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The WNBA is getting bigger.
The league has announced where the 16th team will be based after months of speculation and over 11 cities in negotiations.
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The WNBA will award its 16th franchise to Cleveland, according to the Sports Business Journal.
Cleveland is expected to join the league for the 2028 season and will be reprised as the Cleveland Rockers, an original WNBA franchise that folded after the 2003 season.
This comes after the league said it would be expanding from its current 12 teams to 16 by 2028, after already awarding three cities a team – Toronto, San Francisco and Portland.
Cleveland’s $250 million bid saw them trump their rival cities and also set a record for the cost of a WNBA team.
The Golden State Valkyries, the league’s 13th franchise coming in May, paid $50M to join the WNBA, while Toronto and Portland — the 14th and 15th franchises — paid $115 million and $125 million, respectively.
The announcement is set to be made official in March and serves as a major blow to the likes of Patrick Mahomes and Caitlin Clark, who expressed a desire to to see the next WNBA expansion team in Kansas.
Mahomes, the superstar quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, previously shared his interest in being part of a prospective ownership group that makes a bid for a WNBA team in the city.
“We want to get basketball to Kansas City,” the 29-year-old said in November.
“The WNBA and the success that they’ve had this last season and these last few seasons, it’s kind of a no-brainer to try to get a WNBA team in Kansas City.”
“So let’s try to get a WNBA team in here as well and kind of that same-type ownership group.”
While Clark, a lifelong Chiefs fan, also expressed her wish to see Kansas have a WNBA team, a city she says “loves women’s sport.”
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“Kansas City would be a good spot for it, obviously, it’s a great sports town that supports women’s sports,” Clark said on the WNBA expansion.
“The way women’s sports and women’s basketball has taken off is truly incredible. This is just the beginning. It’s showing the world, not even just our country, how great it is and how fun it is to watch women’s athletics.”
While the next four WNBA teams have seemingly been decided, it doesn’t mean Mahomes and Clark’s dream for a basketball team in Kansas is completely dead in the water.
While the league have previously said it only wanted 16 teams initially, SBJ have now reported that the WNBA has re-thought this and could now award two more cities a franchise — increasing the league to 18 teams.
Although it still might not be Kansas City, as the frontrunners for these two new teams are Houston, Nashville, Detroit and Miami.
This is because as recently as two weeks ago, the WNBA trademarked the following: the Houston Comets, the Detroit Shock, the Miami Sol and the Charlotte Sting.
“The WNBA has received formal bids from many interested ownership groups in various markets and we are currently in the process of evaluating these proposals,” a WNBA spokesperson said in a statement.
Overall, 13 cities have a bid for the next two franchises: St Louis, Kansas City, Austin, Jacksonville, Nashville, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, Miami, Denver, Charlotte and Milwaukee.
Mahomes is not the only major athlete involved in the expansion of the WNBA, with reports that the Celtics’ Jayson Tatum has invested in the St. Louis bid, and the Suns’ Kevin Durant in the Austin bid.
It seems by 2030, the WNBA will be an 18-league team and the cost of a franchise will only keep getting bigger.
