AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Pay us what you owe us. That is what women's basketball players demanded on their T-shirts last season. And now, after days of marathon negotiations, a verbal agreement to keep the WNBA season on schedule has been reached. The agreement announced this morning is said to raise the average player pay to more than $500,000, according to the players union. Representatives for the players and for the league are calling this transformative. Meghan Hall is a reporter for USA Today. She's been covering this whole collective bargaining agreement saga step by step and joins us now. Welcome, Meghan.
MEGHAN HALL: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
CHANG: Oh, great to have you. OK, can we start with revenue sharing? Can you just break down what was the share previously, and what did the players want?
HALL: Yeah, so that's a really good question. So previously, it was about 9%. That's what players were getting in the old CBA.
CHANG: Collective bargaining agreement, CBA.
HALL: Yes. So in these new negotiations, the league said, hey, we will give you 70% of net revenue, right? But the players were like, I - that's not really what we're looking for. We're looking for gross revenue. And they initially started around 40% in the early, early parts of the negotiations and got down to about 25% in the first year of the deal. This morning, there was an ESPN report that the average revenue share is about 20% across the life of the deal. So if you're thinking about that, that's not that far off from what the players were asking for.
CHANG: Interesting. Well, can we also talk about housing affordability? I mean, that's a concern that a lot of Americans are - can relate to these days. How did housing affordability make it into the bucket of agreements here?
HALL: In the grand scheme of things, housing became an issue because of the current player salaries, correct? So I'll give you, for example, a rookie salary is about $76,000. So the WNBA has provided housing since the first CBA in 1999. And so of course, in these negotiations, it came up. But how it came up and how it was discussed was a little bit different for both sides. Ultimately, in the early parts of the negotiations, the league was like, well, hey, if you're going to be making more money, you don't really need housing. And the players said, well, we want housing to be provided 'cause we're also concerned about the people that are in the middle part of this negotiation, the middle part that are going to be affected. And I think that's really where it became a crux of, OK, what can we provide? How can we help support them in a way that still, like, helps them as they transition into these new salaries?
CHANG: Let me ask you about long term going forward. We've seen this huge increase in WNBA viewership coming off of, like, the heels of the Caitlin Clark effect and now a league expansion. Do you think we're going to see continued growth in popularity and viewership over the next - I don't know - five to 10 years? Or do you think this enthusiasm for the WNBA is going to taper at some point, and therefore, the leverage that these players might have at some future negotiation - could that end up waning at some point?
HALL: You know, I actually think that when the players said, pay us what you owe us, it wasn't just for them. It was for the future generations. And I think that's what's getting lost in the conversation to that point is that this is for momentum building. This is for securing the future. This is for paving the path for every player that would come after them. And so I think we often hear this phrase that women's sports is not a - you know, a moment. It's a movement. And this movement has been going and growing, if you will, as well. I think the WNBA realizes what they have in these players and the value that they bring. At the end of the day, ultimately, the players know and the league know that the league actually does not move without its players.
CHANG: Meghan Hall from USA Today, thank you so much for joining us.
HALL: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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