The Indiana Fever rookie lit the match that set women’s sports on fire this year—including a $2 billion media rights deal for the WNBA, gender parity in the Olympics, and record-breaking viewership for professional women’s soccer.
Caitlin Clark was almost nonchalant about the shot that, in March, made her the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer—male or female. “Pretty cool,” she told Fox’s courtside reporter Allison Williams before using the same breath to launch into an analysis of her team’s performance in the game’s first half.
“Pretty cool” is one way to describe the year that Clark has had. Groundbreaking, galvanizing, and history-making are others. After leading Iowa to the NCAA women’s finals—which was watched by a record 18.7 million viewers (24 million at its peak), making it one of the most-watched games in college basketball history and surpassed the men’s final for the first time—Clark went on to become the number one pick in the 2024 WNBA draft.
In her inaugural WNBA season, she continued making history—she set rookie records for most points and assists, as named the league’s Rookie of the Year. Alongside draft class members Angel Reese, Cameron Brink and Kamilla Cardoso, Clark is credited with driving a record 54 million viewers to ABC, NBC, ESPN and their cable peers to watch the WNBA’s regular season.
All of that attention is also lucrative: Over the summer, the WNBA struck an 11-year $2.2 billion media rights deal with Disney, Amazon Prime and NBC.
A basketball player has never before made the ranks of the Forbes list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women (Serena Williams, tennis ace, is one of the only other athletes to appear in the rankings in the last 20 years), but the 22-year-old Clark was a driving force in a game-changing year for women’s sports. The year marked the first time there was gender parity in the number of Olympic athletes competing in the Games; U.S. women’s soccer closed its 2024 season with the most-watched championship game in NWSL history; Angel City FC became the highest-valued women’s professional sports team, at $250 million when Willow Bay and Bob Iger acquired a controlling stake this summer.
“Caitlin Clark became the lightning rod of this moment in time,” says Thayer Lavielle, the executive director of Wasserman’s sports division, The Collective. Lavielle estimates the value of professional women’s basketball and soccer stands to increase by a combined $1.6 billion over the next three years, a figure that is based on attendance and viewership (on television or streaming equivalents) and doesn’t include merchandise or media deals.
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It’s a growth spurt that is long overdue. Dawn Staley, who as the head coach for the South Carolina Gamecocks now has three NCAA women’s titles to her name, told Forbes in July that the momentum behind women’s sports has been building for so long that it’s finally “uncontrollable.” But it also takes a singular figure to truly galvanize consumer interest.
“I think sometimes you need a unifier,” Staley said. “I think Caitlin Clark has done a tremendous job at being that person people want to see. She’s brought a different set of eyeballs to our game.”
Of course, for all the attention that Clark and her cohorts have brought to women’s sports in 2024, it’s “a long path to equity,” says Lavielle. “The men’s side of the ecosystem is $54 billion.” And research from The Collective shows that in the years leading up to 2024, women’s sports received, on average, 15% of total sports media coverage and 10% of sponsorship dollars.
Naturally, that discrepancy translates to significantly lower starting salaries for female players in the WNBA. Clark’s $76,535 rookie salary made headlines earlier this year when it was compared to the salaries of her male counterparts in the NBA: Zaccharie Risacher, 2024’s overall number one pick, and Victor Wembanyama, 2023’s first pick, both received a starting salary of $12 million.
“The major money that funds women’s sports comes from sponsorships and media rights, and even media is really just a reflection of what brands are willing to spend,” explains Pete Giorgio, a principal at Deloitte who leads the firm’s sports practice. “Caitlin Clark will get paid the same as Victor Wembanyama when companies spend 50% of their marketing dollars on women’s sports.”
Giorgio projects that 2024 will mark the first year that global revenue from women’s sports will surpass $1 billion and says that any “bear” case to his thesis is gender-neutral: an economic downturn that would affect sports writ large, for instance. “I fundamentally believe that women’s sports is an undervalued asset that’s going to continue to grow,” he says.
The power of Clark’s half-court three-pointers will be a part of that continued growth. So too will investments from women’s sports team owners like Michele Kang—who, in addition to holding ownership stakes in the NWSL’s Washington Spirit, pledged another $30 million towards developing women’s soccer in November. And Olympic stars like Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky, and coaches like Cheryl Reeve (Minnesota Lynx) and Emma Hayes (UWNT), are becoming household names that are also driving consumer interest and sponsorship dollars.
“While I think what Caitlin has done and what she did this year is extraordinary, I do think it’s part of a broader narrative not just within basketball, but across the Olympics, soccer, volleyball, gymnastics, all the different pieces of it,” says Giorgio. “I think we’re at the beginning of a new normal in women’s sports.
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
