The crucial unanswered questions about Project B — Teri Moren talks Indiana

Basketball Wednesday

Presented by The BIG EAST Conference

There is virtually nothing known about it so far, despite some solid reporting from my colleagues like Doug Feinberg and Annie Costabile. But there are massive gaps in what we do know, and how those get filled in will inform everyone, including those nervous about the impact of the new league on the women’s basketball landscape.

Let’s start with what we do know.

The league is expected to begin play in November 2026. It has signed Nneka Ogwumike and Alyssa Thomas, with a pair of public reveals, to contracts that are, per Feinberg’s story, higher than what they could be paid in the WNBA or Unrivaled. And the league is supposed to include 66 players, without any interference in the traditional WNBA calendar.

All sounds good so far, right? Players getting paid more, a cooperative calendar with existing leagues, and effectively attempting to bridge the American offseason gap in competition with Athletes Unlimited and Unrivaled.

The questions come from, well, everything else. Here are the reasons so many people I spoke to around the WNBA have some apprehension, and I am absolutely in wait-and-see mode here as well.

Let’s start with the idea that the league set a goal of raising $5 billion. Players, per Costabile, are being offered $2 million annual salaries, or roughly 9-10 times what Unrivaled’s average salaries were a year ago, along with equity in the new venture (as Unrivaled has done).

There are two critical questions that level of financial commitment raises: where is the money coming from, and what do investors expect for a return on their financial outlay?

Let’s start with the second question. Even if we think of this as a 10-year runway, exactly how a series of exhibitions across Asia, Latin America and Europe will produce anything like $500 million annually in revenue is hard to fathom. Just to put this in current terms, both Unrivaled and the WNBA are powered financially by their media rights deals. The WNBA, as we’ve covered here, begins a new deal next season that raises its operating capital exponentially. Unrivaled’s genius was in building a deal with Turner Sports that included a six-year payout, pairing its initial investment with true operating capital.

Neither one of these deals is anywhere close to $500 million annually — which, again, is a back-of-the-napkin math assuming investors are comfortable with a ten-year runway. If it’s less? The math gets even more daunting. Nor is Project B revealing how much of that sought-after $5 billion it actually raised, nor why $5 billion was even the number.

Does Project B simply replace overseas leagues? Many of those teams, paying higher salaries than the WNBA, operate as vanity projects. The advantage to putting all of this WNBA offseason talent in one place is that the piecemeal way the overseas market operates each season would be simplified. The disadvantage? If it isn’t diversified, and the key financiers pull the plug, what happens to players in a post-Euroleague world? Think of it like a stock portfolio, with players set to put everything into one new, largely undefined stock. Maybe it’s Apple! (Maybe it isn’t!)

This is less of an issue for Ogwumike, who will be 36 by next November, and Thomas, who will be 34 next November. It would be unfair to claim that Ogwumike and Thomas have some financial obligation to future generations of players to make sure the profession of women’s basketball remains sustainable over time, though Ogwumike’s role with the WNBPA — the president — certainly does complicate that question. It also doesn’t mean their decision to go get a life-changing payday is, on balance, best for the future of the women’s basketball landscape overall.

That is, especially, as we consider the first question raised. In a cleanup effort after the initial publicity, co-founder Grady Burnett said this to Costabile about Project B’s relationship with Sela Sport:

“We have partnerships with a lot of companies around the world,” Burnett told Costabile. “Sela is one event partner that we pay money to. We do not have any dollars coming from them. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary based in London that has done a ton of events globally, including the most recent big boxing events, the America’s Cup, a bunch of other global sporting events. They are a global partner of many people around the world.” 

It’s worth breaking down just how much nonsense Burnett packed into one soundbite. Sela Sport, for those who may not know, isn’t some random company in London. It exists at the pleasure of the Saudi Arabian government, through that ruling party’s sovereign wealth fund. Back in February, it was reported to be a “strategic partner” of Project B, and now it is supposedly an “event partner” who Project B pays money to?

Why would Project B pay money to Sela Sport, which exists to spend money and aid the justifiably horrific public reputation of the Saudi government? The events Burnett cited were… sponsored by Sela Sport! The money flowed from Sela to these events, not the other way around. The Saudis are happy to tell you this themselves! No event anywhere is paying sponsors for the right to be associated with them. And that’s obviously extra true of the Saudi government.

Which brings us back to Sela Sport’s actual track record, and the part I have the most concern about. In another life, I covered Sela Sport’s purchase of the New York Cosmos. Briefly, for those who weren’t privy to the mid-2010s men’s soccer wars: Major League Soccer existed with a firm commitment to long-term sustainability which, depending on who was talking, either meant good reason to keep a restrictive salary cap in place or was a talking point used to do so. (Sound familiar?)

The Cosmos argued they would blow up this model, and spent handsomely to do so, bringing in overseas talent like Marcos Senna and Raul. The problem, though, was that there really wasn’t any plan beyond:

Step 1: Add massive talent infusion, making the Cosmos must-see

Step 2: ??????

Step 3: Profit!!!!

The Cosmos wanted to build a signature stadium, and the renderings were beautiful, but New York wouldn’t let them build it. The Cosmos played in a league, yes, but the North American Soccer League, version 2.0, wasn’t remotely built to support the club’s ambitions. And that left just the U.S. Open Cup as a once-a-year, ride-or-die place for the Cosmos to prove themselves each season. The loudest postgame anger I ever heard in my years covering sports came from inside the visiting locker room after the Philadelphia Union beat the Cosmos in the Open Cup in 2014.

By 2017, Sela Sport had sold its majority stake in the Cosmos. The team was losing $30 million a year. Similar efforts at disruption have followed in men’s golf, with to-date disastrous results. The PGA Tour did suffer from some significant financial issues in the process, however, to the point it had at one point agreed to merge with LIV Golf.

Even something that merely stops WNBA momentum in its tracks is worrisome to many of the same folks around the league who worry about that for a different, seemingly contradictory reason: that a failure to properly raise salaries now will cripple the league’s ability to retain and add talent.

The league’s middle class of players should be particularly loud right now, as multiple sources tell The IX Basketball the overall salary cap increase on the table would not keep pace with proposed jumps in rookie and max salaries. That would be the second straight CBA which does so. Our Isabel Rodrigues at The IX Basketball documented how problematic that was the first time around for the WNBA’s rank-and-file veterans here.

Leave aside the difficulty anyone should have arguing that tech investors or the Saudi government are here to provide better wages to women’s basketball players out of some sense of women’s empowerment. That’s beside the point. The WNBA is growing now, and there are important qualitative arguments to be made that the league’s players operating as a force for social good has played an important role.

But the reason ownership groups paid $250 million apiece for franchises in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia this summer wasn’t out of a desire to support sisters doing it for themselves. It was because the current WNBA is clearly on a strong financial trajectory with a plan for further growth which included media rights deal, corporate partnerships (that, you know, pay the league, not the other way around) and a calendar/geography footprint that gives large American markets regular access to the games.

What’s the plan for Project B to do any of that? And most critical, if high up-front salaries destabilize the growing women’s basketball landscape from the WNBA to Unrivaled and Athletes Unlimited: what happens if it doesn’t?

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Five at The IX: Teri Moren, Indiana

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