The WNBA’s next national media rights package has come into shape. The league is set to receive roughly $2.2 billion over the next 11 years in rights fees in its new deals — an average of $200 million a year — with an opening to earn more over that period, according to league sources briefed on the contracts.
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The NBA negotiated the WNBA’s new deals during its just-completed rights talks, where it reached an agreement with Disney, NBC and Amazon on an 11-year, approximately $75 billion set of contracts. The WNBA’s national media rights agreements are with those companies as well; ESPN, NBC and Amazon will all have their own WNBA packages.
The NBA’s board of governors approved those media rights deals Tuesday but they are not yet official since Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of TNT, maintains that it has matching rights for a NBA rights package but has not yet decided whether to exercise them.
The WNBA’s current media deals, valued at roughly $50 million annually, are set to expire after the 2025 season, with Disney, Ion, CBS and Amazon as its media partners. The new rights fees could have as much as six times multiple of the league’s current media rights fees since the new deals leave room for the WNBA to bring in new partners. The league anticipates it will sell two other rights packages in addition to the ones it has already made agreements for, and projects to bring in another $60 million annually in total in those additional deals.
That would help the WNBA ride the wave of increased interest and media spending in the league and across women’s sports. The NWSL began a new media rights deal this year that is supposed to pay it $240 million over four years. The WNBA’s next contracts could surpass that annually, even outpacing commissioner Cathy Engelbert’s hopes for the league. She said earlier this year she wanted to at least double the WNBA’s rights fees.
The WNBA will exceed that. It has also built in some measure of protection if the WNBA keeps flourishing and its rights become undervalued. There is an agreement between the league and the media partners to revisit the rights deals with good faith talks after three years that could reprice them to reflect the league’s growth.
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(Photo: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
