the gentrification of the WNBA
While “investment in women’s sports” is often uncritically celebrated among league owners and the media, reality is much more complicated.
Thanks for being here! I am a full-time freelance sports writer. This piece is free for everyone to read because I think it’s important, but it is the result of many hours of work—and a year of pitching this story to outlets, unsuccessfully (it was rejected by eight different publications!). Paid subscriptions to this newsletter allow me to dedicate more time to this work, including hiring an editor to help me with posts like this one. Paid subscribers also have access to a Discord server where we chat queer women’s sports, as well as events like our monthly book club.
You can upgrade here:
Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of the women’s sports bar opening in Brooklyn this spring. It is Athena Keke’s, not Althea’s.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, New York Liberty owner Clara Wu Tsai predicted that the Liberty will be the first women’s sports team valued at $1B “by the mid-2030s.” While the franchise is not yet profitable, Sportico named it the third most valuable WNBA team last year.
But while “investment in women’s sports” is often uncritically celebrated among league owners and the media, reality is much more complicated. The Liberty—the WNBA’s reigning champions—are following the gentrification pattern of Brooklyn itself. As investment goes up, so do barriers to entry, to the point that fans feel priced out or unwelcome in an arena they called home. This feeling may be familiar to many Brooklyn fans; it mirrors the area's trajectory over the last two decades. The rest of the WNBA isn’t far behind.
Last season, socialite Julia Koch—the richest woman in America—and her son, David, Jr., bought a 15% stake in BSE Global, which owns the New York Liberty, as well as the Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center. As I mentioned in this week’s piece for Xtra, “The move to sell part of the team to the Koch family raised eyebrows among fans, some of whom launched a petition asking Koch to donate $15 million of her own money to causes supported by WNBA players.” The petition was started by the folks behind the
social group, and promoted by Athena Keke’s, the forthcoming queer women's sports bar in Brooklyn set to open sometime this spring.“Show the fans, players, Brooklyn and the W that you share our values by making it rain on non-profits the W league has selected to receive prize $ for the Commissioners Cup tournament,” the petition read. The group came up with the $15 million figure to symbolize the Koch family's 15% stake in BSE Global, which amounted to 0.023% of their $65.6 billion wealth. “We did the math," the group wrote. "If someone making $66K per year gave the same .023% of their earnings it would = $15!”
These fans are pressuring the Kochs for a reason. The WNBA's social justice initiative for the 2024 season focused on reproductive justice and civic engagement. The Kochs have a long history of making political donations to candidates who work against these interests. The Daily Beast described Julia and her late husband as “best known as dark-money mega-donors to conservative causes and candidates.” Julia considers herself a philanthropist but, as the Beast noted, her charitable giving has plummeted since her husband’s death in 2019.
Meanwhile, in contrast to the “stick to sports” mantra that largely governs men's sports, WNBA players have historically had little appetite for keeping politics out of their league. They have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they care about who they play for and who represents them.
In a bit of ironic timing, the Koch sale was announced the same week the Power of the Dream documentary premiered. The documentary tells the story of how WNBA players campaigned to oust Kelly Loeffler, the owner of the Atlanta Dream, from her Senate seat after she came out against causes that they stand for, including the Black Lives Matter movement and trans inclusion in sports. The players’ advocacy helped elect Democrat Raphael Warnock to the Georgia Senate.
The Liberty, in particular, have claimed to embrace what their fans and players care about, including Brooklyn and, specifically, the area’s cultural Blackness. That includes the team’s mascot, Ellie the Elephant, who has become a social media sensation and icon in her own right. According to Andscape, Ellie is the brainchild of three Black women who also oversee most of the Liberty’s branding and public image: Liberty CEO Keia Clarke, senior director of entertainment Criscia Long, and chief brand officer Shana Stephenson.
“The WNBA is a league of mostly Black women, so we are a reflection of the players in the league, on the court, the women in the community, and that’s something that’s really important to this organization,” Stephenson told Andscape last year. But for a team that gives lip service to being by and for Brooklyn, recent actions suggest that it is motivated primarily by financial gain.
The Liberty were sold to BSE Global and the Tsais in 2019 and the new ownership moved the team to Barclays Center from a smaller, less accessible facility in Westchester. The area where Barclays Center currently stands was a battleground between developers and locals, with entire neighborhoods being seized through eminent domain and razed to clear the way for the arena where the Liberty now play. The development of the project then-known as “Atlantic Yards,” which was announced in 2003 and completed in 2012, contributed to the gentrification of Brooklyn. Barclays sits at the intersection of Prospect Heights and Fort Greene, the latter of which is a historically Black neighborhood.
In the 1990s, the majority of people seeking to buy properties or rent apartments in Fort Greene were Black. By the early aughts, white people seeking housing in Fort Greene greatly outnumbered Black ones. This demographic change happened not because of development within Fort Greene, which is a historic district, but because of “development pressures in its margins,” as Themis Chronopolous wrote in African Americans, Gentrification, and Neoliberal Urbanization: the Case of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, citing Barclays Center’s development as a major driving force.
Developer Bruce Ratner promised to build multiple market-rate residential buildings alongside the arena, vowing that 2,250 units of its new apartments would be affordable. As of 2025, only 1,374 affordable units—just more than half of the number promised—have been built. Norman Oder, a tour guide who maintains a devoted watchdog blog about the development, told Gothamist that Atlantic Yards has failed “to fulfill [its] transformative promises of jobs and affordable housing.”
Meanwhile, through the Liberty and Nets’ parent company, BSE Global, the Tsais are now “planning a major development initiative in the traffic-clogged area around Barclays,” Liberty co-owner Clara Wu Tsai told Bloomberg earlier this month. Wu Tsai said that adding hotels and restaurants will “help draw more fans for the Liberty and Nets while also benefiting Brooklyn more broadly,” citing the fact that only a small number of New York City’s 63 million annual tourists set foot in the borough.
But locals remain skeptical that the community will actually benefit. “The fact that [Tsai’s comments] are about drawing the fans to Brooklyn, as if we are not here already, is very telling,” says Caitlin Shann, a Liberty season ticket holder. “It’s very clear what they are saying is, ‘We want white fans and we want fans with money and we want fans who are not from here to have easy access to our space and our community and we are going to prioritize their interests over people who live here already.’ The last thing we need is more hotels and more restaurants that people who live here cannot afford.”
In the 2000s, following the announcement of the Atlantic Yards project, approximately 75 % of Black-owned stores in Fort Greene closed. “Gentrification pressures undermined their existence while new Black entrepreneurs did not have the connections with investors willing to support their ventures,”Chronopolous wrote. “Many stores closed because landlords offered unaffordable rents to renew commercial leases and preferred new commercial establishments with multiple investors willing to pay large sums of money for many years.”
If they're not careful, the Liberty could be facing the gentrification of their team—which would really be leaning into the culture of the borough, just not in the way they think. The first indication that longtime fans may be getting pushed out of Barclays came last season as the playoffs approached, the team gained popularity across New York City, and ticket prices skyrocketed. And while Clarke, the Liberty’s chief executive, told the New York Times last year that she was not in the business of pricing people out, a spreadsheet tracking the price increase of 170 current Liberty season ticket holders shows an average increase between 80% and 100% year over year.
Shann, the season ticket holder who started the spreadsheet, is working to organize a group of over 50 Liberty fans to fight these increases. Through this organizing, Shann is also hoping to band together with other season ticket holders to create a space where they can swap, or buy and sell their tickets at face value, cutting out middlemen like Ticketmaster and Stubhub in an effort to avoid price jacking.
“The WNBA and the Liberty have historically been an ignored team for a long time,” Shann says. “The result of that was that the game was beautiful and accessible and the crowd was reflective of the makeup of the players on the court—lots of Black people, Black women, queer people, genderqueer people. It was one of the safest public spaces that I have felt good in.” Shann says that the demographics of the crowd shifted over the course of the 2024 season, in particular. Shann says the playoff strips—ticket packages that guarantee seats for a team's home games throughout the postseason—were very expensive for season ticket holders to buy and many were unable to afford them. The tickets instead went to people who could spend that kind of money, many of them white men that Shann says she had never seen at the games.
“When you bring in more white men, there is a higher likelihood of players getting harassed and people yelling at players in a derogatory way,” Shann says. “It’s disgusting for a white man to be yelling profanities at Black women. The only time I saw a man do that at Barclays, I told him to sit down and he did, but that’s not something I would feel safe doing anymore. There is a correlation with increased ticket prices and decreased safety for the people who should be at those games.”
The changing demographic at WNBA games resulting in decreased safety for marginalized fans is something I witnessed firsthand at a playoff game last season between the Indiana Fever and Connecticut Sun, which I wrote about for Andscape. Chicago Sky fans are facing similar issues—both with increased attention leading to increased harassment of players like Angel Reese, but also of longtime season ticket holders being priced out of their seats. In her exit interview from the Sky last season, Diamond DeShields advocated for existing season ticket holders to receive discounts so they can continue to attend Sky games even as prices skyrocket, saying, “Those are our most loyal fans.” Sky season ticket holder Veronica Arreola says her ticket prices doubled following the 2024 season, and while she renewed for 2025, she did so “with a whimper instead of a HELL YEAH!”
“Why should I keep myself from enjoying the team I love just because it doesn’t love me back?” Arreola wrote. “What many of us mourn the most though is the sense that the games will change. Women’s sporting events have been a haven for families and queer folks. Affordable events where I would plan Girl Scout nights. Will those be possible anymore?”
Some franchises are at risk of losing their homes altogether due to the changing face of WNBA fandom and investment. In Connecticut, the Sun recently announced that they are exploring the sale of the franchise, and expect the team to be relocated as a result. The Sun have failed to attract the same level of investment as some of the other WNBA teams in recent years, and multiple players have discussed the challenges of playing on such a small market team. Both Jonquel Jones and Alyssa Thomas have said they felt being in Connecticut hindered their ability to get sponsorship deals. But while it’s true that the Sun play in the smallest media market, they have access to a massive built-in women’s basketball fandom in Connecticut thanks to UConn’s dynasty. The team also just announced that it has sold out all season ticket memberships for the first time in franchise history.
But the Sun are owned by the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority, as they have been since the franchise relocated from Orlando (where they were known as the Miracle) in 2003. Watching the only Native-owned team in pro sports fail to attract the same level of investment as teams owned by billionaires is depressing, and reinforces the same systemic hierarchies and systems of oppression that exist in the world at-large.
“Just as in men’s sport and wider society it is the ‘ruling elite’ who control elite, competitive, commercialised sport, that stand to gain the most when growth is the primary objective,”
writes at the “It’s Just a Game” newsletter. “When elite sport makes more money, financial brokers, shareholders, wealthy top executives, conservative politicians, and upper-middle class people extend their power.”Local Connecticut politicians, including Gov. Ned Lamont, said this week that they’re not opposed to using public funds to try to keep the team where it is, but they don’t seem thrilled about the prospect. “I'll be blunt, I'm not really big on the taxpayers putting a lot of money at risk,” Lamont told CT Insider. “But I also know how important the Connecticut Sun is, so I'll hear what [the Mohegan Tribe] ha[s] to say.” Other politicians have suggested that perhaps the team could move to the state’s capital of Hartford.
However, it’s unclear whether state funds will be able to compete with the predicted bidding war for the franchise, as the growth and interest in the WNBA skyrockets among potential investors. Because the Sun is a private business, if the Mohegan Tribe chooses to sell it to someone with deep pockets, there isn’t anything public money or local politicians can do to prevent it.
“I do think this upcoming season is going to be a lot different, and I do think it's going to be a lot more new fans at the games,” says Hypatia Sorunke, a WNBA fan and artist who attended 40 Liberty games last season in order to create the Fitted WNBA photo project. “Yes, it's exciting to be there, but you could also just watch on TV, and you could throw your own events. I think we're going to see some disruptions in the way that fans are attending or even watching games. I think we'll see more spaces opening up outside of the stadium to be able to build a fandom, or for people to be able to express themselves in their fandom.”
Liberty co-owner Wu Tsai considers herself a social justice activist, and was asked by Bloomberg journalist Megan Greenwell about how her desire for equality shapes her work. Wu Tsai was clear that she is a businesswoman who understands that not everything in life can be fair. She admitted that she wouldn’t have invested in the Liberty if she didn’t see a money-making opportunity, but that her choice to build a billion-dollar business in the WNBA specifically was evidence of her commitment to equality.
“Like all women’s sports, the team had been underestimated and underfunded. We changed that,” Wu Tsai said. “We bet on women. And we are winning.”
But who exactly is winning when Wu Tsai says "we"? And who are her wins coming at the expense of? What, exactly, is her definition of “equality” in the answers to those questions? Like any good gentrifier, Wu Tsai is well-versed in the art of lip service as she steamrolls the people who helped make her franchise great.
This newsletter was edited by Louis Bien.
Brilliant and devastating.
This brilliant article needs more exposure. Happy to see you producing such work Frankie; sad for the everyday people being left behind.