Kaitlin Clark, the University of Iowa basketball player who has dazzled crowds with her deep shooting and precocious scoring prowess, is one of the biggest draws in sports.
Tickets for its games this season were nearly 200 percent more expensive than last year, according to Vivid Seats, a ticket exchange and resale company. Fans routinely traveled hundreds of miles to see her, queuing for hours before the upset and boosting local economies.
A record nearly 10 million people watched her play in last year’s championship game, a loss to Louisiana State. More than three million tuned in this year when she set the career record for points scored by a female Division I college basketball player.
Now, as Ms. Clark prepares for her final NCAA tournament — No. 1 Iowa plays its first game Saturday — excitement has reached a fever pitch. One wonders whether Ms. Clark’s impact on the popularity of women’s sports, and their finances, will remain after her Iowa career ends.
Viewership, combined with media rights deals, and corporate sponsorships are the main revenue drivers for universities and professional sports. In women’s sports, these have fallen far behind what men’s sports receive. In 2019, for example, women’s sports programming accounted for less than 6 percent of coverage on ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” according to one study.
But in recent years, women’s sports have seen significant growth. A November report by Deloitte projected that women’s sports will generate more than $1 billion in global revenue this year, about 300 percent from the firm’s estimate in 2021. Globally, the number of sponsorships in professional women’s leagues increased by 22 percent in 2023, compared with a 24 percent increase in men’s sports, according to SponsorUnited, which tracks corporate sponsorships and deals.
“You need women like Caitlin Clark who are so great you can’t miss them,” said Michael Pachter, technology analyst at Wedbush Securities.
Stars play sports. The 1979 men’s national title game between Magic Johnson’s Michigan State and Larry Bird’s Indiana State remains the most-watched basketball game of all time. Both stars then joined the National Basketball Association, making the league more popular than ever.
Before the Johnson-Bird NBA era, the championship finals were broadcast on tape delay. Today, the NBA earns billions of dollars from its television deals, and star players make more than $60 million per season.
And as TV networks have tried to give viewers reasons to tune in during the streaming era, broadcast rights to popular men’s sports like football, hockey and basketball have become expensive. That has prompted networks to make deals to broadcast sports, such as women’s basketball, that don’t cost as much and whose ratings are projected to increase.
“The networks have faced a financial problem where they are paying too much for the sports they need to fill their network space,” said Andrew Barrett, managing director of STS Capital Partners who works in sports management. “You start looking at women’s sports because people will watch them.”
In January, the NCAA signed a deal with ESPN that valued the annual rights to broadcast the women’s basketball tournament at more than $60 million, more than 10 times what the network paid in its previous deal in 2011.
The network pays $25 million to $33 million a year to air some NBA games, while Scripps reportedly pays $13 million a year. The WNBA’s previous deal, exclusively with ESPN, was signed in 2013 for $12 million annually, according to the Sports Business Journal. Annual revenue nearly doubled from $100 million in 2019 to about $200 million in 2023, according to Bloomberg.
“We are not a charity,” Cathy Engelbert, the WNBA commissioner, said during a recent discussion with the law firm Kramer Levin. “We are a true sports and entertainment property.”
When Ms. Clark said she would forgo eligibility for her senior year of college to enter the spring WNBA draft, it was effective immediately. The Indiana Fever, who are expected to select her with the No. 1 overall pick in April, saw a more than 200 percent increase in their season-opening average listed price, according to Vivid Seats.
Ms. Clark’s success follows decades of progress for women in sports dating back to the 1972 passage of Title IX, which banned gender discrimination in educational settings and led to a surge in funding — and participation — in women’s sports. The World Cup won by the US women’s soccer team in 1999 sparked interest and investment at the youth level. Serena Williams changed the audience for tennis, and athletes like racehorse Danica Patrick and fighter Ronda Rousey brought new viewers to their sports.
Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College, said Ms Clark’s success was “one more event in a long line of events” that had boosted the acceptance of all women’s sports.
“There has been a positive development since Title IX was passed in 1972,” Mr. Zimbalist said.
Unlike previous generations, Ms. Clark was able to immediately reap the benefits of her fame because of an NCAA rule change in 2021 that allows college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, including through product endorsements and sponsorship deals. Ms. Clark’s sponsorship deals – worth $3 million, according to On3, a website that tracks NIL deals – mean she earns more than most WNBA players. (Her projected base salary for her rookie season is $76,000.)
Ms. Clark is hardly the first female basketball star to garner intense interest. The WNBA was founded in large part because of the popularity of women’s college basketball. Historic programs like the University of Tennessee and the University of Connecticut collected multiple championships and featured stars such as Tamika Catchings, Chamique Holdsclaw, Candace Parker, Rebecca Lobo, Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi.
But progress has come and gone. In 1997, the inaugural WNBA season, average attendance was around 10,000. Three years later, the league expanded to 16 teams. In 2023, there were only 12 teams and the average attendance was less than 7,000. The 2023 finals averaged 728,000, an improvement from 2022 but down from the 2003 finals, which averaged 848,000.
Mr. Pachter said he didn’t think the audience for women’s basketball would reach the hundreds of millions overnight. However, she sees interest continuing to grow steadily and can envision a future where a streaming service can try to own the exclusive rights to a league like the WNBA.
“You need three or four more, but they are coming,” Mr Pachter said. “They will emerge because now we are paying attention.”
