The WNBA will not meet its year-end timeline of naming a new expansion team, as commissioner Cathy Engelbert had previously said she hoped to do, but the league continues to assess where its next franchise will be and which ownership group will run it.
The league has been transparent about its desire to add at least one new franchise to the mix. The WNBA currently has 12 teams, and it has not added an expansion franchise since the Atlanta Dream in 2008. Earlier this year, The Athletic identified six cities as viable options for the league.
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“We’re now engaged in the hard work of looking at the cities that we’ve kind of narrowed to at this point,” Engelbert told The Athletic in a phone interview this week, “and working with different investor groups, different ownership groups, on what would the arena situation be? Practice facilities? How do you think of season ticket holders? How do you think of the corporate sponsorship that you could bring in to the team? So we’re evaluating all that now in a handful of cities. The hard work on that does happen in the offseason. So we’re really into that now.”
Engelbert said the league is looking seriously at 10 interested ownership groups, down from what she said were roughly 20 at the beginning of the league’s process. She noted the league is in no hurry to identify a new team and city.
The WNBA has already had a very busy year. It finished off a $75 million capital raise in February and increased its 2023 season to a 40-game schedule, four more than an already record-high 36 last season.
Engelbert has also been busy assisting with the full hands-on effort to bring Brittney Griner back to the United States from Russia, where Griner spent nine months detained in what the U.S. described as an unlawful imprisonment. Griner was released and brought home last week.
With all of that now over, the league will focus full-bore on expansion.
“We’ve got a whole process,” Engelbert said. “We’ve got data, we’ve got interesting discussions going on but it’s not something we’re going to rush it to just to say we expand. I’ve told so many business leaders this, and they all seem to agree with me — like I’m a big, big believer in let’s transform the economics and then we’ll expand, not expand and then hope that economics transform. We want to bring new owners in that are going to be successful in standing up a franchise that can compete for a championship. So I’m not in a rush, but yeah, would we like to get it done in the next few years? Absolutely.”
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The new team, wherever it will be, is unlikely to begin play until the 2025 season at the earliest.
Engelbert cautioned that there needs to be enough time to have an expansion draft and free agency, and to give the league’s coaches and executives time to prepare. She has said that it would take roughly 18 to 24 months to go from naming a new team to having it ready to play in its debut season. There was belief earlier this year that a new team could begin play for the 2024 season.
“Look, if someone called me tomorrow and said, ‘Here’s a check, and we’re ready to go. And we have the financial model ready. And here’s our corporate sponsors, and we already have thousands of season ticket holders; can we get it done for ’24?’ Yeah,” she said. “But I’m just trying to be more realistic. And I probably said that eight (to) 12 months ago and, again, COVID put us totally behind on all of this. I think we’d be in a better position. We raised the capital in February, that we’re now deploying on the transformation and growing the league. I wouldn’t call it a delay.
“Good news is, we have a ton of interest from a lot of cities. I didn’t think we would have that much interest. And now that we have so much interest, we really want to be thoughtful in how we look at where we’re going to be for the next — because this is a long-term commitment from that ownership group and the league.”
The league’s expansion process has made some strides, aside from narrowing down its field. Engelbert confirmed that she has discussed expansion fee numbers with some interested ownership groups.
She has leaned on the WNBA’s valuation from its capital raise, which valued the league at $475 million, according to sources, as a baseline for how much a new team could cost, though she said there is a “range of reasonable estimates on what a franchise would be worth.” Engelbert also has history in valuations during her time at Deloitte, before she took over at the WNBA. The league, she said, is also focused on not just ensuring that a new ownership group could pay the expansion fee but also that the new franchise would be well-capitalized and could run without issue.
(Photo of Cathy Engelbert: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
