In the summer of 2025, the WNBA ran an experiment it had not planned. Caitlin Clark got injured, and for two weeks the league had to hold itself up without her. The results were genuinely confusing.
THE ARRIVAL
Clark, a point guard whose college career at Iowa had made her the most-watched player in women's basketball, joined the Indiana Fever in 2024. The WNBA drew 2.35 million fans that season, its highest attendance in 22 years. ESPN's average viewership per game rose 170% year-on-year. Of the 30 WNBA games that drew more than a million viewers in 2024, Clark was on the court for 21. The league signed a new $2.2 billion media rights deal with Disney, Amazon and NBCUniversal, worth more than three times the arrangement it replaced. One player had transformed a sport.
THE ACCIDENT
Clark suffered a series of muscle injuries in 2025 and played only 13 games. During a two-week window without her, national TV viewership dropped 55%. Fever games without Clark dropped 53%. The All-Star Game, held without her participation, drew 36% fewer viewers than the year before. The case for Clark-as-category seemed overwhelming.
The same season produced the opposite reading. Non-Fever broadcasts, the 37 games that had nothing to do with Clark or Indiana, averaged 549,000 viewers, up 37% on equivalent games from 2024. The Golden State Valkyries were selling out an 18,000-seat arena as a first-year club, in a market Clark had never visited as a competitor.
Both things were true simultaneously. That is not a contradiction. It is a diagnostic problem.
THE QUESTION GOLF NEVER ASKED
Tiger Woods joined the PGA Tour in 1996 and offers the closest precedent. Television rights ballooned, prize funds escalated, attendance climbed. Neal Pilson, a former president of CBS Sports, estimated Woods contributed a 30-35% ratings lift whenever he played. When injuries and personal circumstances removed him from the circuit, viewership fell around 18% over the five years between 2013 and 2018. Golf had built commercial infrastructure priced on one man's presence, without asking whether the audience would hold without him. It is still working through that question.
The WNBA has a chance to ask it now, while Clark is still active.
A TIDE OR A BOAT?
There is a structural difference between someone who creates a category and a category that has actually been created. The first is a person. The second is a condition. Organisations confuse the two constantly, and not through carelessness: when the creator is performing and the numbers are moving, the distinction is invisible. It only surfaces when the creator is removed, by injury or retirement, at which point the media deal and the raised valuation are already signed.
The 2025 data was the league's first accidental controlled trial. The 2026 season, with Clark healthy, three new broadcast partners live, and expansion clubs needing to prove independent demand, is the first deliberate one. By September the question will have a provisional answer: did Clark build something, or has she been building it all along, and the building stops when she does?
The Valkyries, 18,000 strong in a city that barely knew the WNBA existed three years ago, are already voting with their seats.
TRY IT YOURSELF
🚩 Your organisation almost certainly has a Caitlin Clark. One person, product or partnership carrying more of the growth than you would be comfortable admitting. Name it.
🔬 Clark's 2025 injuries were an accident. Most leaders never get the natural experiment. If your variable disappeared tomorrow, what would you find out? The honest answer to that question is your actual dependency score.
💡 The WNBA signed a $2.2 billion deal in 2024, in the middle of the Clark era, not after it. The time to build structural independence is while the variable is still performing. If you are waiting to see whether you need to, you have already waited too long.
FURTHER READING
📚 Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney (HarperBusiness, 2016) The book that defined category creation as a discipline — and showed how rarely the organisations that benefit from a category creator do the work to make the category permanent. The framework behind the question this piece poses, in full.
📰 "Golf's Viewership Problem Is More Than Just a Tiger Woods Problem" by Joe Pompliano, Huddle Up (subscriber) The Tiger precedent examined with all the data now in. Pompliano shows how golf built two decades of commercial infrastructure priced on one man, without asking whether the audience would hold without him. The WNBA is living the same story; reading golf's version is a way of knowing how it can end.
🎙 "WNBA Valuations, Valkyries" — Sporticast, Sportico (2026) Institutional investors are pricing the category vs. creator question with real money. Sportico's team unpacks what the latest WNBA franchise valuations — including the Valkyries becoming the first women's sports team worth $1 billion — do and don't confirm about the league's structural independence from Clark.
🦉 If this piece resonated, you might also like The Price of Having One — on what happens to an organisation built entirely around a single non-negotiable thing, and the hidden cost of coherence.
SOME FINAL WISE WORDS
"This league is a 28-year overnight sensation."
— Adam Silver, NBA Commissioner, November 2024
Until next time
The world's best business lessons, told through the stories of sport.
