WNBA All-Star Player Pay Moves Began Well Before Shirts and Signs

Looking back on the 2025 WNBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis, the tone was set not with partner activities at Indianapolis Motor Speedway or activation previews at the convention center, but an unsatisfying meeting between the players’ union and the league on Thursday.

After the league signed a new broadcast deal last year worth an estimated $2.2 billion over the next 11 years, and players opted out of their collective bargaining agreement with the league in search of better working conditions and a greater share of revenue, players left Thursday’s meeting dissatisfied with the result. As Los Angeles Sparks guard and All-Star Kelsey Plum, who also serves as vice president of the WNBPA, told The Athletic, “We’re gonna use this weekend to show our value and our worth.”

Arguably, they waited until Saturday night’s All-Star Game to do so, donning black WNBPA-made shirts reading “Pay Us What You Owe Us” during warmups and the Nike Fit Check. During the MVP trophy presentation to the Minnesota Lynx’s Napheesa Collier, who scored an All-Star-record 36 points, fans chanted, “Pay them,” at league Commissioner Cathy Englebert as Washington Mystics All-Star Brittney Sykes stood behind them with a sign reading “Pay The Players.”

In a post-game press conference, Plum noted that the fans’ involvement “applies pressure.”

But that pressure has also been building for a while from all sides of the sports industry.

With players claiming their demands are being met with league observations that they “don’t understand the business,” ADWEEK spent All-Star Weekend—and the time leading up to it—watching players and brands including Aflac, Samsung, Ally, Sephora, and State Farm make a business statement stronger than just WNBA shirts and signs—both of which are for sale.

For its part, Ally replaced US Bank as the WNBA’s official banking sponsor in April, but was also among the first aboard the Napheesa Collier-and-Breanna Stewart-founded 3-on-3 league Unrivaled and, according to Marciano, helped the league land its six-year deal with Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT Sports. With WNBPA leader Nneka Ogwumike named one of the founding members of the company’s Team Ally group of athlete ambassadors, Ally sees player success as essential to its own.

“Listening to the players has been a priority for us from the start,” Stephanie Marciano, head of sports and entertainment marketing at Ally, said in a conversation at WNBA All-Star Weekend. “A lot of us at Ally, from an executive standpoint, are also former athletes ourselves. I played in college, and I played basketball abroad in Germany—so we went through it, and we understand the disparity in resources as we come up, so we really know what levers we had to push and pull as well.”

Meanwhile, in addition to teaming with media and culture firm Togethxr to host an All-Star panel with Unrivaled-affiliated NBA players, including Rickea Jackson and Kate Martin, Aflac touted its partnership with the WNBA and handed out supplemental checks to WNBA Skills Competition and 3-Point Contest winners Natasha Cloud and Sabrina Ionescu.

This year, Aflac kicked in $115,000 to boost the prize pool for both the 3-point contest and the All-Star skills challenge. Based on the league’s 2020 collective bargaining agreement, which players just opted out of in October, the WNBA itself provides the winners of both competitions with just $2,575 each.

More financial security has been one of Collier’s goals in Unrivaled, which had only 36 players in its first season, but attracted investors including John Skipper, former Turner president David Levy, Moira Forbes, Alex Morgan, Michelle Wie West, Dawn Staley, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Megan Rapinoe. In the first year on TNT Sports, Unrivaled drew 221,000 fans per broadcast and paid its players an average of $220,000 per game—or just under the WNBA’s $250,000 maximum salary.

During Collier’s All-Star MVP trophy presentation, WNBA broadcaster and ESPN’s Holly Rowe reminded everyone that Collier and her fellow players and brand partners had been making their case for value independently of the WNBA throughout All-Star events. Rowe not only asked Collier during the trophy presentation what was important for her and the players at this moment, but brought up the WNBPA vice president’s fellow executive committee members, Nneka Ogwumike (president) and Breanna Stewart (vice president), to make their demands known.

The latter, Stewart, not only hinted that the time between Saturday night’s All-Star game and Tuesday’s return to regular-season play should likely be longer, but earlier that day, saw Unrivaled extend seven collegiate players’ name, image, and likeness rights deals with help from its partner Samsung. The announcement came at an Unrivaled activation that followed the league’s successful first season and was a roughly 12-minute walk from the WNBA All-Star host site at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

“That’s really always been the goal: How do we uplift women’s basketball overall?” Kirby Porter, chief brand officer at Unrivaled, told ADWEEK. “It’s cool to see it have a ripple effect across different leagues, so how do we continue to really innovate and push a needle for our fans but also our partners?”

In addition to the NIL announcement, Samsung powered a recruiting-themed tour, Ally set up a locker room, Sephora built a glam station and tunnel for pregame looks, State Farm helped build a replica court, and Under Armour supplied a merch store. When players including LSU’s Flau’jae Johnson, Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo, and the University of Connecticut’s Sarah Strong and Azzi Fudd took the court for the NIL announcement, they were already surrounded by brands operating independently of the WNBA.

“We always measure things twofold. Are we impacting the landscape through new media deals, more endorsement deals for players, women’s sports becoming a billion-dollar industry, players getting bigger deals, salaries continue to rise, a healthy CBA—these are things that you can note that the industry is growing,” Marciano said. “The other way we measure is how our business and brand are growing, and by every metric, fans of women’s sports are more favorable to our brand.”

Investing in the future

In the press conference after the All-Star Game, Collier noted that a CBA typically lasts for seven years, and that when players negotiate one, they do so to set up the next CBA and affect future generations. So, even as Collier moved through All-Star Weekend, interviews, brand activations, and appearances, the CBA and the Thursday meeting was foremost in her thoughts.

“I feel like I haven’t been able to forget it, like people won’t let us, which is amazing, just the awareness that we’ve raised this weekend,” Collier said. “The fans doing that chant gave me chills, so the fact that we’ve kept this so present in the conversation, it’s never left my mind because of that.”

If an agreement isn’t reached on a new CBA by Oct. 31, a player strike or league lockout could imperil multiple years of progress. However, with all the brand and fan support—and alternatives like Unrivaled—the pressure is mounting for the WNBA.

“The driest commercial value of any league are brand partners and media partners,” said Alex Bazzell, co-founder of Unrivaled, NBA and WNBA skills coach, and Collier’s husband. “Then you start to understand where the value comes from: It’s the fans, it’s the brands, and it’s the partners, collectively, and I think the players understand that mountain now more than ever, which I think is important for our league, along with every other league that operates.”