NEW YORK — As she sat before assembled media Monday night at the 2024 WNBA Draft, top overall pick Caitlin Clark was asked about making her transition from college to the professional game. She sounded almost relieved.
“Honestly, if I’m being completely honest, I feel like it doesn’t change a ton from how I lived my life over the course of the last year,” Clark said. “Sponsorships stay the same. The people around me, agents and whatnot, have been able to help me and guide me through the course of the last year. I don’t know if I would be in this moment if it wasn’t for a lot of them. My mom has done a lot, my dad has done a lot.”
The status quo level of her life, now that she’s traded in her Iowa uniform for one from the Indiana Fever, isn’t likely to change, and neither will her payday. The persistent, false claims about her taking a pay cut to go to the WNBA do not survive basic scrutiny.
Clark’s sponsorships, as she mentioned, remain a constant. None came through Iowa, nor was she paid by the Iowa NIL collective. So the basic math here is: sponsorships — likely increasing as she moves to the pros — plus her WNBA rookie scale salary. A balance like this is new to women’s sports, but not to basketball phenomenons — Michael Jordan, for instance, made many times his Chicago Bulls salary in endorsements.
Still, that rookie salary means Clark is making a lot less than other professional athletes in her first year in the league, even within the WNBA. The rookie scale is preset — at her position in the draft, via the current collective bargaining agreement, she’ll earn $76,535 in Year 1 of a four-year deal. The WNBA’s max salary is $241,984, but she won’t be eligible for that for a while under the current CBA.
That last part is significant — the current CBA runs through 2027, but it is widely expected that the WNBA’s Players’ Association will exercise an opt-out clause following the conclusion of the 2024 season. In conjunction with a currently underway negotiation of the league’s new media rights deal, which runs through the end of the 2025 season, players around the league simply haven’t signed long-term deals, expecting salaries to rise precipitously.
Clark, like all rookies, wouldn’t be eligible for free agency, restricted or unrestricted, through the duration of their rookie scale deals. (It is worth noting here that this is common practice across men’s sports, too, even if the salaries themselves are higher.) But whether these rules will survive the new CBA is absolutely a live issue, and it is easy to envision, for instance, a CBA that allows WNBA teams to tear up rookie deals and sign promising young players to long-term contracts.
So even the duration of Clark’s four-year, $338.056 contract she’ll agree to when she signs with the Fever could be part of massive changes that ultimately increase her base compensation. But even if they don’t, that’s money she wasn’t going to see at Iowa, but will as a member of the Indiana Fever.
For her part, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert reiterated that the goal is to continue increasing the revenue on both the sponsorship and media rights sides with the goal of not only increasing the profitability of the league, but to improve salaries and day-to-day benefits like adding more charter flights as well.
“So speaking of better travel, better pay and all that, sports, especially at league levels, you have two main revenue streams,” Engelbert told reporters prior to the draft Monday evening. “One is your media rights, and the other is corporate partnerships. We’ve been really making great progress with the corporate partnership side. On the media side, I think women’s media rights have been undervalued for so many years, just a microcosm by the way of the broader world that I came from before I came here. So I think it’s really important that we’re doing everything we can.
“This is an important year for us around viewership, around attendance, around all the qualitative and quantitative factors that go into the valuation of media rights, because as I’ve said to my team, there’s not a day that if we’re not working on things that feed into the valuation of our next media rights, we’re not focused on the right things.
“This is a really important focus for us. Our current deals go through the ’25 season. So through October of ’25. We do have some time, but we’re gearing up for a combination of what that media rights package would look like.”
It’s an important year for Clark too, of course, who pointed out that she needs to make her main priority basketball, with sponsorships taking care of themselves around her as long as she succeeds on the court. There’s only one thing about Clark’s workload that’ll be different, and she didn’t draw a salary for doing it.
“I don’t have to do school anymore. That’s pretty exciting,” Clark said with a chuckle. “I do have to get my degree. I graduate on May 14. Other than that, my 110 percent focus is on basketball, and when I do that really well and carry myself really well, everything just kind of takes care of itself.”
