For years, WNBA bigwigs whispered that ESPN was holding the league back.
As the league’s only national partner with sole oversight of the postseason, what the Worldwide Leader said was law. When fans complained about the shrunken WNBA postseason format, bad TV windows, or a lack of coverage, ESPN was an easy target.
But the WNBA has leverage after cashing in on skyrocketing viewership the past two seasons by quadrupling its TV rights revenue and tripling its national partners. Right on time, ESPN also needs a new date for Sunday nights after a nasty breakup with Major League Baseball. Luckily for both sides, the WNBA is sitting pretty as the perfect rebound for ESPN.
WNBA basketball is a clear fit to replace Sunday Night Baseball. Its schedule offsets women’s college basketball and lasts from midway through the NBA playoffs through the NFL season. Great talent is already on staff. For the first time, ESPN has an incentive to keep its status as the dominant place for women’s basketball as fans tune into new platforms to watch as the competition grows.
The result could be a win-win.
According to ESPN PR, the 2024 season produced the 11 most-watched WNBA games ever on ESPN and the top three most-watched WNBA games ever on ABC. CBS also saw fantastic results, creating a midday Saturday national window for the WNBA in 2023 and 2024, with viewership doubling year-over-year and drawing seven-figure audiences for several games. The league has proven it is a draw with premier teams (especially Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever) in exclusive windows. More national WNBA dates for ESPN will almost assuredly draw massive returns.
Those games also come at a bargain. Despite the WNBA 4x-ing its broadcast rights revenue on the back of Clark’s arrival, there’s already a credible case that ESPN, Amazon and NBC undervalued the league. Just looking at basketball alone, a national WNBA regular season game with Clark draws more viewers than most NBA regular season games. And the WNBA Finals proved that a growing fanbase will tune in even when Clark is not playing.
The three networks are paying around $200 million combined annually for WNBA rights, compared with around $7 billion combined annually for the NBA. The men’s league has many more games, a bigger postseason bracket, and more goodies like All-Star weekend and the In-Season Tournament that the WNBA does not, but even with that, it’s hard to account for the NBA getting 35-times what the W is getting. That’s good news for networks like ESPN, especially considering the NIL-era college stars are just starting in the pros.
If ESPN wanted to pare back its commitment to MLB because it was overpaying, we can assume it would milk its WNBA cash cow while it could. It’s the smart business move (and if the Worldwide Leader really wants to turn the knife, it could plug the WNBA into off-weeks for Sunday Night Baseball this June and July before its MLB deal is technically up).
For ESPN, it’s also about owning the sport. The network owes massive credit to talents like Elle Duncan, Holly Rowe, Chiney Ogwumike, Andraya Carter, and Monica McNutt, who dedicated their energy to covering the WNBA even when their bosses undervalued it. Now, ESPN can take advantage of the polished experts on its staff who are more than ready to take the network’s coverage to the next level. It can also create a cohesive year-long structure around women’s basketball, building off its investment in the women’s NCAA basketball tournament with talent and on-court star power that crosses over. If all goes according to plan, ESPN will continue to be seen as the top dog on WNBA coverage even when the newcomers arrive on the scene, and it loses its stranglehold on the postseason and Finals.
NBC and Amazon won’t join the fray until 2026, almost a full year after they start airing NBA games. But beyond staving them off as challengers, ESPN will have to fend off poachers for its top WNBA analysts. What better way to keep them than to give that talent a bigger platform and invest in the league they cover at a higher level?
That brings us to studio programming. For years, ESPN denied the WNBA a pre- or postgame show, even during the postseason. Through the backdoor, Duncan, Ogwumike, and Carter turned the women’s basketball College GameDay into a hit during the NCAA tournament. There’s your WNBA Countdown studio panel! The WNBA, a league with tremendous access and players who know its value, would be more than game to make its stars available for interviews and other access.
Looking ahead, the WNBA reportedly has an opt-out after six years of the new TV deal. It is also permitted to negotiate additional side deals like the ones it struck with ION and CBS in recent seasons. After years of putting games on ESPN2, Twitter, or Facebook, the WNBA knows the value of great TV slots. To show off its growing audience and prove its value to networks, the league will want those Sunday nights just as badly as ESPN and ABC.
If the past two years were about the WNBA punching above its weight, the coming years will see the league come for its summer throne. The timing couldn’t be better for the league or its top partner at ESPN.
