WNBA players Breanna Stewart, Napheesa Collier launch ‘Unrivaled’ offseason league

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WNBA players have long lagged in earning power compared with the NBA, and that has often meant having to leave their families to take offseason work overseas, leaving them to navigate child care and secure enough funding and sponsorships to sustain their careers. To address that, two WNBA players — Breanna Stewart of the New York Liberty and Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx — are founding a new professional women’s basketball league to give top players an option to play domestically in the offseason. 

“We remain committed to the WNBA, however there’s a problem that exists, which is players having to choose whether to play overseas to maximize earnings in the winter or stay home with family,” Collier said on Twitter. “We’ve decided to create our own solution.” 

The league, called Unrivaled, will initially include 30 players in six franchises and feature “an innovative style” of 3-on-3 played on a shortened court with “more spacing, more scoring & shorter games,” Collier said on Twitter. 

The new league, which was first reported by ESPN on Thursday, is scheduled to run from January through March at a soundstage in Miami. Collier and Stewart said they founded it in large part as a response to the WNBA’s new prioritization rules that will make it harder for players to play abroad in the offseason. Many women basketball players join overseas leagues in the offseason because they can make up to 10 times as much money in other countries — which drew widespread attention last year when Brittney Griner was detained at the end of her offseason in Russia.

Unrivaled would join another newly launched professional women’s league, Athletes Unlimited Basketball, which completed its second season in March 2023. 

Greg Bouris, undergraduate sport management program director at Adelphi University, said that it’s exciting to see professional athletes taking the initiative to have more of a voice in their sport. This new women’s basketball league is following a trend of women athletes encountering problems and coming up with their own solutions: A new professional women’s soccer league and a new professional women’s hockey league are also launching in 2024.

“It’s great to see that the women here are taking the bull by the horns and saying, ‘Hey, let’s do our own thing,’” said Bouris, who also has decades of experience working with professional teams and associations. “The sports industry is very nuanced and unique in that the players are the product. This league lets them have the ultimate say on what this product is going to look like from a performance perspective and how it’s presented to the public.” 

The WNBA’s new prioritization rules, which are set to go into full effect next season, were a part of the 2020 collective bargaining agreement and require that players return from overseas by the start of training camp to be eligible for the season. However, the overseas season often runs through mid-May, making it difficult for WNBA players to play both domestically and abroad. 

“We can’t keep fighting [the WNBA’s prioritization rule],” Stewart told ESPN. “It is a rule that takes away our choices, which should never be a thing, especially as women, but it is still a rule.” 
According to Spotrac data, the minimum WNBA salary was set at $62,285 this year, while the top-paid players earned a maximum of $234,936.  The 2020 bargaining agreement set the average WNBA player’s salary at six figures for the first time. Meanwhile, NBA players make a minimum of $1.4 million each season. In Unrivaled, each player will receive equity ownership with the league and earn salaries that are competitive to the WNBA, Collier said.

Collier, who stopped playing overseas after she gave birth to her first child in 2022, said another primary motivation in founding the league stemmed from the difficulties players faced navigating child care overseas. Stewart told ESPN that the idea for the new league began to really materialize for her when she found out her wife was expecting their second child in the fall. 

“Stewie and I both have daughters,” Collier tweeted. “It’s our responsibility to show them and every young girl that looks up to us that sometimes you don’t have to wait your turn. You can either beg for a seat at the table or you can build your own table. We’re building our own table.”