The 2030 World Cup could mark a big change for women’s basketball around the world with the tournament being played later in the year than previous editions. The growth of the WNBA will be continuing between now and then and its role in relation to the global game could also be significantly different by then. While there is certainly room for the relationship to be positive, there are also a lot of potential conflicts that could arise instead.
WNBA Budgets
Financial growth has been substantial for the WNBA in recent years and there is set to be another major jump next year, which will certainly change where their teams sit compared to other women’s basketball teams around the world, which has recently returned to the spotlight with the release of the Taurasi documentary. The Indiana Fever made an important breakthrough last year, being projected to have increased their revenue past Bayern Munich’s men’s team, which would only have left them behind the 30 NBA teams when it comes to professional basketball and they have certainly experienced growth this year too.
The new team on the block, the Golden State Valkyries, are going to be even higher up the charts this year, almost certainly blowing past the revenue of every men’s college basketball team too, though proper calculations for college programs are largely impossible. Their highest grossing games bring in more revenue than what all twelve teams in the French women’s league, which most closely resembles a commercial entity from top-to-bottom among leagues overseas, bring in from all sources directly from fans for their entire season. With the New York Liberty no longer limiting seating at most home games, they will join the Valkyries and Fever in having particularly high revenue figures this year. That will create a disparity with the other teams in the league that cannot make moves to match them, which is a point to watch in CBA negotiations. The effects could be reduced by how much of the increased national media deals get distributed to teams.
That increase in broadcast revenue and the impending new CBA, which will increase salaries greatly even if that does not end up being to the level hoped for by the players. That should mean that all of the WNBA teams have higher expenses next year than the leader internationally, Fenerbahce, which is believed to have a budget of around $15 million, which would still be well below the $35 million or so estimated to be the budget of their EuroLeague champion men’s basketball team. While those WNBA budgets are still going to far lower than even the stingiest NBA teams, that disparity still very much affects other women’s basketball teams around the world. The big question will of course be how much of those expenses go to the direct benefit players, which is where overseas teams have been able to allocate larger percentages of that budget. Given the ability for overseas teams to pay coaches less and the lesser need for business and operations staff, it could still be tough for a WNBA team to take over the salary crown post-tax, even after the new CBA.
Prioritization
No player has been a more consistent critic of the prioritization rule adopted by the WNBA in the last CBA than Gabby Williams, who was only able to play in the league in 2023 and 2024 due to negative life circumstances. Early reports from this round of CBA negotiations do not show any indication that the league would accept anything lighter than current rules. The existing setup has already had effects on leagues and teams around the world as some leagues have made sure that their seasons ended in compliant windows. The only case of a contracted player facing the punishments of the rule was when Reyer Venezia held Jessica Shepard to her existing contract in Italy to help them win the championship, leading her to proactively have her 2024 season suspended to free up a roster space for the Minnesota Lynx.
While the rules have obviously affected which WNBA veterans that overseas teams are willing to sign, even players not subject to the rules have had their options affected by the possibility that they might head to the WNBA. Agents have certainly made it clear to teams that they want their clients to be available for WNBA training camp and some teams no longer consider signing any players who could request to leave early. Some teams have decided to acquiesce when players want to leave early in the hopes that it would help them with players in future seasons even if it costs them a chance at a championship in the current season. While a player certainly could not play in a WNBA game before the Letter of Clearance arrives from the country of their overseas team, it is a little bit more of a gray area when it comes to leaving for training camp.
National Team Conflict
Interfering with club play is certainly not the only way in which the WNBA can cause friction in other countries during a time when they are trying to create global growth too. Their season being scheduled during the time for national team tournaments around the world has led to them wanting to limit the time that their players miss, which created that section of the prioritization rules. Even for players not subject to those rules, there have apparently been a number of moves that teams have made to encourage players to not participate at all, which has led to negative publicity this year in particular with EuroBasket 2025 taking place.
In the United States, national team play only really matters when it comes to the Olympics, which can make it difficult for Americans to understand how important it is elsewhere. National team play in all competitions gets coverage even in places where the local leagues do not get any attention. Players enjoy representing their countries and playing with people who are their opponents or scattered around the world during club season, but they are also firmly aware that many countries use direct government funding to develop young athletes and that the existence of national team play helps keep that funding flowing.
The greater number of European players in the WNBA this year led to an increase of players not playing in EuroBasket, which did not go unnoticed among European fans. Their belief that the WNBA does not respect national team play could be an obstacle to their support of the league in the future even if their favorite players are there. The league’s lack of an official public position on the interpretation of certain rules in the CBA also led to a wild variety of rumors being spread within the European basketball scene about ways that teams or the league itself were going to punish players who did opt to join their national teams.
Moving the continental tournaments could be an option in the future, but that schedule change would affect the season in those countries in the same way that the 2030 World Cup will cause changes. Reducing the frequency of the tournaments or not making them the definitive qualifiers has also been proposed in line with what has happened on the men’s side in part due to NBA meddling, but that would also affect interest and funding.
The NBA Agenda
WNBA fans have long discussed the NBA’s agenda in relation to their league, but the NBA certainly has plans for the rest of the world too. The term agenda can have negative connotations, but the NBA certainly has objectives that are not positives for everyone in the world of basketball. Even though FIBA is supposed to represent the entire globe, it certainly has a headquarters and its own agenda at given time, which is increasingly balancing clinging to the NBA, which will pursue its goals no matter what, and trying to help grow basketball in different ways.
The NBA clearly has two global plans, but they sometimes end up conflicting with each other in some regions. On one hand, they want to expand commercially and increase their revenue from the international market. On the other hand, they want to make sure that development around the world gets them the best players possible by the time that they are old enough to play in the league. Their goals on the WNBA side are very much the same, although there is risk of alienation.
The NBA, FIBA, and EuroLeague are very much engaged in an interesting battle on the men’s side for the future of club play in Europe right now. FIBA and EuroLeague have both tried to boost the commercial viability of the sport on the continent in recent years and not found much success doing it. The NBA and FIBA, fresh off of restructuring competition in Africa, are now trying to do the same in Europe. How this goal will be accomplished remains confusing as the NBA agendas are varied and somewhat in conflict. Certain countries with historic men’s basketball teams are politically or economically unpalatable to the NBA, which largely keeps them in the EuroLeague orbit. On the commercial side, the league must also decide between trying to bring established teams on board for more income potential now or to try to expand into target markets, which might take more investment to establish. The NBA will obviously have more say in the competition than FIBA would as is the case in Africa, meaning that they can manipulate qualification criteria to their preference in same way as opposed to taking into account sporting merit.
The NBA has obviously not shown any interest in club play on the women’s side and remains opposed to WNBA players being involved too. If they do create a formal relationship on the men’s side with clubs that field two basketball teams like Fenerbahce and Galatasaray, it would be interesting to see if that causes conflict or if a club like Fenerbahce chooses to de-emphasize women’s basketball to cozy up to the NBA as some of their fans have wanted to do in the past or if there is any room for collaboration. In the case of the FIBA-EuroLeague conflicts, that has not managed to spill over to the women’s side at all.
On the development side, the NBA has not shown much interest in anything beyond bolting girls’ programming onto to anything they do on the boys’ side at a lesser scale. The league has definitely not had the same impetus to develop a full-scale academy and seems unlikely to do that. Of course, the NBA has not figured out how to balance global training on the boys side either. Their localization model is on its way out the door, not helped by overreliance on local practices, leading to the negative stories from their China branch. The move globally from Australia to the United Arab Emirates also shows that they would prefer to go their own way rather than to lean on development practices in countries with a history of success in that regard.
The Threat of Soccer
It is no secret that basketball, along with other sports like volleyball and handball have benefitted in terms of participation and finances because soccer has historically not been considered a socially acceptable sport for women in a number of countries. While there continue to be some holdouts, it is clear at this point that soccer is an option at least equal to the other sports in most countries. That could affect the level of talent coming through in some countries, especially when it comes to guard play, but could also affect the level of sponsorship and resources being allocated to women’s basketball, including at multi-sport clubs.
Unrivaled
The schedule for the 2026 Unrivaled season has not been revealed yet, but when it runs will certainly bear watching. FIBA is scheduled to have World Cup qualifying in mid-March, which is when the last Unrivaled season ended. That leads to the question of whether the season will be finished before then, which would affect who represents the United States. The only unsanctioned leagues that FIBA currently has agreements to allow national team participation from are the ones under the NBA umbrella starting in the Dream Team days so they could disallow active Unrivaled players from playing even if the league takes a break during that time in the same way that they have guarded against players interacting with Big3 since that league started.
Unrivaled has not quite made much of a push internationally when it comes to signing players yet. Aaliyah Edwards was their only player to not hold US citizenship and her choice to play in the league made sense in terms of being able to rest longer and her rookie status not necessarily meaning that she would get better offers overseas. The league’s unsanctioned status could also come into play globally if they sign away players in the middle of their overseas contracts.
College Basketball
In the same announcement as the one with the World Cup scheduling change, FIBA also talked about the organization’s relationship with the NCAA. While the focus at this time is primarily on the men’s side, there are also starting to be implications on the women’s side. Like other sports governing bodies, FIBA has historically treated the NCAA as school sports, understanding that athletes might pursue education while in the middle of their careers. The finances involved with college basketball at this point are now making FIBA wonder if it needs to be treated the same as professional basketball instead.
The issue arose on the men’s side when under-contract players were deciding to leave for college until those contracts expired, an area in which they could escape FIBA punishment with education as a justification. Overseas clubs with a history of developing NBA-caliber players tend to structure contracts with their youth players in a way to ensure that they get buyout money from the NBA when players got drafted and this trend was starting to threaten that. As a result, FIBA is going to attempt to add the NCAA to the current Letter of Clearance system that is in play whenever players move to a team in a different country. While there is no direct incentive for the NCAA to cooperate, FIBA would then be able to prevent under-contract players from going to college by threatening punishment up to banning them from sanctioned leagues for life.
On the women’s side, there have generally been differing attitudes in different countries to the college system, although it has usually been more positive than to the men’s side due to the financial differences. A number of countries continue to actively encourage players to head to the United States for college and return to local leagues after that point. Other countries have had a more negative reaction to those moves, feeling that the players are wasting the time and money spent on their development at younger ages. The big change in this past year is older men making the jump to college and there has been similar movement on the women’s side now. Nastja Claessens is joining Kansas State having already been picked in the last WNBA draft and Izoje Uche is heading to Syracuse having played in the Japanese national league three years after her high school career there finished.
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