calibrated to exactly what happens week-to-week, month-to-month or even year-to-year,' said Ed Desser, a longtime NBA employer who negotiated the WNBA's first media contract and is now an industry consultant.
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Though the incoming media rights deal is a historic sum for the WNBA, the total figure is still only about five times the current deal and future increases via the look-in are unlikely to be massive. Even if all of the TV revenue were funneled into player salaries, the individual max would still be in the realm of $1.25 million. Thus, this source of revenue would still fall short of capturing the additional value Clark has brought the league.
Cramer, the Harvard economist, hasn't modeled how much of the WNBA's economic growth can be attributed to Clark, but he said, 'Consider if there was an increase in the league over a 10-year horizon in the order of billions. If she's 25 percent of that, then that's how I would say she could have brought $750 million to the league.'
He said she's made an even more significant impact on the economics of women's sports more broadly.
'I think her overall value to women's sports starts with a B,' Cramer said. 'It's in the billions for sure.' His insight draws on the significant increases in media rights and franchise valuations over the last few years, as Clark rose to prominence in college and now stars in the pros. All of this projection comes before Clark has played in an Olympics, made a deep postseason run, or even finished a season with a winning record.
Clark will almost assuredly never receive in salary what she is worth to the WNBA. In that regard, she's a lot like Jordan, and other all-time greats across sports. Yet, no matter the challenge in quantifying her value, her impact is palpable.
As Kosner, the former ESPN executive, put it, 'I think every commissioner in every sport wishes he or she had a Caitlin Clark.'
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Visual data: Thomas Oide / The Athletic; Photo of Caitlin Clark:)