Do pro female pickleball players really outearn WNBA, NWSL stars ?
And it's Christmas Eve 🎄
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
You can tell by how short my “best of the rest” list is this week.
Most headlines are end of year wraps that go something like this: From Caitlin Clark and Simone Biles to a new hockey league, women’s sports had a pivotal year
It was particularly interesting to see these articles contrasted with an article from CNBC: “Pro pickleball players are now getting a higher salary than WNBA, NWSL players.”
Despite women’s sports stellar year, the average pay of the more than 60 women on the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) Tour and Major League Pickleball tops the highest-paid WNBA player’s annual salary and is more than double the average salary of National Women’s Soccer League athletes, according to the pickleball league’s 2024 annual review.
The average salary offered by the pickleball league to women players was $260,000 this year.
Something doesn’t quite add up.
Pickleball can be fun to play, and maybe it can be fun to watch? I’ve caught a few games, but it’s not on par with tuning into an NWSL or WNBA game. And the statistics show it.
320,000 fans attended PPA Tour and MLP events this year, while over two million fans attended NWSL and WNBA games respectively.
Virtually, the WNBA pulled in 54 million unique viewers, with regular season games averaging at least 1 million viewers. And for the NWSL, it had a total viewership across Nielsen-rated platforms of 18.7 million and an average viewership of just under 1 million. Meanwhile the largest-ever pro pickleball TV audience had a viewership of 501,000 for the PPA Mesa Arizona Cup FOX national broadcast.
So why are pickleball players being paid more? The NWSL and WNBA are in a league of their own when it comes to engagement.
There is already less disparity between men and women tennis players relative to other sports. Professional male tennis players are paid 1.2 times more than women players, while in basketball that figure surges to 108 times, according to a study from the Wasserman’s The Collective and RBC. As pickleball is a sister sport to tennis this could have helped create a good baseline for ensuring equality in pickleball athletes’ salaries. Several tennis players have switched to playing pickleball professionally.
The PPA doesn’t get into the details of how they manage to pay these high salaries, but I suspect it has something to do with the significant amount of investment that’s poured into the league and pickleball in recent years. In February, the Major League Pickleball and the Professional Pickleball Association completed their merger, which included $75 million of outside investment.
But is it sustainable ? Only time will tell.
The announcement from the pickleball league might push the NWSL and WNBA to create further parity amongst their high-earning players and the rest of the league, especially amid the renegotiations surrounding the WNBA’s collective barging agreement (CBA) and the NWSL’s new historic CBA, which raises the minimum salary for the league and sets the annual salary cap.
Under the CBA, the NWSL’s league-minimum salary will more than double over the course of the CBA, rising from $48,500 in 2025 to $82,500 in 2030. It’s still miles behind what the PPA purports to offer its professional female players.
Collectively pro pickleball players earned more than $30 million in the 2024 season. According to CNBC, this is based on salary alone and does not include endorsement deals secured by athletes.
Over the Christmas season, I no doubt will be mulling over how the economics of the pro pickleball leagues work and whether any lessons from the league can be taken to the NWSL and WNBA.
If any pickleball enthusiasts are reading this with any insights on how the league achieves these high salaries and whether they will be sustainable long-term, I’d love to hear more…
Merry Christmas from Throws Like A Girl xx
The best of the rest
82% of brands plan to increase their women’s sports budget in 2025, according to Sports Innovation Lab’s 2025 Women’s Sports Media Benchmarking Survey, with 34% of those brands planning an increase of more than 10%.
Netflix has guaranteed exclusive U.S. streaming rights for the Women’s World Cup in 2027 and 2031.
Reebok returns to basketball in multi-year sponsorship deal with the WNBA as the authorized footwear supplier for the league.
Pre-season event The Coachella Valley Invitational continues to grow, with six NWSL teams participating in February.
A fascinating read about the impact of the LPGA and USGA's rule change banning female transgender golfers from competing in elite ladies golf tournaments on Hailey Davidson, the sole professional transgender golfer within elite women’s golf.
Image source: Bryceppa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons