The WNBA’s next national media rights package is taking shape. The league is set to receive about $2.2 billion over the next 11 years in rights fees in its new deal — an average of $200 million a year — with the opportunity to earn even more along the way, according to league sources familiar with the contracts.
The NBA negotiated new deals with the WNBA during just-completed rights talks, reaching an agreement with Disney, NBC and Amazon on an 11-year package worth about $75 billion. The WNBA also has national media rights deals with those companies; ESPN, NBC and Amazon will each have their own packages of WNBA rights.
The NBA Board of Governors approved the media rights deals on Tuesday, but they have not yet become official. Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of TNT, maintains that it has similar rights to the NBA package, but has not yet decided whether to exercise them.
The WNBA’s current media deals, worth an estimated $50 million per year, are set to expire after the 2025 season, with Disney, Eon, CBS and Amazon as its media partners. The new rights fees could be as much as six times the league’s current media rights fees as the new deals leave room for the WNBA to bring in new partners. The league expects to sell two more rights packages in addition to those it already has in place, and plans to bring in another $60 million per year in total from those additional deals.
That would help the WNBA ride the wave of growing interest and media spending in the league and across women’s sports. The NWSL began a new media rights deal this year that is expected to pay it $240 million over four years. Future WNBA contracts could exceed that amount annually, even exceeding the expectations of commissioner Cathy Engelbert for the league. She said earlier this year that she wanted to at least double the WNBA’s rights fees.
The WNBA will exceed that limit. It also has some protections in place if the league continues to grow and its rights become undervalued. The league and its media partners have an agreement to revisit rights deals in good-faith talks after three years that could reprice them to reflect the league’s growth.
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