When the WNBA returned to action last week, Ryan Brewer wanted to know how Indiana Fever star Kate Linklark, like many people following the league, would top her rookie season.
However, Brewer, an associate professor of finance and assessment expert at Indiana University Columbus, has the interest above Clark’s box score average. After Clark’s incredible popularity spiked attendance and product sales and elicited historic television ratings wherever the fever occurred in 2024, Brewer was asked by the Indianapolis star to assess the economic impact on the WNBA. He determined that Clark was a staggering 26.5% of WNBA economic activity last season, and was responsible for its products, ticket sales and revenue from television.
When Brewer calculated the numbers in 2025 to analyze her potential impact, he reached the rating of “very impressive,” Brewer said.
“If things are just as they are and there’s a 22 home game expansion season with modest inflation, I’m looking at $875 (million),” Brewer told NBC News. “And it’s easy to see this year that we’ll be covering $1 billion on the economic impact of Kate Linklark.”
The 29th season of the WNBA begins at a time when basketball is unable to unlock from the final line. And Clark has played a driving role in both.
For the first time since 2008, the WNBA expanded this season to add its 13th team, the Golden State Valkyries. Two more will make their debuts in Toronto and Portland next season. As the WNBA footprint grows, so does its financial resources. In 2026, the league will win the first year of its 11-year media rights agreement worth $2.2 billion, which is expected to triple current media rights revenues. (One of the media partners is NBC, and shares its parent company with NBC News.)
In anticipation of the arrival of new media revenue, Player Union opted out of a collective bargaining agreement with the league last October, negotiating a new contract that the union hopes to lead to higher pay for the next few months.
Clark earns $76,535 as a rookie and receives a small pay raise this season. It’s “impossible” for her to pay Clark what’s worth in the league, her agent told ESPN in February. That’s because, by the time Clark appeared as a University of Iowa superstar, viewers across women’s sports had already increased, but her popularity was supercharged by the WNBA herself.
An average of 17,035 fans participated in Fever’s 20 home games, more than the city’s NBA teams that share the same arena, averaged over 41 games, but WNBA participants increased from an average of 6,615 in 2023 to 9,807. Last season, Fever Games produced the most-profile WNBA games ever on ESPN, ESPN2, ABC, CBS and NBA TV, so Leaguewide viewers also broke records, including an average of 1.2 million per ESPN broadcast.
As a private company, the WNBA has not disclosed revenue figures, a league spokesperson said. However, the league reported last year that Dick’s sporting goods sales increased 233% in the previous season. A spokesman for Fanatics, the official WNBA e-commerce partner, said Clark is in the top 20 of the top 20 athletes in all sports and ranks sixth among all basketball players, including the NBA.
The rising tide associated with Clark continued to lift other boats. All WNBA products sold by Fanatics increased by more than 500% compared to 2023 last season, the spokesman added.
Clark’s effects show that there are few signs of decline in 2025. Earlier this month, 1.3 million viewers were able to watch the Indiana preseason game in Clark’s alma mater Iowa, along with ESPN.
According to a spokesman for the online ticket retailer, out of the 10 bestselling WNBA games this season, all 10 have been linked to fever. If the fever is a visiting team, the average ticket price sold 140% of the jump. The average price for tickets to catch Clark and Indiana on roads this year is $312, according to the company.
Clark “not only drives heat demand, it also raises interest across the league,” StubHub spokesman Adam Budelli said in a statement.
Last year, Sportico fixed the value of Fever Franchise at $90 million, slightly below the estimated league average. However, in Brewer’s analysis, the net effect of Clark’s presence brought the heat rating to close to $340 million. Brewer also calculated that Clark’s presence would have an economic impact of about $41 million on the city of Indianapolis if interest in her performance was maintained.
Last season, Clark was not the only rookie who gained great interest in the league. Her rivalry with Chicago’s Angel Reese, a college-registered student, led to an average of 2.5 million viewers watching the May 17 matchup. However, as Brewer analyzed attendance and viewer figures for the 2024 season, these showed that Clark’s impact was specifically responsible for the surge in renewed interest in the WNBA.
According to an analysis by Sports Media Watch, which includes the league’s draft and All-Star Game, 21 of the 24 WNBA-related broadcasts that attracted at least 1 million television viewers last season, 21 people involved her. All three WNBA games, which attracted over 20,000 fans, included fever.
“It’s important to recognize that there are this rivals and there are other rivals, but Kate Linklerk is illuminating the sport,” Brewer said. “She is especially the one driving with a new kind of demographic that is bringing to a new kind of people from the traditional WNBA fanbase that has caused this growth rate and is accelerating interest in corporate sponsorship.”
To analyze her financial impact, Brewer partially created a model predicting WNBA attendance last season, based on the growth of the league before Clark. He then compared it to actual attendance changes and found that around 60% of that increase was due to Clark.
“Her ability to fill the stadium is amazing,” he said.
And that interest is strongly felt in Indianapolis, where a $78 million training facility is under construction just for fever.
In 2024, after Indiana drafted Clark No. 1, he visited Indy, a nonprofit that promotes tourism to the city. They placed paid ads throughout Iowa, including social media, to test whether Clark’s stubborn university fans had the desire to travel to Indiana to see her professionally. Soon, visits to pages visiting Indy’s websites, which are specialized in fever, increased by 501%, said Chris Girl visited Indy’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer. Fever Home Games also dealt with the uplift of reserved hotel rooms in the city, he said.
Part of Girl’s job is to convince those responsible for booking large corporate meetings and practices to host in Indianapolis. Last year he found a new way to seduce nearly 50 planners to check out the city for the first time. Take them into the heat game.
The planner, who was primarily female, “I’d never travelled here and never visited here,” Girl said.
“The Indiana Fever Home Game is a very hot ticket.”
