New York Liberty owner sees US$1 billion team value in 10 years
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Breanna Stewart of the New York Liberty drives against A'ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces in the third quarter of Game 4 of the 2024 WNBA Play-offs semi-finals.
PHOTO: AFP
NEW YORK – Clara Wu Tsai, co-owner of the New York Liberty, has predicted that the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) franchise will be worth US$1 billion (S$1.3 billion) in a decade.
“I’m on record for saying that in 10 years, I think the New York Liberty can be the first billion-dollar women’s sports franchise,” she said on Oct 9 at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles. She was joined on stage by WNBA great Candace Parker.
The popularity of the WNBA has surged massively in 2024, partly due to the immensely popular college basketball star Caitlin Clark, who joined the Indiana Fever this season.
For instance, the audience for games on the ION network more than doubled this season to an average of 670,000 viewers per game.
The Liberty are in the WNBA Finals, with the first game against the Minnesota Lynx on Oct 10 (Oct 11 morning, Singapore time) in New York. It will be broadcast by ESPN.
The team were purchased in 2019 by Tsai and her husband Joseph Tsai, co-founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, for an undisclosed sum. The couple are also majority owners of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Brooklyn Nets.
Tsai and Parker also said that team owners have been making the investments necessary for the league to capitalise on the arrival of Clark and other new stars.
“It was also a combination of franchises being ready to sustain the growth,” Parker said.
Before moving to the Barclays Centre, the home of the Nets, Liberty had played in the suburb of Westchester County. To make such a big upgrade shows the vast development of the team and the league.
It helps that the WNBA is part of a US$76 billion, 11-year media rights deal negotiated in 2024. The deal added Amazon as a broadcast partner starting with the 2025-26 season.
Tsai sees a lot of opportunity for the league to grow. Currently, the average WNBA franchise is worth about US$96 million, according to estimates from Sportico.
“It’s basically broadening our reach and accelerating fandom,” she said of how it would work out.
The league today attracts about 30 per cent of the NBA’s TV audience, but will get just 4 per cent of the media revenue, she added.
“So there’s a lot of room there,” Tsai said.
“I’m counting on the viewership continuing to rise just because I think the talent is going to explode next year.” BLOOMBERG
