WNBA Players Are Getting Brand Deals, But Not Equally

When Jonquel Jones was named WNBA Finals MVP after helping the New York Liberty clinch their franchise’s first championship, it was yet another achievement for the 6’6” center. The former league MVP, Most Improved Player, and Sixth Player of the year finally had her chip on her fourth straight trip to the Finals. The official Nike social media accounts had a celebratory graphic ready to go for their sponsored athlete—an image of the Statue of Liberty with Jones’s face projected onto it, alongside the word “Monumental.”

“Monumental” is a great word to describe the past season for both Jones and the WNBA. Viewership is up 170% over last season and these Finals were the most-watched in league history. The WNBA has more money and investments pouring in than ever before. But for a league that has historically struggled to market its masculine players—especially Black ones like Jones—it’s worth asking whether the dollars are benefitting all the athletes equally or if long-existing discrepancies are being exacerbated.

“I feel like I'm still fighting for those [brand] deals,” Jones told Complex before this season’s semifinals series between the Liberty and the Las Vegas Aces. “I don't know if the opportunities are necessarily there for me, like by myself as a player, but I do know that the New York Liberty [have put me in place to ensure I'm] getting the things that I deserve.”

Angel Reese recently made headlines when she said that her WNBA salary doesn’t pay her bills “at all.” At the beginning of the year, Reese called her $73,439 rookie salary “a bonus,” indicating that her meaningful income is the result of her sponsorships with brands including Reebok, Good American, Tampax, beauty brand Mielle, Beats by Dr. Dre, and Hershey's Reese's Pieces candy.

In a league where player salaries are still as low as they are—no player makes more than $252,450—brand endorsements can make all the difference. They can mean a player doesn’t have to travel overseas in order to support themselves, which gives them an offseason to rest and reduces their risk of injury. While U.S.-based offseason leagues like Athletes Unlimited and Unrivaled, whose inaugural season begins in January, are allowing more athletes to remain stateside, nearly 50% of W players went overseas last winter.

On Monday, the Women’s National Basketball Players’ Association (WNBPA) announced that the athletes had decided to opt out of their current collective bargaining agreement to push for higher salaries. That still won’t close the endorsement gap between more feminine players who are considered “marketable” and their more masculine colleagues who don’t receive the same attention from brands.

“I love this league,” Phoenix Mercury guard Natasha Cloud tells Complex. “I love the diversity of it, I love the beauty of it. Everybody can eat, but when you literally keep people from eating—and that's what I typically feel when it comes to the more masculine-presenting women of our league—we're left out all the time when it comes to marketing and endorsements and sponsorships and all those things.”

The WNBA is likely the most inclusive highly commercialized professional sport organization in the world, but they are still not immune to the discrimination that plagues people from marginalized identities throughout our society. Many of the players are what Nefertiti Walker, co-author of Slaying the Trolls! Why the Trolls are Very, Very Wrong About Women and Sports and professor of sport management at the University of Massachusetts, calls a “triple threat:” marginalized due to their gender identity, racial identity, and sexual identity.

“Our research on multiple-marginalized people in sport provides evidence that these people will have more barriers to leadership positions, less access to powerful networks, and far fewer opportunities for advancement. Specifically, Black, gay women were some of the most mistreated people in our study.”

At the beginning of the 2024 season, the league dropped their much-lauded Skims campaign, partnering with Kim Kardashian’s line of intimates. It was announced at the end of the previous season and players—including Cloud—commented publicly, encouraging the WNBA to make sure that “the papis of the league” weren’t forgotten. But when the campaign was released, Cloud remarked, “You can clearly see who was marketed from our league, and again, what demographic was missing.”

“The Skims campaign is amazing, everyone just looks amazing [in it],” said Layshia Clarendon, the recently retired, first openly trans WNBA player, on a recent episode of the Good Game with Sarah Spain podcast. “And I still think our league also always struggles with not marketing the people who are masculine. Yes, market our femme people who are beautiful. But there's such a spectrum of gender expression in our league.”

It’s important to differentiate the league’s marketing from that of brands and sponsors because they are different entities, but that doesn’t mean they’re not connected. When the league promotes, highlights, and platforms certain players, it boosts their profile. That higher profile brings those athletes to the attention of brands. Promotion begets promotion, and when the WNBA decides that only a certain kind of player deserves to be the face of the league, it impacts the bottom line of all the players.

In 2021, research by Risa F. Isard and Dr. E. Nicole Melton found that Black WNBA athletes’ gender presentation greatly factored into how much media attention they received. White players who presented in more masculine ways received more than five times the number of mentions as Black players who had masculine-of-center presentations (212 to 41, respectively).

Someone like Jones has seen her brand slowly grow over the past few seasons, with State Farm commercials and her own Nike PE. While that is obviously due to Jones’s immense talent, it’s also because she moved from playing in the small market of Connecticut to the much larger market of New York City.

For WNBA players who haven’t been championed by the league the way they could have been and who don’t play in markets like New York, they and their agents have to work hard to fill the gap and find brand opportunities that align with their image.

One example is Moolah Kicks, the woman-specific basketball shoe brand that has signed Courtney Williams and Sug Sutton. Following the NCAA season and going into the 2024 WNBA season, Moolah Kicks reported that sales were up 97% year-over-year.

Another is Woxer’s campaigns with several WNBA players, including Natasha Cloud, Natasha Howard, and Kierstan Bell, who were left out of the league’s Skims campaign, despite Skims having a line of tomboy-cut undergarments. These players have found a brand that will give them the underwear campaign they deserve—while also tapping into a neglected corner of the market. Cloud and Bell connected with Woxer on X, and Howard says she asked her marketing team to reach out to the brand.

“I wanted to show everyone that we are just as marketable,” says Cloud. “There's a huge demographic out here that is just itching for more spotlight. I wanted to show everyone that there is a sex appeal, while still catering to everyone.”

Campaigns like Woxer’s are more than just smart marketing on behalf of a brand that has found a gap in the market to capitalize on. They also expand cultural ideas of what womanhood looks like and what kind of woman is deserving of an underwear campaign.

“I really got excited for being a part of their campaign, and showing who I am and my figure as a masculine woman,” Howard tells Complex. “It just felt really good to express my body in their clothing.”

For league veterans like Howard and Cloud, sometimes it can feel like they’re fighting an uphill battle to get paid what they deserve. Howard is a three-time champion, a Defensive Player of the Year, a Most Improved Player, and a two-time member of the All-Defensive First Team. Her wife, Jac’Eil, was on the most recent season of VH1’s Basketball Wives Los Angeles, which is an opportunity she says she took because she felt more people should know Howard’s name.

“I would love to do more things like [the Woxer campaign],” says Howard. “I'm like, ‘I'll do whatever, I'm not really picky. So whatever that could put me out there, my face out there, I'm glad to do it.”

Cloud, too, says she’s still trying to learn to navigate the world of endorsements, even as a nine-year vet with a championship and several WNBA All-Defensive team accolades under her belt. “It's not only I feel like the W that has to focus on being more diverse in their marketing, but as well as everywhere else, especially when it comes to more masculine-presenting women. I feel like it's slim pickings out here for sponsorships and endorsements, and that's just me being honest about where I am.”

Both brands and leagues are using outdated beliefs and oversexualized standards to sell women’s sports, says Walker. This is despite the fact that the research has long provided evidence that athleticism, and perceived level of expertise in one’s sport is a better endorsement model for women’s sports than sex appeal. Yet, the sexism, racism, and stereotypes that are embedded in these beliefs are deeply entrenched in the brand endorsement world of women’s sports.

“The league needs to shift the way we market our gender non-conforming players,” Clarendon told Spain. “There's all these marketing dollars going towards the league right now, which is so beautiful. Are we marketing the Seimone Augustus of our era? Is the WNBA learning how they missed out on Seimone? Is Courtney Williams getting the marketing deals she should get now?”

Williams became a breakout star of these WNBA Finals, even though her Minnesota Lynx fell short of the championship. Her Game 4 quote to ESPN’s Holly Rowe that she was so deep in her bag that she was “in a Birkin” has offered perhaps the easiest and most obvious marketing campaign out there. Whether or not Hermès—or any other brand—will capitalize on a talent and personality like Williams remains to be seen.

Cloud puts it even more bluntly: “I just feel like we're more marketable than they're allowing us to be.”