Cathy Engelbert knows fans are frustrated with the cost and complexity of watching WNBA games. She just doesn’t think the league can do much about it.
Speaking to Sports Business Journal, the WNBA commissioner was asked about the challenges facing consumers: rising subscription costs and the difficulty of tracking which outlet is carrying which game on which night.
“I’m not running one of those media companies, so I can’t fix the cost thing,” Engelbert said. “The WNBA is not unique in this battle. It’s the free market that the U.S. has in the media market because there’s a lot of participants. That has been accretive to live sports, keeping cable alive, and live sports getting streamers. It’s the one thing keeping everybody alive, quite frankly.”
She then added, with some self-awareness, that she personally pays for 18 subscriptions and still has not cut the cable cord.
The WNBA’s record 216 national games this season are spread across ESPN, ABC, CBS, Prime Video, Ion, NBC, Peacock, USA Network, and NBA TV. Keeping track of who has what on a given night is a genuine ask of fans, casual or otherwise. It’s the same problem the NFL, NBA, and MLB face, as live sports have become the primary currency of every major media company fighting for subscribers.
Engelbert isn’t pretending otherwise, but what she’s arguing is that the problem belongs to the broader media economy, not to the WNBA specifically, and that the league’s job is to get its games in front of as many people as possible within that structure.
“I don’t disagree with the cost point,” she continued. “We’re outpacing the NHL and MLB on visibility as far as percentages. That was important. I think it’s important to the players that they be shown and their stories be told. Look at our shoulder programming. When I joined the league, no one was doing any shoulder programming. Now every single broadcast partner is doing shoulder programming. They are also doing marketing of the W. During the Kentucky Derby last week, they played a WNBA ad spot.”
When Engelbert took over as commissioner, the WNBA had 15 national games, most of them on ESPN2 and ESPNU. This season, 216 of 330 regular-season games air nationally, a percentage that she said outpaces both the NHL and MLB.
CBS, which previously split its 20-game slate between its broadcast network and the little-watched CBS Sports Network, now airs all 20 games on CBS itself. NBC and Prime Video came in this season as part of the NBA’s 11-year media rights package, lifting the league’s average annual rights value from roughly $40 million to what Engelbert has described as $200 million.
At some point, that’s the trade every league is making. More money and more exposure usually mean more partners, more platforms, and more fragmentation. Fans may hate bouncing between Peacock, Prime Video, cable, and over-the-air broadcasts, but leagues keep signing these deals because the economics are impossible to ignore. From the WNBA’s perspective, Engelbert is arguing that visibility comes first. The league spent years fighting for relevance and consistent television exposure. Now it has both, even if the viewing experience has become more complicated in the process.
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