For years, Dolan and the other owners have viewed the WNBA as a misguided, minor effort at their expense. They’ve whined endlessly about having to contribute to marketing, sabotaging it with cynicism. Now they’re lining their own pockets while the league’s all-star game is one of the most attractive events of the Olympic summer. Dolan sold the Liberty to Joe and Clara Tsai of the Brooklyn Nets in 2019 for a reported $10 million to $14 million. The Liberty is now worth $130 million. In May, the team set a record for annual sales. single game When Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever came to town, there was over $2 million.
No one has been more gleefully denouncing this blind financial blunder than Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder, entrepreneur, and husband of Serena Williams, who has profited from the fact that many legendary male sports owners have chosen foolish situations. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the legacy of underinvestment in women’s sports is not only blatant sexism (it is), but also a lesson in egregious business incompetence,” Ohanian posted on social media in 2023.
When Ohanian became co-founder and lead investor in Angel City in 2020, everyone told him he was going to lose a lot of money. “You wonder where those people are now,” he said triumphantly on the ESPYs red carpet last week, where word was leaking of an impending deal in which Willow Bay and Bob Iger would buy a controlling stake in Angel City for $250 million. The club generates about $30 million in annual revenue, the highest in the nascent U.S. Women’s Soccer League.
“Fun fact: when we started the team I invested a separate quarter million dollars into a trust for Serena and all of my children, making my daughters not only the youngest owners in professional sports, but also billionaires,” Ohanian proudly posted on X. “They proudly own their shares.”
When Ohanian was first looking for investment opportunities in women’s sports in 2019, he had the same conversations over and over with the same types of guys. They were investing in the WNBA or women’s soccer only because they had daughters who loved sports and wanted to sell them. They treated them like “charity pity parties,” Ohanian said. They didn’t put any marketing or energy into them as a business. “Like, why are you surprised they’re not doing well?” Ohanian wanted to know. They would swear it wasn’t because of their laziness or neglect. People just don’t want to watch women.
“They were creating a kind of Stockholm syndrome of mediocrity,” Ohanian said in a video posted to Instagram, “…like a feeling of helplessness and powerlessness that then became uncomfortable because you realized this had been building up for decades… and that’s what this new generation of owners is bringing to light.”
Ohanian spotted what anyone with eyes that aren’t written off as stupid should have noticed: an undervalued stock. The fact that women’s games at big events like March Madness, the World Cup and the Olympics can draw huge audiences means that with some serious marketing, those audiences can become habit-forming. The only reason this hasn’t happened before is because, in Ohanian’s view, “lack of resources, lack of marketing, undervaluation, undervaluation, lack of support.” All of this is attractive to investors who want to act early.
Contrast that with Dolan, who moved the Liberty from averaging nearly 10,000 at Madison Square Garden in 2018 to a 2,300-seat arena in Westchester County and then sold it as a flop. He’s crying now because he also completely missed the streaming revolution and cord-cutting. Last week, Dolan lashed out at the NBA for not protecting his MSG regional sports network in its new media rights deal, as if Adam Silver could stop consumers from canceling a cable channel run by the guy who inherited his father’s only good idea.
The NBA has subsidized the WNBA from the start, and the league as a whole hasn’t yet made a profit, but commissioner David Stern sees the league as an investment in his global viewership strategy rather than a revenue stream, and it’s paying off: The WNBA is on track to make $2.2 billion from a new media rights deal.
It’s hard to believe. Five Of the original eight WNBA teams, 20 are now defunct, shuttered by owners equally unwilling to fund, market or wait. They didn’t listen when Stern told them it was a long-term investment. I heard from people around the league a few years ago that they simply didn’t see the benefit. Their attitude was killing the bottom line.
Here’s what they’re left with: By the end of 2024, consulting and auditing firm Deloitte predicts that revenue from elite women’s sports will surpass $1 billion for the first time, a 300 percent increase from its previous forecast for 2021. As Ohanian noted, “The market has spoken loud and clear, and when money is involved, people catch on quickly.” The market isn’t just talking, it’s shouting. And it’s laughing.
