The Latest on the WNBA's CBA Negotiations
The clock is ticking...
The WNBA and the WNBAPA (Players Association) have yet to agree on the next CBA. They have extended past multiple deadlines, and time is starting to run out. There have been multiple reports out over the past week, and I wanted to share them with my audience just in case you haven’t seen them yet.
The two sides have yet to reach an agreement because they are far apart on how much revenue the players should receive. The WNBA (league, owners, investors) wants to give the players roughly 70% of the net income, which has been reported to be equivalent to around 15% (or less) of the gross income. The players are seeking around 30% of the gross income.
Annie Costabile of Front Office Sports recently wrote.
“The WNBA is still proposing a salary cap of $5.65 million and based on the league’s revenue projections, players would still not receive more than 15% of total revenue during the agreement… On Feb. 17, the WNBPA submitted a proposal seeking a salary cap below $9.5 million and a 25% share of the league’s total revenue in year one of the deal. That revenue share would average out to 27.5% over the life of their proposed CBA. The WNBA issued a statement late Tuesday calling the union’s proposal “unrealistic” and alleging it would result in “hundreds of millions of dollars” in losses for the league.”
Without a deal in sight, ESPN’s Alex Philippou wrote about the league’s latest ultimatum.
“The WNBA told the WNBPA and its teams on Monday that a new collective bargaining agreement should be agreed to by March 10 for the 2026 schedule not to be impacted, sources told ESPN… Even once a deal is agreed upon, it could take weeks to formally ratify. The WNBA still needs to conduct a two-team expansion draft for the Toronto Tempo and Portland Fire and hold free agency for 80% of the league.
Training camp is currently slated to begin April 19, with the college draft scheduled for April 13. The regular season is supposed to tip on May 8…”
To add an interesting nugget to all of this back and forth, ESPN’s Katie Barnes reported that the Players’ Union announced that the league made enough money for revenue sharing to be paid out.
“For the first time in history, the WNBA generated enough revenue in 2025 to trigger revenue sharing with its players, union leadership told ESPN on Sunday. Union leaders said the league notified player leadership earlier this month that they hit the benchmark. The 13 teams will receive a total of $8 million from the league to disperse among players, the union said.
The Women’s National Basketball Players Association declined to provide bank statements, the amount of revenue generated by the league or the number required to trigger the revenue sharing. The WNBA declined to comment on the payments on Monday.
The revenue targets in the 2020 CBA were based on 2019 revenue numbers and compounded by 20% across subsequent years. The COVID-19 pandemic depressed revenue in the 2020 and 2021 seasons, seemingly making the cumulative targets out of reach…
Under the 2020 CBA, players would receive 50% of shared revenue -- defined in the CBA as the amount of revenue over a predetermined threshold minus 30% for expenses. In 2025, the players' portion of shared revenue amounted to about $16 million, according to the union. Of that, $8 million will be paid to players who were active in 2025, the union said. As mandated by the CBA, the other half ($8 million) will be allocated to league marketing agreements, which are offseason initiatives offered to some players to promote the league and its partners.”
This is particularly interesting because the 2020 and 2021 seasons were drastically altered negatively by the COVID-19 pandemic. That means the 2024 and 2025 WNBA seasons boosted revenue by an incredible amount.
It’s not a coincidence that this happened after star college players like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese entered the league in 2024. Paige Bueckers followed in 2025. The growth of the women’s college game in the NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) era has been significant. And that has helped boost the popularity of the WNBA once those players graduate and enter the professional league.
The fact that league revenue grew so much over the past two years is a large reason why the WNBAPA is pushing for a higher percentage of the revenue share. They are looking ahead to the future, and they strongly believe the WNBA will continue to grow by leaps and bounds over the next several years.
The WNBA wants to keep the players at around 15% or less of gross income. The players are pushing for around 30%, but have recently dropped that number a little bit. If you split the difference from 15 to 30%, that would put things around 22.5% of the gross revenue to the players. Would the players ultimately accept that? Should they?
If neither party is willing to budge on their demands, I have a hard time believing they will reach an agreement within the next two weeks. If they don’t, we are looking at a shortened 2026 WNBA season. Or worse yet, no season at all.
Even if it goes past the March 10th deadline, it’s not impossible to still have a season. In 2020, in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, the players and league were able to salvage a season and worked out a deal where the teams played 22 games that year (instead of 34, which was the norm at the time).
The WNBAPA is still working in good faith to get a deal done with the league, but they have suggested they could go on strike as an option if nothing is resolved. The league doesn’t work without the players, so hopefully both parties will come to an agreement soon.
Notes:
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Linked articles:
https://frontofficesports.com/wnba-cba-no-financial-concessions/
https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/48014819/union-wnba-made-enough-money-revenue-sharing
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The owners are basically daring the players to strike at this point. Their offer of just 15% of the gross revenue is incredibly greedy, in my opinion, but they've made it clear in their last few offers that they aren't going to meet anywhere close to the middle. (They moved like half a percent two offers ago and not at all in their most recent offer, while the players went down from 32 to 30 and then down to 27%.) The deadline two weeks from now makes sense as the point where we're either starting on time or not. So now it's basically on the players to either cave or go on strike. Maaaybe they can talk the owners up a few points in order to avoid the possibility of a strike (and/or maybe they can get the owners to switch to gross revenue, which is clearly the "right" answer and how every other league does things), but the behavior of the owners in these negotiations so far leads me to believe that they don't think the players will strike. They think the players are bluffing and will fold.