Time announced on Tuesday that its selection for the 2024 Athlete of the Year is Caitlin Clark. It’s just the latest in a long line of honors Clark has won over the past few years. Among those honors are the titles of AP Player of the Year and Naismith College Player of the Year for both 2023 and 2024, her junior and senior years as a player at the University of Iowa. During those same two years, she also won back-to-back John R. Wooden Awards and was selected as Big Ten Female Athlete of the Year twice. In October, Clark was named WNBA Rookie of the Year.
In its story, Time highlighted the remarkable surge of interest in women’s professional basketball Clark created as fans followed her from the Hawkeyes to the Indiana Fever, and as she created new fans during her rookie season.
“Clark’s Fever appeared in the most watched WNBA games ever on ABC, CBS, ESPN, and ESPN2,” Time’s Sean Gregory wrote. “The WNBA attracted an all-time record of more than 54 million unique viewers across all its national broadcasting platforms during the regular season, and the league’s overall attendance jumped 48% year over year to its highest level in more than two decades. The Fever broke the WNBA record for home attendance by a single franchise, and Fever games were moved to NBA and NHL arenas in Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., to accommodate the hordes of fans, many donning Clark’s No. 22 jersey. The Washington Mystics-Fever regular-season finale set a new WNBA single-game attendance record of 20,711.”
Caitlin Clark is TIME’s Athlete of the year. (TIME) #WNBA
— Meghan L. Hall (@itsmeghanlhall.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 8:42 AM
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Stories on whether Clark could successfully transition from college player to professional were common before the WNBA season started in May. After the season ended in September, stories focused on trying to estimate Clark’s economic impact on the league and the city of Indianapolis proliferated. Last week, the Indianapolis Star published its latest attempt to quantify the difference Clark has made.
The paper asked Ryan Brewer, a University of Indiana Columbus finance professor who specializes in valuation, to estimate Clark’s impact.
“The numbers are so staggering,” Brewer told the Star. “They don’t even seem real.”
Brewer said he ran his calculations several times to make sure they were accurate, and the results were the same each time.
“By Brewer’s calculation, Clark is responsible for 26.5% of the WNBA’s leaguewide activity for the 2024 season, including attendance, merchandise sales and television,” the Star reported. “One of every six tickets sold at a WNBA arena can be attributed to Clark.”
That Clark is generating millions for the WNBA and her new hometown isn’t reflected in her Fever salary. Clark was paid the maximum amount for a first-year player under the WNBA Player’s Association collective bargaining agreement with the league, but that’s a base salary of $76,535 for the season. The salary of Victor Wembanyama, the NBA’s 2024 Rookie of the Year, was 184 times greater than Clark’s this year. The San Antonio Spurs paid Wembanyama $13.8 million.
Even without the restriction on rookie salaries, the pay gap between the two leagues is enormous. Jackie Young, who is in her sixth year in the WNBA, earned the league’s highest base salary this year. The Las Vegas Aces guard was paid $252,450. In contrast, Steph Curry’s base salary with the Golden State Warriors was $55.8 million in 2024.
As soon as the 2024 season ended in September, the WNBA Players Association announced it would opt out of its current collective bargaining agreement, which had been scheduled to run through 2027. The players association wants to improve salaries and benefits given how much more team owners are making thanks to what’s being called “the Caitlin Clark effect.”
Of course, a comparatively low salary as a professional basketball player isn’t really a financial problem for Clark, thanks to her many lucrative endorsement deals. Last week, the sports business news site Sportico estimated that in 2024, Clark “generated a record annual payday for a WNBA player of $11.1 million with 99% of the total earned off the court.”
Clark tied with gymnast Simone Biles for ninth-place on Sportico’s list of the 15 highest-paid female athletes of 2024. Clark was the only basketball player to make the list, which is dominated by professional tennis players. Tennis stars make up nine of the 15 athletes, with Coco Gauff coming in at number one, having earned an estimated $21 million.
Even though her WNBA salary is low, Clark has clear understanding of her worth to the league.
“I’ve been able to captivate so many people that have never watched women’s sports, let alone women’s basketball, and turn them into fans,” she told Time.
Clark was also candid with Time about the circumstances that have helped fuel her phenomenal popularity.
“I want to say I’ve earned every single thing, but as a white person, there is privilege,” Clark said. “A lot of those players in the league that have been really good have been Black players. This league has kind of been built on them. The more we can appreciate that, highlight that, talk about that, and then continue to have brands and companies invest in those players that have made this league incredible, I think it’s very important.”
