After the big bang: women’s basketball in 2025 — Live from Sienna Betts’ debut for UCLA

Basketball Wednesday

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My biggest question after the explosion of 2024 about women’s basketball in a macro sense came down to this: how sticky would the gains be? I was optimistic, because those of you who have been here for longer than a calendar year understand that this growth predates 2024 by quite some time. Even so, the exponential rate of expansion — both figuratively and literally — wasn’t guaranteed to continue at the same rate. It would have been strange if it did.

Caitlin Clark‘s rise was a singular event made possible by the landscape and groundwork ahead of and around her. Expecting her to repeat this in 2025, with a similar catalytic event, wasn’t a reasonable goal. Keeping the ratings and attendance gains in place and growing WNBA revenue around this? That was the true ceiling.

I don’t think anyone can argue women’s basketball failed to reach this. Just one data point, though this was the pattern: the 2025 WNBA Finals were largely indistinguishable, ratings-wise, from the 2024 Finals. And no offense, Mercury-Aces, but there wasn’t as much drama in your series as there was in Liberty-Lynx! Regular-season ratings held many of their games despite a largely lost season for Clark do to injury, which served as more than just an implicit rebuke of the idea that the WNBA was a one-woman show. It reinforced the data supporting the new permanence of women’s basketball in the overall sports landscape.

And all of that was on a shoestring budget! We are on the cusp of a new period I have spent years writing about. The new media rights deal with ESPN, which comes with a massive bump over the previous agreement, takes effect in 2026. No, there’s not yet pen to paper, but listen to the language our of players like Clark and Kelsey Plum and the likeliest endpoint – a lot more money means a deal can be reached, even when some people made this negotiations unnecessarily personal — is clearly in sight.

Labor peace, a new runway for well-capitalized expansion teams, long-term economic security from media rights, the lifeblood of any league’s finances — this is the essential way the WNBA locks in the gains of 2024 and 2025 for the future.

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That does all make massive increases in revenue relatively unlikely over the next few years, though. That’s not to say women’s basketball has peaked in popularity. I don’t remotely believe that. But even a dramatic growth in ratings isn’t going to change much on the TV revenue side. The deal with ESPN is for 11 years! There are other, shorter deals with places like Versant, so the money can grow. But it’s not the arrow pointing straight up that the last two years have brought.

Similarly, expansion to 18 taking us out to 2030 means a lot more money in from expansion fees. But short of committing to a vastly bigger league, that money is now in place, with a roadmap for teams through the end of the decade. T(he only wiggle room is the NBA and WNBA deciding between themselves that they can achieve multiple goals by expanding the WNBA season and reducing the length of the NBA season, something I’ve written about here.)

This is all why the debate over revenue share compared to guarantees has never made a whole lot of sense. There’s a lot more revenue now! But over the next few years, that’s not likely to go up or down much. Finding the sweet spot where players receive massively more money than they had been is the obvious endpoint. But there’s relatively little risk for either side from there short of ESPN itself going bankrupt.

This growth was echoed in the college game. No Caitlin Clark, no championship game 30% more watched than the men this time around. But the 8.5 million who did watch reminded us all that when Charlie Baker and the NCAA decided $65 million was a reasonable valuation for the women’s tournament, they sold cheaply. The men’s tournament, remember, gets $1.1 billion per year. Their title game was watched by 18.1 million people. That’s around twice as much viewership at 17 times the price.

Still, while I have issues with the way the NCAA failed to capture this moment fully, it is indisputable that having a media rights deal with some real money behind it, and critically, a unit payout for teams who win games in the NCAA Tournament, will change how athletic programs value women’s basketball going forward. It already has.

If this all feels like less than enough, that is the story writ large of women’s sports and, I’d argue, American feminism as a whole. There are wins, and there is work to do, and it is important to always savor the former without losing sight of the latter. Both can be true. We can live in the gray area on this.

It is an understatement to say that we live in turbulent times, ones in which what we knew to be true is rapidly disintegrating under our feet. If anything, that only reinforces how significant the infrastructure-building we’ve seen in women’s basketball is, how strong the pull of this sport is and how even targeted efforts to minimize it, which we see every time women’s basketball makes gains dating back to the very dawn of the sport in the 1890s, are likely doomed this time around.

I leave 2025 with more worries than I entered this year with on almost every topic you can name. But not women’s basketball. The state of the sport is strong.

“Becoming Caitlin Clark” is available now!

Howard Megdal’s newest book is here! “Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar” captures both the historic nature of Clark’s rise and the critical context over the previous century that helped make it possible.

Secure Your Copy

This week in women’s basketball

Jackie and I talked New York Liberty on the latest The IX Sports Podcast women’s basketball edition.

Get to know Fadima Tall.

Jazzy Davidson is a must-watch.

Sayvia Sellers is spurring a revival in Washington.

Unrivaled is almost here!

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Five at The IX: Live from Sienna Betts’ debut

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