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The WNBA recorded its highest total attendance in more than two decades as a 2024 draft class led by the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark and Chicago Sky’s Angel Reese helped the league set all-time records for viewership and merchandise sales.
WNBA games averaged 9,807 fans per regular-season game in 2024, a 48 percent increase over the 2023 season, according to a Friday press release.
The league marked a total attendance of more than 2.35 million, the most tickets the WNBA has sold in 22 years.
Teams also recorded sellouts in 154 games, marking a 242 percent increase over last season’s total of 45 sellouts, according to the WNBA.
The Fever, who used the No. 1 pick of the 2024 draft to select Clark, set a WNBA record with a total home attendance of 340,715.
A Sept. 19 game between the Fever and the Washington Mystics in Washington, D.C. additionally set a single-season attendance record by drawing in 20,711 fans.
The WNBA also set multiple broadcast standards in 2024, with the league reporting record totals of 54 million unique viewers and 22 individual broadcasts averaging more than one million viewers.
Both ESPN and CBS Sports marked their most-watched regular WNBA seasons ever, while ABC’s broadcast of the 2024 All-Star Game saw a 305 percent increase in viewers as 3.4 million people tuned in to see Clark and Reese compete for Team WNBA against the American Olympic team.
In addition to the Fever’s impact on the league’s attendance totals, Clark’s team also played a significant role in the league’s viewership spikes. Indiana games that set new WNBA viewership records at ABC, ESPN2, CBS and NBA TV.
WNBA viewership in Canada meanwhile increased 148 percent from the 2023 season following league’s May announcement of an upcoming expansion franchise set to be located in Toronto.
The league also set an all-time record in merchandise sales, with sales from the WNBA website and the flagship store in New York City increasing 601 percent from the 2023 season.
As of Aug. 21, according to Boardroom and Fanatics, the best-selling WNBA jerseys produced by Fanatics belonged to Clark and Reese, followed by the New York Liberty’s Sabrina Ionescu and the Las Vegas Aces’ Kate Martin and A’ja Wilson.
The WNBA will now look to drive that spike in league interest past the end of Clark and Reese’s season as the 2024 playoffs enter the second round. The semifinals begin on Sunday with an afternoon Aces at Liberty game followed by an evening contest featuring the Connecticut Sun at the Minnesota Lynx.
