Unconfirmed reports on Twitter say the reigning WNBA MVP tore her Achilles tendon playing in the EuroLeague title game. (photo Rebekah Welch / The Seattle Times)
Source: Storm star Breanna Stewart suffers lower leg injury playing in EuroLeague
It feels like I’ve been writing the same posts over and over again. The argument against paying women more in the WNBA is a consistent, “If they attract more viewers, they’ll get paid.” I can yell my ass off, and I would apologize for the cursing, but f that, “That’s not how this works!!!!!!” For any person who has ever owned a business and who has attempted to move people to buy something there is this thing that’s called customer acquisition. For those of you who don’t understand this, like I said I’ve written over and over on this issue as it relates to the WNBA:
This is Why More Female Athletes Don’t Have Signature Sneakers
But it seems people still don’t get it. So let’s place this into more simple terms.
The WNBA has about 220 players. I angrily wrote this post in 2017:
To Supplement Pay, W.N.B.A. Players Put Their Safety at Risk – The New York Times
In the above article the NY Times wrote that, “A player in her third year made as much as $54,609.” If the average salary is 54K on 228 players (give or take) We are looking at a league salary of $12,450,852 dollars. Once again though, I wrote another angry post on this recently that started out about adidas’ She Breaks Barriers campaign, but much like this post it turned into something else:
adidas’ ‘She Breaks Barriers’ is Needed | Now Someone Keep Them Honest
In the post above I explained exactly what it would take to give the W the shot in the arm it needs:
Gaming is a great example. While people argue that eSports earned its way to a following, the first eSports tournaments and leagues were born of the companies that created the product. Nintendo created leagues in the 90s. That’s investment. The rise of gaming was not because some kids jumped online. There was heavy investment and there continues to be and none of the current investments have a return coming any time soon. Michael Jordan just invested into eSports, “The basketball Hall of Famer and owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets is joining an investor group putting $26 million into AXiomatic Gaming” (Bloomberg). He’s not going to see any of that money back immediately. Yet people want to argue that dropping 26 Million into the salary of WNBA players will bankrupt the league and there won’t be a return on the money. FOH!!! Think about it, there are 12 WNBA teams with 15 roster spots, that’s 180 players. A 26 Million dollar investment would be $144,444 per year for every player. No WNBA player would have to go overseas to afford a living. Now take the average attendance of 7000 per game for 34 games. That’s 238,000 people per season. Season ticket price is 5 bucks a game at the lowest level. For an entire season at 5 bucks per game a team earns 1,190,000 bucks x 12 teams = 14,280,000.
That places the WNBA at – 11,720,000
The league signed a deal with ESPN at 12 Million a year. This means on ticket revenue and the television deal the league is at 23,700,000 a year.
Add in revenues from concessions and merchandise, the league can operate at break even with a 26 Million dollar investment. On the surface this looks like it could never be profitable, but when you take a beat to think about it, I established this entire summary on the same investment that MJ poured into an eSports venture. I didn’t look at potential social media advertising revenue, team sponsorships (jersey deals are 1 million a year. That’s an additional 12 Million a year which places the league at a profit), licensing deals or any of the additional things that could come into play. At 5 bucks per game, the television contract, and jersey sponsorships the league could turn a profit on a 26 Million dollar investment into player salaries. The additional revenue creates an additional chance for an investor to turn a profit at the lowest ticket price.
Now let me get back on track. Breanna Stewart was injured yesterday on a play that could have happened at anytime. She landed on Britney Griner’s foot. This was not an injury of overuse. I’ve long made the case that the rise in sports injuries for basketball players happens because of overuse and constant competition. I use Derrick Rose often because of the number of games he played from his childhood to the NBA, but if we look back to when AAU/Travel basketball exploded we can see a correlation to athlete injuries in basketball.
If Stewie is building her body by working out she isn’t overseas playing. The only way she can take the time to build her body is if she’s making enough to attain the lifestyle she wants. When you consider her career will be around ten years, that’s ten years away from the work world. She won’t enter the stage of her life where she has to seek employment until she is in her thirties making it tougher for her than it is for college classmates who have been working on their chosen career. When you add in the depression associated with sports after retirement she could be slowed even more as she heads away from the game. I’m going off topic here. Stewie and all of the ladies balling abroad are doing so out of neccessity and it shouldn’t be that way. Let’s go back to Customer Acquisition.
Nike spends around 865 Million a quarter on Demand Creation Expenses. That’s basically 1 Billion. Over the course of a year that’s 4 Billion on advertising not including sponsorships and other costs not included under that total. Nike is the largest sportswear company in the world and their advertising expense is 12.5% of their annual income. That’s an astronomical number. I raise this point to establish that a company that is this popular is this popular because of the amount of advertising being done. When you take into consideration Nike is also the most talked about brand then the value of the conversation around Nike might be equal if turned into dollars.
Customer Acquisition is often the most difficult job in the world for any company. It’s why so many companies resolved themselves to give away 15% of their profits to Amazon so they can be a part of Amazon’s digital ecosystem.
The WNBA is not a part of the highlight packages on ESPN.
The WNBA is not a part of the discussion roundtables on Fox Sports.
The WNBA is not a regular feature on Bleacher Report.
The WNBA does not get the free advertising that men’s sports gets on 24 hour sports news. Baseball is hella boring, but them MFs get like 6 hours a day!
This absence of coverage decreases the amount of interest in the brand around the WNBA and what happens at the end of each season? If the sisters aren’t fortunate enough to earn income in sports television as Candace Parker has done this year, they have to turn a 4 month season into an 8 month season which means they don’t have any time for recovery and this will diminish the brand of ball being played on the court, which in turn diminishes the coverage.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Nike just stated that they are making a committment to improving women’s basketball. Both adidas and Under Armour have said the same thing. If we throw PUMA in there we could make a pot of ad money for the W. Let’s just take Nike for now. Nike spends 865 Million a quarter on advertising. The WNBA season is basically the first quarter of the fiscal year for Nike. Nike could take 1% of their advertising budget which is $8,650,000 dollars and divide it over the 220 players in the leage to increase every salary by $39,318.18. Now take a second to think about the other brands and their 1% and how much that would add to salaries.
That type of investment creates coverage and it shows that there is an increased level of interest in the W. Money makes money … am I wrong?
