Why Women’s Basketball Doesn’t Get Paid

TV ratings are up big, TV rights fees aren't up nearly as big

Yahoo Sports noted this week that the new WNBA rights deal makes the league one of the best bargains in sports broadcasting. The numbers back the claim. The same is true of women’s college basketball, and both deals have the same explanation.

Two of the best-performing women’s sports properties — the WNBA and the NCAA Division I women’s basketball tournament — are now drawing audiences that would command much higher rights fees if either property were sold standalone on an open market. Neither one has been sold that way. There’s a few reasons for this.

The gap, in round numbers

WNBA national telecasts now average over 1M viewers. That’s roughly half the NBA’s 1.8M regular-season average. The new WNBA rights deal pays about $280M/year; the NBA’s pays about $7B. Half the regular-season audience, 4% of the money.

The 2026 NCAA women’s tournament averaged 1.3M viewers per game against the men’s 11M. The women’s tournament is valued at about $65M/year inside a broader ESPN package. The men’s tournament pulls roughly $1.1B. About 12% of the audience, about 6% of the money — and the women’s championship game alone drew 10M viewers to the men’s 18M.

If either property were being sold cleanly, on its own, with multiple buyers competing on an audited audience number, you’d expect both would price much higher. They aren’t being sold that way for at least three reasons.

One: carriage doesn’t reprice fast

ESPN and other broadcasters fund sports rights spending in large part through the network carriage fees they charge Comcast, YouTube TV, and other distributors. That rate doesn’t get rebuilt from scratch — it gets renegotiated against the prior cycle plus an escalator. The 2026 WNBA deal is anchored to what the league was worth way pre Caitlin Clark, i.e., years back when it averaged 200K viewers. And the WNBA and Women’s March Madness are just a couple sports properties inside much bigger programming lineups on NBC, CBS, ESPN, etc. Drastically re-rating one league inside a much larger bundle isn’t something networks or distributors do often (if ever).

Two: distributors are short on money

Even if ESPN or another broadcaster wanted to argue for a higher WNBA value, Comcast, Charter, YouTube TV and the like have trouble with the math. Most TV distributors are losing subs every quarter. There’s little-to-no headroom to fund new rights inflation for emerging sports leagues. The NFL, NBA, MLB, and college football already absorb whatever capacity exists.

Three: both properties were sold inside bigger deals

The WNBA was negotiated alongside the NBA’s $76B megadeal. The NBA captured its 150%+ raise on its own product and accepted a WNBA number that worked as a throw-in. The $280M wasn’t an arms-length valuation. It was the residual.

The NCAA case is also stark. ESPN paid $115M/year for 40 NCAA championships as a single package. The women’s basketball tournament — about $65M of that — is effectively subsidizing the broadcast of 39 lower-audience properties: softball, gymnastics, wrestling, and the rest. The NCAA accepted a discount on its most valuable women’s property in exchange for ESPN’s willingness to produce the rest of the inventory. Standalone estimates for the women’s tournament have been in the $80–110M range for years.

A long-term bet to watch

CNBC’s 2026 valuations put the average WNBA franchise at $460M. Golden State crossed $1B in year two, three years after paying a $50M expansion fee. Those investors aren’t underwriting the 2026 rights deal. They’re underwriting the 2036 deal, and betting that one or more of the constraints above will give way before WNBA media rights go back out to market.

The WNBA deal does include a three-year adjustment provision that lets the league and its partners revisit the value in 2028 — and the NWSL used a similar mechanism last fall to expand its deal mid-cycle after 72% YoY ESPN viewership growth. So the renegotiation path isn’t entirely theoretical. But absent that kind of trigger, the W and its players are sitting on a media deal that’s much larger than its immediate predecessor but that still captures only a small fraction of the value implied by current TV ratings. Same for Women’s March Madness. Inertia is a mother…