The most important number in women's sports right now is not a point total or a shooting percentage. It's 140%. According to the latest Redtorch SportOnSocial Global Sports Properties report, the WNBA posted a 140% increase in global online searches over the past year, topping the search growth rankings across all global sports properties for the second year running. As SportsPro noted, the surge is increasingly driven by stronger league structures and wider brand appeal. The momentum is real.
But that momentum is now running into a number the league wants everyone to simply just accept: $460 million. That's the figure the WNBA cited this week after the Players Association submitted a revised counterproposal, dropping its requested share of gross revenue from 31% to 27.5%, and trimming its first-year salary cap ask from $10.5 million to just under $9.5 million. Despite those concessions, the league called the proposal "unrealistic" and claimed it would produce $460 million in losses over the life of the deal. It also comes entirely from the league's own internal models, built on its own definitions, applied to revenue projections the union has never been allowed to independently verify. The WNBA has never publicly disclosed it's financials, and The Players Association has no access to the books. Every loss figure that has surfaced in these negotiations traces back to anonymous NBA or WNBA sources rather than audited documents.
That context matters when you try to make the numbers add up. The league's own proposal offers players over 70% of net revenue, revenue after expenses are deducted, which it acknowledges works out to less than 15% of gross. The union is asking for 27.5% of gross. The gap between those two definitions is where the $460 million lives, and it's a gap the league controls entirely. Sports economist David Berri put the contradiction plainly — since 2019, revenues have doubled, but the league's claimed losses have grown. A business whose costs reliably outpace its revenues at that rate, year after year, isn't just struggling. It's doing its accounting strategically. And when the previous $700 million loss projection dropped to $460 million the moment the union moved 3.5 percentage points, it revealed these numbers for what they are: negotiating tools, not financial facts.
The league is also starting to see the ripple effect. New York Liberty star Breanna Stewart recently signed with Turkish club Fenerbahçe for the EuroLeague Women Final Six in April, a schedule that overlaps directly with the WNBA's planned training camp start on April 19. She's picking a guaranteed paycheck over domestic uncertainty, and she's not alone. The expansion draft for the Toronto Tempo and Portland Fire has already been delayed. With the WNBA Draft on April 13 and opening night May 8, the clock is running out.
Off the court, the corporate world keeps betting on the long game. American Express recently renewed its multiyear partnership with the NBA, specifically deepening its WNBA integration. That confidence is anchored by the league's upcoming 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal with Disney, Amazon, and NBC, a deal the league negotiated and celebrated as proof of the product's value. The New York Liberty, bought for under $15 million in 2019, is now worth an estimated $450 million. All 13 teams combined are valued at over $3 billion. Owners who kept the league afloat through its lean years have seen extraordinary returns, and yet the official story remains one of unsustainable losses.
The players see a $2.2 billion TV deal, a 140% search spike, and billion-dollar franchise values, and they believe the old financial models are dead. The league points to $460 million in projected losses and says nothing has fundamentally changed. Both can't be right. Open books, independent auditing, and a neutral financial review, is exactly what the league has refused to provide through multiple rounds of bargaining; however, this is exactly what could settle the issue. Until that changes, the WNBA is asking its players to accept a hard ceiling on their earning power based on numbers only one side has ever seen.
The May 8 tip-off is coming fast. But the real problem isn't the calendar. It's that the most-watched era in women's basketball history is being negotiated in the dark.