Battle to define revenue sharing in the WNBA continues

It looked like the great collective-bargaining agreement war was ending. Months of terse negotiations had gone quiet. The players’ union and the league extended their bargaining deadline without trading public insults. Then a surprising proposal from the league leaked: They were offering players a max salary of $1 million, with a salary cap tied to league revenue.

For a moment, it seemed like the breakthrough — a “fundamentally different compensation structure,” initial reports said.

Then more details emerged. Once again, the league’s revenue-sharing model looked fuzzy and withholding.

Less breakthrough, more déjà vu.

The two sides still can’t agree on what “revenue sharing” really means.

In professional sports, revenue can be sliced a hundred ways — and the definition almost always reflects whoever has better leverage. One model is the WNBA’s current one: set a target above current revenue, and if the league exceeds that target, players get a cut of the excess.

Pretty conservative.

A slightly bolder model is what the league floated earlier this fall: count a smaller subset of revenue — media deals, sponsorships — and share a piece of that with the players.

And then there’s the model used in the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB: count all league income and use around half for player salaries.

That’s Prime Time revenue share. And it’s the kind of model WNBA players are holding out for.

If history is any guide, it pretty much guarantees a bloody battle.

The WNBA insists they want to pay players more, but they’re leaning on the same arguments owners always use to preserve power. They would return every dollar of growth to players if they didn’t have to balance this against infrastructure investments, or ensure owners have a path to profitability.

There’s also a subtle undercurrent in their messaging: We’re not big enough yet for Prime Time revenue share. We’re too young, too small. That implication became explicit when NBA commissioner Adam Silver said as much on national TV.

“I think [revenue] ‘share’ isn’t the right way to look at it [for the WNBA] because there’s so much more revenue in the NBA,” Silver said. “I think you should look at it in absolute numbers … they are going to get a big increase in this cycle of collective bargaining, and they deserve it.”

The league keeps framing this as a question of scale — whether the league is big enough to share a more direct cut of its growth. But the history of Silver’s own league shows the opposite: revenue-sharing has always been a question of power, not prosperity.

NBA players won Prime Time revenue sharing in 1983, before the league became a global entertainment machine. Before Magic, Larry and Michael turned it into a cultural force. In 1983, NBA playoff games still aired on tape delay. Owners claimed they were losing money.

Players didn’t win because the league was big. They won because they built leverage.

In the 1970s, they secured the right to free agency through antitrust lawsuits. They capitalized on a rival league — the ABA — to increase their earnings. By 1983, they were prepared to strike on All-Star Weekend if the league didn’t meet their demands.

The pattern holds across other sports and other eras. In the NFL and MLB, players won Prime Time revenue share only after years of litigation and credible strike threats.

Kind of makes you wonder if WNBA players should be bolder in their messaging.

Their line throughout negotiations has been: It’s just business. We’re not asking for anything crazy. Just pay us what we’re owed.

But Prime Time revenue share is always a radical demand. It cuts against the logic of ownership’s other businesses, where the key to success is keeping labor costs fixed and low — and where workers wouldn’t dare ask for a direct cut of the upside.

So instead of Pay Us What You Owe Us, maybe the WNBA players’ All-Star weekend shirts should have said:

Pay Us What You Prayed You’d Never Have To

Or:

Pay Us Against Your Capitalist Instincts

Not quite as punchy — but closer to the truth.