Diary of a WNBA negotiator

This is "Planet Money" from NPR. There's this player in the WNBA, her name is Alicia Clark, who has kind of a reputation. I think my teammates would describe me as a tough, gritty, winning, like a winner. Can you go into a winner a little bit like what does that mean? I'm going to be in the right position at the right time. I'm going to be prepared. Yeah, I just want to win at all costs and whatever that looks like, whatever I need to do is what I'll do, so. and I have a track record of winning. Yeah, she's understating it a little bit. Actually, when we were talking to her, the only time she seemed kind of bored was when she was listing her accomplishments. Going back to high school, like I want to stay championship. She went on to win championships in college and overseas leagues. Then in the WNBA, winning three championships with three of the. how many teams have I played for? So we're talking to a three-time WNBA champion. Yes. Awesome. But recently, she took part in a competition that had higher stakes than any game she's ever played. Alicia knows long ruling workouts. She's learned dozens of defensive schemes and offensive plays. She's used to practicing, preparing, strategizing. But this was a totally different kind of endurance challenge. Because instead of running drills, she was studying contracts and labor law. You know, taking the time to sit down and go through this 300-page document and read. And if there's something I didn't understand, I googled it. And I'm like, "Okay, what does X, Y, and Z mean?" "Oh, okay, got it." And so then I would go back and reread a section and then if there were questions, "Hey, I saw this. What exactly does this mean?" She was doing all of this studying because for the first time in her life, she was going to be negotiating the contract for all the players in the WNBA. And look, it's normal for players to be involved in collective bargaining. And union workers sign a new contract with their employers. Some of the actual workers have to be part of the negotiations. So Alicia was going to be one of the players negotiating over things like parental leave for a 1K matching, housing stipends, and most importantly, pay. What was not normal was how potentially historic this new contract could be. The WNBA has seen astronomical growth since the players got their last contract six years ago. And the players were saying, "Wait a minute. This is our moment. We want our fair share." Our share should grow as the business grows because we're the reason the business is growing. All Alicia and the other negotiators had to do was get the league to agree. Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Erica Beres. And I'm Emma Peasley. Alicia Clark and the other players had a once in a generation opportunity to change the future for all of women's basketball, and maybe all of women's sports. And it came right down to the buzzer. Today on the show, we go court side to one of the most important union negotiations in professional sports history and learn what it's like to be a rookie doing high stakes bargaining. From bluffs and puffs to strategic silence and something called batten up. And the ringer? And the ringer? On the court, Alicia Clark is a forward for the Dallas Wings. But over her time with the WNBA, she has been in pretty much every position. Being cut from her team twice, being a bench player, getting the minimum WNBA salary. Being the like middleman in terms of I'm not the superstar, but I'm not a rookie. Then being a starter, winning all those championships. She says that's why she stepped up a couple years ago to help negotiate this contract. I just knew that my lived experience would be so crucial and beneficial to this negotiation. Alicia is the oldest player in the league, 38. And when she first started thinking about these contract negotiations two years ago, she knew what she did not want. The kind of contract she had back when she was a rookie. What was your salary? My salary? Oh, I think I wrote it down. Let me check. She's pulling out like a red diary notebook. Yeah, I am. I am. Yes. Alicia Clark starts flipping through a real old school diary. During the contract negotiations, she was making entries multiple times a day in her careful cursive writing. This is, this was my handy dandy notebook. Do you normally keep like a diary or a. No, I am like a diary, like journal person, just because I like to remember stuff. And I have so many thoughts. She finds the page she was looking for. So my first contract, I think was $36,400. That was during her first WNBA season in 2012. I looked at it, I was like, okay, I'm making $36,400 for five months. Like, that's decent. And I'm like, I'm not going to look at the rest of the months of the year. We'll figure that out later. But for these five months, I was just like, this is what professional athletes are making or at least the women professional athletes. Nothing they had was like what the men had. Our practice court was a church gym. Alicia says they flew economy in middle seats if you were a rookie, didn't matter how tall you were. And when they traveled, most players had roommates. Adults, professional athletes sharing a hotel room. Did you say anything about it? Like, I know you were like, well, this is good. But were you, did it occur, you'd be like, wait, should I get more? Oh, no, there was, there was no thought or even opportunity to get more. That is, that's just what you got. At the time, the WNBA was not turning a profit, which is typical for a new league. Many professional sports leagues don't make money for a while. Alicia says when the WNBA players asked for more money, they were always told the same thing. No one comes to the games. The revenue just isn't there. In the beginning, the NBA owned the WNBA. They're still majority owners. And in their 2002 negotiations, the NBA commissioner threatened to cancel the upcoming season if they couldn't reach an agreement. But over Alicia's career, women's basketball has changed a lot. It started slow. More people going to games, more television stations showing them. During the height of the pandemic, they were one of the only sports on television. And ever since, women's basketball has gone bonkers. Remember when Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA all-time scoring record? Here comes Clark. How will she go for history? She got so popular she was invited on Saturday Night Live. Here in a comment is Caitlin Clark. When Angel Reese's first preseason game with the Chicago sky wasn't televised, a fan streamed the game from their phone and it got 500,000 views. And off the court, Angel is a regular at the Met Gala. So now, money is coming in from skyrocketing ticket prices and advertising revenue. The league is projected to get $3.1 billion over the next 11 years from a new media rights deal. And the players have gotten better deals as things have changed. They got rid of the roommates, recently they've been flying charter. They got parental leave and they got somewhat higher salaries. Last year the minimum salary, like for a rookie, was around $66,000. And for the first time, the players did get a bonus because the WNBA made enough money to trigger it. But going into contract negotiations this year with the WNBA pie growing exponentially, Alicia was on a mission. Can you tell us a little bit about what was on your wish list? Yeah. I mean, everything. We were like, where did we start? Literally everything needed to be thrown out and started over again. No, literally. That's literally what we said. We were like, this all needs to be scrapped and we need to like redo this entire CBA. The entire collective bargaining agreement. And if you're going to ask for more of everything, Alicia learned, you have to be able to explain why. When an organization is making a profit, there are no rules that say management has to take this much and labor gets this much. You make it up. And when you're getting ready to negotiate, one thing you look for are comps in your industry. Like other plumbers or teachers or whatever make this much money, so we should make that much. But there was no comparable professional women's basketball league in the country. And just asking for the same is what the men make. The average men's salary is around $10 million. Just wasn't going to work because despite all the growth of the WNBA, it still doesn't bring in nearly the kind of money the NBA does. The new pie is not that big. So it was going to take some complicated math to figure out a fair comparison. And that was a first big challenge for the players as they prepped to start bargaining with the league. Mind you, Claudia Golden is on our side. You heard that right, planet money fam, the Claudia Golden, the Nobel Prize winning economic historian and labor economist. When the WNBA players asked Claudia, after she won the Nobel, to help them negotiate their pay, she said, "Okay, but for no pay." So she was one of the people advising the player side. Did you get to meet her? What was that like? What did she tell you? Basically, what you guys are fighting for is more than fair. And she was like, " Honestly, it's embarrassing what they're paying you guys." So just to know to have confidence that what you're fighting for is more than fair, and they have it. We exchanged emails with Claudia. She didn't want to come on because she wanted the focus to be on the players. And she said the math she was doing for them was not actually complicated. It was simple. It's all laid out in an op-ed. She wrote last year for The New York Times. Claudia wanted to find what a reasonable gap between the NBA and WNBA salaries would be by comparing their revenue. So she looked at what the W and the NBA each bring in from advertising, streaming, and game attendance. She accounted for the fact that the NBA season has more games. The games themselves are longer and there are fewer WNBA teams. Then she crunched all those numbers and estimated that the average WNBA salary should be about a quarter to a third of the average NBA salary. In reality, Claudia calculated it was more like 1/80th. And part of the reason that gap existed is because of the WNBA's previous collective bargaining agreement. The player salaries were not tied to revenue. They grew at a fixed rate that did not account for the incredible growth of the league. So that is the part of money that Alicia and her negotiating team decided to zero in on revenue. They wanted what's called revenue share, which Alicia says she didn't really understand in her rookie years. Like you know what revenue is and you know like obviously revenue shares like okay you're sharing in the money that you're that's coming in but like what does that actually look like in the terms that they have? The players did have an opportunity for some rev share from an earlier contract. That's how they got those bonuses last year. But the way the agreement worked, their salaries and their share of the revenue didn't grow at the same pace as the WNBA's overall revenue. If the business grew our share stayed the same. So they sent their first proposal to the league in February of 2025 and what they asked for was 40% of revenue to split between players. You know now they were willing to settle for less but negotiators usually start out with something called an anchor number to influence the direction of negotiations. By the way, NBA players get about 50% of rev share using a different system. In response to the WNBA players proposals, the league did eventually offer some big jumps in salaries. At one point they said they increased the max salary from about 250k to more than a million. But they were still insisting on a fixed rate system. They were not budging on the players rev share ask. So they're going back and forth and Alicia and the other negotiators are following along with help from you could say the Claudia golden team, the math team. I'm a visual person. So I needed to see like you can tell me something but I'm like let me just see it. And so they created like pie charts for us. Like hey, I love pie charts. You know, it's amazing. And so it's like hey, here is what happened, right? Like here's the revenue. Here's their estimated what they're saying. What they're offering you is this piece. Okay, but they told the players now watch the pie as the years go by. Look at the revenue the week is projecting. Here's what they're projecting the league to make over, you know, the next five years. And here's what happens to your share that they're offering you over those five years. And when you see it, you're like, huh, what? Why is that getting smaller? Why isn't it getting bigger with the increased revenue? And it's like exactly. So in our revenue model, here's what it would look like. That was really eye-opening because you know, they're like, oh, there's a million dollar contracts, there's this, there's average salary of this. And the players just see the numbers and where everyone's just like, but look at the salaries and it's like, I look at this pie chart. Look at this chart. Look at how this look at the graph. As the negotiations move forward, Alicia and the other players on the committee had to pay the closest attention to every detail. This was a game they were only just learning to play. And with any game, there are lots of techniques. We've actually been looking at a list of, quote, hard bargaining techniques on a Harvard Law School post about negotiation tactics. Things negotiators might use in a situation like this. Now, a source with the league told us, quote, we did not rely on negotiating tactics or anything of that nature. But we think that some of the experiences Alicia told us about sound a little like some of the tactics on the list. They said they would lose hundreds of millions of dollars if they did it our way. That was their whole spielding. I mean, they said it in the in the media all the time. We would lose hundreds of millions of dollars if we did it the way the players want to do it. To us, that sounded a little like a technique the Harvard Law School calls bluffing and puffing. Their post says these kinds of exaggerated claims and misrepresentations can throw negotiations off track. And Alicia said, it really helped to have their own math in their pocket, especially when they thought the league was seriously lowballing them. What they offered in the beginning was embarrassing. I was like, this is actually embarrassing and the fact that you put it in writing is even more embarrassing. Because I'm like, we have this amazing staff of advisors that are giving us facts, not like feelings and we know we're all in our our feelings about stuff, etc. But let me show you what is actually here. That's where the confidence was gained. Another negotiating strategy, it seemed like the players might have encountered. This one is on some other lists of labor negotiating tactics. It's what you might call a strategic pause, like a pause in conversation, or in this case, a pause in the whole negotiation. Yeah. Alicia says in December, 10 months into the negotiation, after the players sent a new proposal, the league went silent, waited more than six weeks to respond. Our source on the lead side says this was not a negotiating tactic and that the union's prior proposal did not warrant a response. Regardless, after what seems like a dramatic pause, the league invited the players to come to their headquarters in New York. This was now February. And so we were like, okay, they're calling a meeting, like surely they're going to come with something. Right. And they showed up with nothing. Why call a meeting then? That's what we were trying to figure out. Like you had people dropping everything to come to New York to be here for this. And you guys don't even show up with a proposal. Next, the league made a move that to us sounds kind of like what the Harvard Law School list calls threats and warnings. After the six weeks of silence and the big nothing of a trip to New York, Alicia says the league gave the players a suddenly urgent deadline. If you don't sign a contract by March 10th, the season will be in jeopardy. They wasted six weeks and then all of a sudden created this false timeline that we all of a sudden all had to be had to jump on. And it was like, okay, well, where was the sense of urgency when you wasted these six weeks? For the record, our person on the league side says it was not a threat or warning. Either way, by now they were way behind schedule. And the start of the season was looming. So in March, both sides agreed to get together in person in New York again. Alicia packed the bag thinking it's just for a few days. You know, I was like, what can we get in this carry on? And in that carry on was her trusty diary. This meeting seemed for real because they had blocked off the entire third floor of the Langham hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York. There was a conference room with a big rectangular table. And Alicia said the first meeting between the players and the league was very passionate because at this point, we were so pissed off at how, at how they were moving. In her diary, she wrote down what she heard the league say after they all sat down. This is from March 10th. Okay. Let me double check my, yeah. It was like, we're putting for the proposal now. We'd like to walk out tonight and get a deal done. On day one, we were like, I'm sorry, what? That didn't happen. Instead, for days, they went back and forth with proposals covering not just revshare, but all the other little details. Like when the season should start, how many training staff should there be? Should the players be provided with cars? Alicia and the other players on the exec committee quickly settled into a routine. They did their workouts in the morning. And then in the afternoon, they negotiated. And Alicia kept diary entries. We met today at 12.45 to go through the proposal. The league sent after 5 a.m. We went through revshare housing. They did make some progress right away with the help of an aptly nicknamed player who was on the negotiation team. Breezy was working on her charts with the numbers and salaries. And, you know, that's why we called her Breezy Hidden Figures Turner. I got real familiar with the charts. That's Brianna Turner. She's a forward for the Las Vegas Aces and the WNBA Players Association treasure. I was just all in the Excel and like the Google Sheets and have my notes and was just making lots of charts. Breezy on the court hidden figures in the negotiation room. Because she'd take whatever proposal the league was offering and stick it in her spreadsheet and see what it really meant. The charts all was making was just like looking at like a $5 million salary cap. Like I think the league came back with like the maximum salary being like 20% of the cap and thinking like, okay, if two players have max salaries that's 40% of the cap right there, then you're leaving 60% of the cap for 10 people. They're just like trying to figure out masks. We see you hidden figures. Brianna also got into it with the league when they proposed cutting housing out of their package. They were saying basically you're making more money. You can pay for your own housing. But Brianna argued in the more transient and sometimes fickle world of professional sports that could leave players without a place to live. So it's like what happens you get cut or you get traded. Then you're on the hook for rent in a city that you don't even look. in any more like he should just expect these landlords to be nice when like realistically that's not the case Breonna says she addressed the full room what happens in LA in 28 and they're like what do you mean and I was like the Olympics like do you think housing calls are going to rise that summer and they were just like you can just tell they hadn't considered that before the days were marathons ending at one or two a.m. for the players and four or five a.m. for the staff every single night I was just praying the security to a cook us out I was like please cook us out of here they weren't really bothered by the quick moving parts of the negotiations they're used to a fast paced competition it was the slow moving parts that frustrated them the most when they were benched but still in the game like when just the lawyers were in the room talking without them what did you do when you waited I feel like I did everything and nothing like I was just scrolling watching stuff on my laptop make my little charts get in fresh air they played card games went on walks everyone had shows they were watching and sometimes they all watched things together like the Oscars Alicia says they were watching when the first woman cinematographer won for centers we were all like let's go like women are up let's go this is the sign like just you know and then like when Michael be Jordan won for best actor like erupted we were all in there like hooting and holler and like it was just so dope it was it was a good time did anyone from the hotel come in and be like why are you all screaming so loudly so they like came running they're like what we would happen and we were like oh centers just one and Oscar and they were like we thought maybe like you guys were cheering because a deal was being done like oh we didn't think I had my come off yeah no deal by day six the hotel had given the players cozy blankets and pillows so they were comfortable but the negotiations were stalled especially on the most important stuff the money Alicia's journal entry I even jot it I was like there wasn't an in person no in-person combos for the group have it happened since last week and it's like us being there was the whole point so we could sit in front of you and negotiate and talk about these things but you're not even allowing us to do that Alicia says the players had lowered and lowered their revshare ask from 40% all the way down to 20 but they couldn't go any lower and still represent what the players said they wanted and I'm like why do we keep allowing them to like blow through what we're asking like we've asked for a response and they keep being like okay maybe a little bit later in a little bit in a little bit and I'm like at what point are we going to put our foot down that's when Alicia and her team of negotiators started really considering their own hard bargaining tactic maybe the biggest hardest bargain-iest tactic yet that's after the break sitting at that big rectangular negotiating table in their fifth avenue hotel Alicia Clark and Brianna Turner were thinking more and more about a hard bargaining tactic of last resort one they really didn't want to use but they had also planned for see a few months earlier Alicia and Brianna and the whole negotiating team had gone to the other 150 plus players in the league and asked them basically hey what do you want to do if they don't give us what we want they were basically asking the players for their version of what experienced negotiators call batna best alternative to a negotiated agreement meaning what will you do if you don't reach a deal and what the player said we walk they authorized a strike if necessary and Alicia says this was a long time in the making every meeting that we had as player leadership executive committee over the course of these last 18 months it was save your money tell your teammates to save their money be sure you're saving your money be sure you're saving your money we don't know what's gonna come but we want to be prepared and so jump forward to March six days into their negotiations they're sitting around the hotel lounge wrapped in blankets waiting and waiting for a satisfying response to their proposal I think the morale was like an effort type of feeling to be honest like you're either about to come to this table and negotiate like you should have been or we're walking like we're not gonna continue wasting our time sitting here that's when Alicia and the players instructed their lawyer tell them if they don't come back tonight we're walking and that was like the first real time that I was like let's buckle up and this time it was the players who gave the league a hardball deadline you have till nine thirty p.m. and this is a huge deal it's a nuclear option the players are gonna lose their salaries potentially lose a whole season the league for their part is gonna lose even more money if there's a strike because there will not be games and if it goes on long enough they could fully lose fans lose momentum that pie could start getting smaller instead of continuing to grow nine thirty p.m. rolls around still no deal but 20 minutes later the league says basically hold tight they're formatting and printing something up at ten fifty five p.m. they meet so I hate when like people walk into a room and don't speak so I said to them good evening Alicia has notes in her journal he literally was like we're what he said contemplating an agreement for the first time for the shared basketball revenue systems the rev share I put big f_ing deal about them wanting to move to our system proud of this group for another 24 hours they went back and forth on details and then on March 18th day eight at 2 a.m. Alicia and Brianna and the rest of the players are scattered around the conference room lying in their blankets I open up my laptop to start watching my show not even two minutes later they come everybody in the room everyone is the meeting room now we're like oh that's for serious voice the week side starts talking you guys will have a $7 million cap starting in 2026 your shared basketball revenue will be 20 percent you know it'll grow the 20 percent over the the course every year Alicia and the other players are looking at each other we're just kind of like so does that mean you guys are accepting like what is they're like yes we accept this deal we accept this agreement and we're like okay you can just say that like what they had secured their 20 percent revenue share holy crap we really just got this done she recorded her final diary entry from the negotiations I literally put in like huge things across the bottom to 22 a.m. we agreed underline exclamation point and put a big heart like that's that's what I put yeah like we did it Alicia gives a weepy toast to both sides I'm gonna get emotional because this deal is gonna change the lives of so many players moving forward and everyone that spent time away from family and friends you're gonna see the results of this for decades so congratulations on an amazing transformation deal thank you for everybody's hard work and thank you for believing in this leave you're believing in us as athletes so this agreement was a big deal at the draft a few weeks later the WNBA commissioner called it the first comprehensive revenue share model in the history of women's professional sports and the rough share it's just one of the big changes the player secured housing for everyone and even one time payments to retired players so they get a cut to and salaries overall are way higher the lowest paid player in 2026 will make more than the highest paid player in 2025 so now the players math built on the math of a Nobel laureate is embedded in the pages of every WNBA players contract Alicia gets to keep her reputation as a winner and as for Brianna also known as hidden figures have you done anything for yourself to celebrate like this episode was produced by me Emma Peasley with help from Willa Rubin it was edited by Mary Ann McEun it was fact checked by video on manual it was engineered by Jimmy Keely and James Willis Alex Goldmark is our executive producer special thanks to Aaron Drake Dave Barry and Noah Aga I'm Erica Baris and I'm Emma Peasley this is NPR thanks for listening [MUSIC]