By Field Level Media
Oct 18 (Field Level Media) – With her tenure as WNBA commissioner in its final months, Cathy Engelbert met with media prior to Game 1 of the WNBA Finals in San Francisco on Saturday and touted the league’s unprecedented popularity in recent years — but also warned of headaches that can come with such rapid growth and prosperity.
And she began her remarks using the Finals itself as one of the biggest signs of the league’s success in the last couple of years as it reached once- imaginable milestones in terms of revenue and popularity.
The Golden State Valkyries, an expansion team just one season ago, hosted the Atlanta Dream for Game 1 of a Finals that will crown a first-time champion regardless of who wins.
“To be hosting a WNBA Finals in just your second season is remarkable,” said Engelbert, who took over as commissioner in 2019 and has announced she will retire at the end of the calendar year.
Perhaps even more remarkable is another first the franchise achieved in the spring, when outlets including CNBC and Inc. valued the franchise at $1 billion — the first time a women’s pro sports franchise ever reached that mark.
Other achievements Engelbert highlighted included:
— A centralized replay center, which Engelbert first announced at the All- Star Game in Chicago in July, remains on track to be fully operational for the start of next season. The center, in Secaucus, N.J., “will give our officials access to state-of-the-art technology and the best available camera angles, helping us bring greater consistency, efficiency and accuracy to our officiating process,” Engelbert said.
— In the first year of the league’s new collective-bargaining agreement, the WNBA reached more than 90 million unique viewers in the United States, who watched more than 320 million hours of content, Engelbert said. A record 51 telecasts averaged 1 million or more viewers (last season saw 19 such games).
— Engelbert said the league’s social and digital platforms generated more than 4 billion views. “Never thought I would be standing up here talking in billions for the W, but we’re there,” she said.
— Nearly 3.8 million people attended games across the league this season, also a new record mark for the league. “We averaged a record 11,500 fans per game and almost two-thirds of our regular-season games were sellouts,” the 61-year-old former Deloitte CEO said.
— While the Valkyries are playing in their second season of existence, the league also welcomed in a pair of expansion teams this season in the Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo — the league’s first team based outside the United States. Three more franchises are slated to join the league in the coming years: Cleveland (2028) and Detroit (2029) will have new teams after having previous WNBA franchises, and Philadelphia will begin play in 2030.
And players have experienced unprecedented financial gains, as well, including charter flights, minimum salaries under the new CBA ($270,000) that are more than supermax contracts under the previous CBA and top-end contracts reaching nearly $1.5 million per year.
But after talking about the league’s successes in recent years, Engelbert was asked about any regrets she has, particularly as the increase in the league’s popularity and financial success led to contentious CBA negotiations.
“The one thing you learn when you get in these big jobs, like I ran a firm of 100,000 people (at Deloitte), not everybody is going to like you or agree with your strategy perhaps,” Engelbert said, before adding, “I think you just saw from the players who made the All-Star this year, the players who made kind of some of these end-of-season award teams and I have talked to many of them to let them know that they won, they are all so bullish on the future of the league.
“I think in collective bargaining, yes, there was a lot of contentiousness. But again, if you talk to a lot of people who do collective bargaining negotiations, they are saying, ‘Cathy, that means you’ve arrived as a league because if you didn’t have that contentiousness, neither side would have felt like they won.'”
(–Field Level Media)
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