Mark Cuban says women's college basketball stars must stop taking a WNBA pay cut

WNBA players are seeking a significant shift in the league’s economic model, asking for an average of 27.5% of league revenue and team-provided housing for all players in recent collective bargaining agreement discussions, according to Front Office Sports.

The league pushed back sharply. In a statement, the WNBA called the proposal “unrealistic” and said it “would cause hundreds of millions of dollars of losses for our teams.”

The debate caught the attention of billionaire entrepreneur and former Dallas Mavericks majority owner Mark Cuban, who weighed in on X about what he views as a fundamental economic difference between the NBA and the WNBA.

“The crazy part is that no matter what the WNBA does with salaries, every star college player will take a pay cut to play in the WNBA,” Cuban wrote, noting that power-conference women’s basketball stars can command between $500,000 and $1.2 million annually through NIL collectives.

Cuban argued that college athletics are effectively subsidized by donors and shared university revenue, creating a European-style model in which outside entities underwrite teams. By contrast, he said, WNBA teams lack the ticket, sponsorship and national media margins necessary to significantly raise salaries through traditional revenue streams alone.

His solution is to allow teams to structure sponsor-backed payments similar to NIL deals in college sports, with league oversight and a cap system tied to experience. Cuban suggested pooling a portion of those deals to address competitive balance concerns in larger markets.

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“Obviously I’m just spitballing this,” Cuban added, “but if they came on Shark Tank, that’s what I would suggest.”

For now, the WNBA has a major problem, and it might just take a new era college solution to solve. 

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