Arguing that Caitlin Clark, the most marketable athlete in all of college sports, will take a pay cut by going to the WNBA is one of the worst takes I have ever heard.
The star point guard announced Thursday she will forego her final season of eligibility and enter the draft. She is projected as the overall No. 1 pick, which is held by the Indiana Fever.
Clark currently has brand deals with Nike, Gatorade, State Farm, Buick, Goldman Sachs, H&R Block, and Topps. Her 11 brand deals, which amount to an estimated $900,000 per On3NIL, will likely follow Clark wherever she goes for however long she plays basketball. I still expect Nike to eventually release a signature basketball shoe for No. 22.
The NCAA women’s basketball all-time leading scorer hasn’t been paid by Iowa’s NIL collective during her college career simply because she doesn’t need it to make a profit. If she did have deals through Iowa’s collective, then yes, those deals would not follow her to the league and she would lose those potential earnings.
But that’s not the case.
Clark is expected to earn the maximum WNBA salary, which, in her first year, is around $75,000. After five years in the league, Clark could make around $245,000 on a supermax deal, according to the WNBA’s current collective bargaining agreement.
Plus, with Clark’s celebrity status, she could have the opportunity to make up to $250,000 per year on a Player Marketing Agreement (PMA) as early as her first season, according to IndyStar’s Chloe Peterson. PMAs allow the league to pay players for being brand ambassadors for the WNBA and its partners year-round. Per ESPN, the 2020 collective bargaining agreement requires the league to spend $1 million total on PMAs each year. If the league doesn’t meet that payout in one season, it gets carried over to the next season.
Clark has over 1 million followers on Instagram and almost 200,000 followers on X, formerly known as Twitter. Clark’s deep threes and swagger have attracted audiences never seen before in women’s basketball. Iowa has only played six games in front of fewer than 12,000 fans this season. Three of them were at a neutral site during the Gulf Coast Showcase in Florida and the other three were sold-out games in smaller arenas at Rutgers, Northwestern, and Northern Iowa. According to the Big Ten, Clark and the Hawkeye women’s basketball team have played in the most-watched women’s basketball game for six different networks — ABC, Big Ten Network, FOX, FS1, NBC, and Peacock. Yes, the WNBA doesn’t attract as big of an audience, but that won’t directly correlate with Clark’s pay. And if anyone is going to bring more eyes to the WNBA, it’s No. 22.
Clark is the perfect player to promote the WNBA year-round, so why wouldn’t the league want to offer her a PMA? Fever forward Aliyah Boston, the overall No. 1 pick last season, is one of six players who have a PMA with the league this offseason. Plus, if Clark and Boston lead the Fever to the playoffs, they’ll receive bonuses, yet another opportunity for the star point guard to make a profit.
Clark will earn her league salary and keep making money from her existing sponsorship deals (and probably sign with even more brands), so she will likely make more money in the WNBA than during her time at Iowa. At the end of the day, I don’t think Clark even cares about the money. She has nothing left to prove in college and is ready for the next level.