When the WNBA returned to the action last week, Ryan Brewer, like many who followed the League, was curious to see how Indiana Faver Caitlin Clark’s star could overcome her rookie season of the year.
However, Brewer’s interest, associate professor of finance at the University of Indiana, Columbus and an expert in valuations, goes beyond the Clark box score averages. After the phenomenal popularity of Clark increased the assistance and sales of goods and generated historical television ratings wherever the fever was played in 2024, the Indianapolis star asked Brewer to evaluate his economic impact on the WNBA. He determined that Clark was responsible for an amazing 26.5% of all WNBA’s economic activity last season, including goods revenues, ticket sales and television.
When Brewer folded the numbers to analyze their potential impact in 2025, it reached an assessment that “is quite impressive,” Brewer said.
“If things simply go as they were, and we have an expanded season of 22 games at home with modest inflation, I’m looking at $ 875 [million]”Brewer told NBC News.” And I could easily see that eclipss one billion dollars on the economic impact of Caitlin Clark this year. “
The 29th WNBA season opens at a time when its basketball is impossible to unravel since its final result. And Clark has played a propulsive role in both.
For the first time since 2008, the WNBA expanded this season to add a 13th team, the Golden State Valks. Next season, two more will debut in Toronto and Portland. As the WNBA footprint grows, its coffers do so. In 2026, the League will enter the first year of a 11 -year media rights agreement worth $ 2.2 billion in general that are expected to triple its current income from the rights of the media. (One of the media partners is NBC, who shares a parent company with NBC News).
Anticipating the arrival of the new income by the media, the players union opted for its collective bargaining agreement with the league last October and will pass the next months negotiating a new agreement that the Union expects to lead to higher wages.
Clark won $ 76,535 as a rookie and this season will receive a slight salary increase, amounts eclipsed by its support portfolio that, according to reports, includes an eight -year agreement and $ 28 million with Nike. It would be “impossible” to pay Clark what is worth for the league, his agent told ESPN in February. That could be due to the fact that although the audience in women’s sports was already increasing when Clark emerged as a superstar at the University of Iowa, its popularity has supercharged the WNBA itself.
While an average of 17,035 fans attended the 20 games at the fever house, more than the city’s NBA team, which shares the same sand, averaged more than 41 games, the general assistance of the WNBA increased from an average of 6,615 in 2023 to 9,807. Last season, while Fever Games produced the most seen WNBA games in ESPN, ESPN2, ABC, CBS and NBA TV, the League Wide audience also broke records, including an average of 1.2 million per ESPN transmission.
The WNBA, as a private company, does not reveal income figures, said a league spokesman. However, the League reported last year that its goods sales through Dick’s sporting articles had increased by 233% during the previous season. A fanatics spokesman, the official WNBA electronic commerce partner, said Clark is located in the top 20 of his best -selling athletes in all sports, and sixth among all basketball players, including the NBA.
The ascending tide associated with Clark continued to raise other ships: all the wnba merchandise sold by fans increased by more than 500% last season against 2023, the spokesman added.
Clark’s effect shows few signs of decrease in 2025. Earlier this month, 1.3 million spectators tuned on ESPN to see an Indiana preseason game played in the Alma Mater de Clark, Iowa, an audience that was larger than all the NBA NBA preseason games in ESPN since 2010 (and both games included LeBron James), by sports newspaper.
Of the 10 best -selling WNBA games this season in Stubhub, the 10 involve fever, according to a spokesman for the online ticket retailers. When fever is the visiting team, the average price of tickets sold jumps by 140%. And the average price of a ticket to catch Clark and Indiana on the road this year is $ 312, according to the company.
Clark is “not only driving the demand for fever, but is raising interest throughout the league,” said Adam Budelli, stubhub spokesman, in a statement.
Last year, Sportico set the value of the fever franchise at $ 90 million, a little less than the estimated average of the League. However, in Brewer’s analysis, the net effect of Clark’s presence led its fever to more than $ 340 million. Brewer also calculated that Clark’s presence, if interest in his actions is maintained, would result in an economic impact of approximately $ 41 million to the city of Indianapolis.
Clark was not the only rookie last season to generate a significant interest in the League. His rivalry with the Angel Reese of Chicago, who goes out with the university, led to an average of 2.5 million viewers to see his confrontation of May 17, the largest for a WNBA game in ESPN. However, as Brewer analyzed the assistance and audience figures of the 2024 season, they indicated that Clark’s influence was uniquely responsible for the increase in a new interest in the WNBA.
Of the 24 transmissions related to the WNBA that attracted at least 1 million television viewers last season, 21 involved, according to an analysis of Sports Media Watch that included the league draft and the All-Star game. The three WNBA games that attracted more than 20,000 fans included fever.
“It is important to recognize that this rival exists and that there are other rivals, but Caitlin Clark is illuminating the sport,” Brewer said. “In particular, she is the one that leads in a new type of demography that is reaching new types of people from the traditional WNBA fans who are causing this growth rate and also accelerates interest in corporate sponsorships.”
To analyze its economic impact, Brewer partly created models that project the assistance of the WNBA for last season based on the growth of the league in the years before Clark. Then he compared it to the change of real assistance and discovered that approximately 60% of that increase is attributable to Clark.
“His ability to fill stadiums is incredible,” he said.
And that interest has been strongly felt in Indianapolis, where a practice center of $ 78 million is being built only for fever.
In 2024, after Indiana recruited Clark No. 1, Visit Indy, a non -profit organization that promotes tourism to the city, went into action. He placed paid advertising throughout Iowa, even on social networks, to prove if Clark collegiate fans could have the appetite to make the trip to Indiana to see it as a professional. Soon, visits to pages on the Indy visit website dedicated to fever increased by 501%, said Chris Gahl, visits Indy Executive Vice President and Marketing Director. Faver’s games also corresponded to a lump in hotel rooms reserved in the city, he said.
Part of Gahl’s work is to persuade those who are in charge of reserving large corporate meetings and conventions to organize them in Indianapolis. Last year, he found a new way to attract almost 50 planners to see the city for the first time: take them to a fever game.
The planners, who were predominantly women, “would not have traveled here and visited here if it were not for the invitation to come to see a home fever game,” Gahl said.
“A game at Indiana Fever’s house is a very hot ticket.”
