The WNBA is up first, as their CBA expires on Halloween this year, and the explosive growth of the women’s game combined with the vastly inequitable landscape has put a labor stoppage on the table, something that has never happened in the league’s history. WNBA players currently receive a paltry 9.3 percent of the league’s revenue, several orders of magnitude less than their NBA, NFL and NHL peers who all receive around 50 percent of league revenues. Players recently slammed “wasted” CBA talks with the owners, leading to every All-Star wearing shirts emblazoned with “pay us what you owe us” that now has the official WNBPA logo on ones you can purchase. This is the part of the blog where dipshit dudebros talk about money and ratings, but that tired sexist schtick doesn’t fly in a new media universe where the WNBA is inking 11-year TV deals worth $2.2 billion. WNBA owners find themselves in a pretty unprecedented situation, where a lockout is not as big of a threat to players’ bank accounts, who are now seeing rising endorsement deals in recent years. Caitlin Clark’s WNBA salary comprises just one percent of her 2024 earnings, although she is an extreme example on a rookie contract that not enough WNBA players are able to emulate. Still, the highest base salary in the WNBA is Jackie Young’s ($252,450) at just 3.3 times what Clark makes ($76,535), and it puts in perspective how much power WNBA stars have to force owners to the table to pay them what they are owed.
An MLB lockout is much a more overt threat. According to Nick Castellanos of the Philadelphia Phillies to ESPN in the wake of Bryce Harper’s nose-to-nose meeting with the MLB commissioner, “Rob seems to be in a pretty desperate place on how important it is to get this salary cap because he’s floating the word lockout two years in advance of our collective bargaining agreement [expiration]. That’s nothing to throw around. That’s the same thing as me saying in a marriage, ‘I think divorce is a possibility. It’s probably going to happen.’ You don’t just say those things.” Castellanos isn’t the only one talking about this probability to reporters, at this year’s All-Star Game, Mets first baseman Pete Alonso said “No one’s talking about it, but we all know that they’re going to lock us out for it, and then we’re going to miss time. We’re definitely going to fight to not have a salary cap and the league’s obviously not going to like that.”
You can see the tension percolating throughout sports, and baseball is an acute example that is uniquely vulnerable because it has more product to sell than anyone and is more dependent than the NBA and NHL on RSN revenue. While the WNBA is able to put a depraved figure to its greed, MLB owners are a lot sneakier about how they take money away from players, setting up a potentially uglier and more complex CBA negotiation than the relatively straightforward “pay us what you owe us” WNBA talks. MLB’s model where players are under team control until their sixth full MLB season has led to a world where players hit free agency at older ages and teams are becoming less willing to pay them what they have earned at that point. In past decades, a star player like Bryce Harper would not remain on the free agent market past the December winter meetings, but in 2019, he didn’t sign his $330 million deal with the Phillies until right before spring training.
MLB owners have become much greedier and more cutthroat in recent years as they have increasingly floated the possibility of a salary cap, with John Fisher’s cold-blooded MLB-approved daylight murder of the Oakland A’s one of the starkest examples. Collusion is the dirty word floating around MLB free agency every offseason, and MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said the quiet part loud at MLB’s All-Star weekend this year, calling a salary cap “institutionalized collusion.” Based on today’s new ESPN report, Harper doesn’t seem to have forgotten about how MLB made him haggle over every penny up to $330 million, and if his reaction to Manfred is indicative of the MLBPA’s negotiating stance over a salary cap, a labor stoppage in 2027 seems eminently likely for baseball.
Which will be a test case for the NBA and NHL negotiations when their CBAs expire in the coming years afterwards. As much as this is just about good old-fashioned greed by capital in its eternal attempt to exploit labor, there is a serious economic tension at the base of sports right now. In October I asked, “are the MLB, NBA and NHL in an economic crisis?” because regional sports networks are in crisis, exemplified by Diamond Sports Group’s bankruptcy. They operate Bally Sports, who held the television rights for 14 MLB teams last year, and only 11 this year. Alden Gonzalez of ESPN noted during MLB free agency in 2023 that Shohei Ohtani’s record contract which exceeded the entire AL Central’s combined payrolls “helps underscore what is being viewed in some corners as a widening financial gap within Major League Baseball, fueled by a deteriorating cable model that might finally be coming to a head.”
The struggles and bankruptcies of RSNs like Bally hit the NBA and NHL too, and the era of streaming seems to have finally come for a healthy chunk of professional sports’ bottom line. It is simply not as profitable to broadcast local sports as it used to be, and my city of Denver is a perfect example of how serious this problem is. Comcast customers (most of the state) were unable to watch the 2022 Stanley Cup Champions and the 2023 NBA Champions from 2019 to February of this year due to a dispute with the local RSN carrying them, Altitude, owned by the billionaire Stan Kroenke who also owns the Avalanche and Nuggets, among other professional sports teams. Team success has nothing to do with the RSN crisis, it’s a second-order effect of cord-cutting and the games are now leverage being used in a battle between billionaires trying to divide a shrinking RSN pie.
Since I asked if sports are in an economic crisis, the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers were sold for a combined $16.1 billion. One could argue that those purchases herald a new gilded era for the NBA and its $76 billion national TV deal, but it would not be shocking in the least bit if those high-profile sales marked the top of an era for endless local TV money. The national TV deals are still pouring in, as the billion-dollar WNBA is demonstrating, but selling all 82 or 162 games a year is proving to be a much more difficult business in a world where cable cutting is the norm. There is a percolating economic crisis in sports to some degree, and the contours of it will emerge in the coming labor battles in each league as players and owners fight over a widening gulf of haves and have nots.
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