WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert is main the league to historic highs. Critics surprise if she’s absolutely seizing the second

The All-Star Game was just one in a string of resounding successes for the league in 2024. Fan numbers have been swelling. ESPN viewership climbed 170% to 1.2 million per game; teams sold 400,000 tickets in one month; and 21 games garnered more than 1 million viewers each—18 of which featured the Indiana Fever and their No. 1 draft pick, Caitlin Clark.

These stats seemed unattainable five years ago, when Engelbert arrived. She left a job overseeing $20 billion in revenue and 100,000 employees as U.S. CEO of consulting firm Deloitte, and inherited a staff of 12 and, months later, a pandemic-induced existential crisis at a league with little financial cushion to save it from missing a season.

Former Iowa star Clark, with her record-setting passing skills and logo threes, and Chicago Sky rookie Angel Reese pulled off a feat no one in the WNBA had cracked over 27 seasons: They brought fans of women’s college basketball with them to the pro league, thanks to a combination of star power and a world finally ready to respect the women’s game. The arrival of generational talent has stoked a period of hyper growth for the league. It has also unleashed a cacophony of opinions that clang around the sports world. For Engelbert, it’s raised the stakes on what was already a balancing act between serving players, owners, fans, and the WNBA’s main behind-the-scenes stakeholder: the NBA.

WNBA players have always been exceptional—they have to be, in a league with only 144 roster spots. But historically, the team and league infrastructure hasn’t met the same standard. With bare-bones staffing, an underdog mentality, and the NBA calling the biggest shots, the WNBA wasn’t built to infiltrate pop culture. But as the league’s fandom grows, some players, agents, and owners question whether the foundation Engelbert laid is enough to fully capitalize on this history-making moment in women’s sports.

Well before the WNBA came calling, Engelbert had already had unique exposure to professional basketball. The Detroit Pistons drafted her 6-foot-6 father in 1957, but there was little money in the game then, and he quickly moved on. One of eight kids, she and her five brothers grew up playing three sports each, practicing jumpers on a half-court in their New Jersey backyard. Engelbert followed in her father’s footsteps as a lacrosse recruit to Lehigh. She walked onto the Division I basketball team as a guard, played for future Hall of Famer Muffet­ McGraw, and won an Eastern Conference basketball title.

Engelbert credits sports with launching her career: “I was the shyest person when I got to Lehigh, and emerged after playing two sports there as a very confident young professional in a male-dominated business world,” she says. She cites stats that indicate sports is a form of leadership development. An EY study says 94% of women in C-suites played sports, 52% at the collegiate level. She tells Arizona Girl Scouts troops in a speech during All-Star Weekend that sports will help them become future CEOs and government leaders. She seems to forget to mention that they could also become WNBA stars, later adding it in one-on-ones with girls who tell her they play basketball.

After Lehigh, she joined Deloitte where she spent 33 years and developed an expertise in derivative financial instruments. In 2015, she became its first female U.S. CEO—a first in the Big Four. As CEO, she grew Deloitte’s business by 30% and invested in the cloud, a decision that influenced how she would invest at her next job.

Engelbert landed on the NBA’s radar when a Deloitte colleague became the league’s head of operations. NBA commissioner Adam Silver even put Engelbert on a short list of potential buyers for the WNBA’s New York Liberty. Those ties would end up shaping Engelbert’s career—and the WNBA’s future.

Engelbert’s former colleague called her in 2019 when Silver was looking for a “proven executive” who knew the game to serve as the ­WNBA’s first commissioner. (Until then it had only a president.) Engelbert was facing the end of her CEO term—the Deloitte board had declined to nominate her for a second term, which the Wall Street Journal reported was a “complete shock” to partners—and was eyeing a next act in women’s leadership. She thought she might become a university president. But WNBA commissioner was too good to pass up. After initial self-doubt—”I knew nothing about running a sports league”—Engelbert accepted. After all, she figured, it was a relatively small league of 12 teams. And after a couple of rough decades, the league had nowhere to go but up.

Engelbert says allocating capital is a CEO’s most important responsibility. Those decisions were easy when she arrived at the WNBA: “We had no capital,” she says.

The league had started on decent financial footing in 1996, when then–NBA commissioner David Stern founded it to great fanfare. Attendance hit a high of 2.3 million in 2002. Seattle Storm star Sue Bird was drafted No. 1 that year with a $57,500 salary, she recalls, and her team stayed at Ritz-Carltons.

That same year, the NBA restructured the league, transferring WNBA ownership from the NBA itself to the owners of NBA teams with sibling WNBA franchises. A few less-wealthy independent owners also entered the mix. Some NBA owners fled the responsibility, and not all independent owners could afford top-tier treatment and facilities. Five teams folded between 2002 and 2009 (two others launched). The 2003 collective bargaining deal gave rookies a minimum salary of $30,000.

The league hit a low in 2017 when average regular season viewership sunk to 171,000 and its last remaining original owner, the New York Knicks’ James Dolan, put the Liberty up for sale. He moved the team to a 2,300-seat venue in Westchester, N.Y., far from its fan base. It was a near death sentence for the struggling franchise that had sold out Madison Square Garden years earlier. (Brooklyn Nets owners Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai eventually bought the Liberty for an estimated $10 million to $14 million. “It was a distressed asset,” Wu Tsai says.)

The NBA has helped the WNBA outlast all other women’s leagues, but that comes with some downsides. Bird calls the NBA “a gift and a curse.” The NBA still owns 42% of the WNBA—with NBA team owners’ stakes, that share reaches as high as 70%—and NBA owners vote on the WNBA’s biggest decisions, even if they don’t own a women’s team. Dolan’s Knicks, for instance, cast the only vote against the WNBA’s Toronto expansion amid a Knicks lawsuit against the Toronto Raptors and objections to the NBA’s financial transparency.

David Berri, a sports economist at Southern Utah University, calculates that NBA players receive about 50% of the NBA’s basketball-related income, while WNBA players get 10%, a share the leagues dispute (but decline to correct). Executives point to the NBA’s 77-year history—and its revenue that’s 60 times the reported size of the WNBA’s—as justification for the arrangement, but “the men of the NBA have never in its history been paid as badly as the women of the WNBA right now,” Berri says. The average WNBA salary of $135,000 would have to rise fivefold to hit pay equity with men by share of revenue, he says.

The WNBA also struggled to get media coverage in a chicken-and-egg-type quandary: Did the WNBA need more viewers to merit primetime treatment, or did it need primetime treatment to grab fans’ attention? ESPN anchor Elle Duncan recalls pushing for a WNBA segment on SportsCenter and hearing from producers who tracked ratings that viewers weren’t interested. “It was like confirmation bias,” she says.

Engelbert’s rehab of the league started with the addition of “changemaker” sponsors. (Deloitte was an inaugural changemaker alongside AT&T and Nike.) “She’s the one who actually transformed our corporate economic model,” says Seattle Storm co-owner Ginny Gilder. Engelbert negotiated with the players’ union to add a Commissioner’s Cup, a tentpole event that brings in additional sponsorship revenue and pays players from a new prize pool. She learned what would help the league grow: rivalries—like the burgeoning (and debated) ones between Clark and Reese or the Liberty and Las Vegas Aces—and games of consequence, supported by a new free agency system that created more off-season buzz. She tapped Deloitte for a digital transformation, mainly redoing the league’s app.

But what really supercharged Engelbert’s turnaround strategy were forces, many outside her control, that thrust the WNBA into the public consciousness for arguably the first time.

The WNBA’s COVID-era season in 2020 drew new viewers as ESPN doubled the number of games it aired and sports fans, starved for content, finally tuned in. The WNBA bubble, or “wubble,” demanded a rigorous schedule, daily COVID tests, and up to 92 days of isolation, all at the emotional height of the Black Lives Matter movement. But without that season, Engelbert estimates, five to six teams would have folded. “It was pretty Herculean what we did that year,” she says.

In March 2021, University of Oregon player Sedona Prince posted a video comparing the women’s “weight room” at the NCAA tournament—a single stack of dumbbells—to the men’s state-of-the-art facility. The stark disparity reignited the debate about gender equity in sports and resulted in an overhaul that, among other changes, let the women’s tournament use the phrase “March Madness” for the first time.

The next year, Russia detained Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner, highlighting how WNBA players compete overseas to supplement their pay.

That same year, players campaigned against Atlanta Dream co-owner Kelly Loeffler, who became a vocal Trump supporter in her bid to retain her Senate seat. She lost, making WNBA players—who had long advocated for LGBTQ rights and dedicated the 2020 season to the Say Her Name campaign for Breonna Taylor—a respected political force.

Meanwhile, a new generation of college players was experimenting with name-image-likeness, or NIL, deals that allowed them to make money for the first time without losing their NCAA status. Building followings came naturally to them, says Wasserman superagent Lindsay Kagawa Colas, who represents projected No. 1 2025 draft pick Paige Bueckers. “They grew up in the highlight generation,” Kagawa Colas says. Their personal brands and social media followings translated into even more interest in their sport: The 2024 women’s Final Four viewership beat the men’s for the first time, an average of 19 million to 14 million.

All these forces coalesced this spring at the WNBA draft, which sold out its 1,800 fan tickets in nine minutes. The season opener between Clark’s Fever and the Connecticut Sun peaked at 2.34 million viewers, then a record. For the first time this year, the WNBA was part of the A-block on SportsCenter.

Engelbert says she knew she was preparing for something big but didn’t realize it would happen so soon. “I thought it would come in two to three more years,” she says. Instead, Clark, Reese, and other rookies burst onto the court this season with the full power of their personal brands behind them. Clark signed a reported $28 million deal with Nike, plus ones with State Farm, Gatorade, and sports-equipment maker Wilson. Prada dressed her for the draft, and league beauty partner Glossier did her makeup. Reese attended the Met Gala, launched her own podcast, and inked a deal with candy brand Reese’s.

Ron Hoskins—NBAE/Getty Images

The historic 2024 season has benefited brands too. Aces sponsor Ally Financial, which pledged to split its sports media dollars 50/50 between men’s and women’s sports, says its brand value is up 31% year over year with 91% positive sentiment from consumers. WNBA chief marketing officer Phil Cook argues that the league has the most “culturally relevant” athletes in any sport. Still, just 6% of the Fortune 500 sponsors women’s sports versus 20% for comparable men’s sports (the NFL is excluded), according to consultancy Gather.

The boom, however, has triggered frustrations. “Every metric is up—except player compensation,” says agent Allison Galer, who represents the Fever’s Kelsey Mitchell and the Liberty’s Betnijah Laney-Hamilton. Combined league and team revenue was last reported at $200 million in 2023, a sum that is soon to be out-of-date with a surge in sponsorships and a new media deal that will bring in that much per year, up from $60 million annually. (Ticket sales go to teams.) But there’s a lag between climbing viewership and attendance and money getting to players (or to the league; the league and teams are projected to lose $40 million this year). The new media deal doesn’t start until the 2026 season, and collectively bargained salaries won’t change until that year at the earliest. Galer says players are “realists” and “know the time is coming.” But patience is hard when an athlete’s playing days are always numbered.

Some argue that the league under Engelbert isn’t fully capitalizing on growth opportunities in the meantime—whether because of strategy or bandwidth, they’re not sure. “For any company, when there’s exponential growth, it’s hard to keep up with that. It’s hard to staff up, to figure out distribution,” says Erin Kane, the Excel Sports Management agent who represents Clark.

In some ways, the league can’t seem to believe its good fortune. It’s hard, for example, to let go of old worries like filling seats when choosing a draft venue. “We have to forget about the scar tissue,” says Washington Mystics owner Ted Leonsis.

Engelbert quickly learned that the “hardest part of this job” is managing “multidimensional stakeholder groups.” The league’s billionaire owners, celebrity players, agents, coaches, team executives, advertisers, network execs, the players’ union, and the NBA are all used to being the most important person in the room.

During All-Star weekend, she can’t walk two feet without being stopped by someone she greets with enthusiasm and by name. (With her tall stature and blonde hair, they always spot her.) When she first meets someone, she says their name three times in conversation to prepare for situations like these. In 111-degree heat, her energy never flags. She doesn’t even drink coffee.

At Deloitte, Engelbert was used to dealing with unhappy partners and clients. “We had 3,000 partners with 4,000 opinions, and they’d all march into my office complaining about something,” she says. But consulting executives usually follow a rule of business: politick behind closed doors but present a unified front in public. In sports, she soon found out, people say what they think out loud and on TV.

The pushback against Engelbert started with airplanes. The WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement doesn’t allow charter travel; the league determined it would give an unfair advantage to teams willing to fund it. Instead, 6-foot-7 players for years squeezed into economy seats and endured long delays before games, sometimes sleeping at the airport.

After a rough four days in 2021, Liberty owner Wu Tsai had had enough. Back-to-back delays totaling almost 24 hours had turned into back-to-back losses. The next time the team faced a serious delay, “we had no choice but to charter a flight,” Wu Tsai says. It was a no-brainer to the Tsais, who earned their $7.92 billion fortune from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. But the league was outraged and, following additional violations, fined the Liberty $500,000, the largest penalty in WNBA history. The Tsais considered the charter flights a matter of health and wellness, part of their vow to treat players like elite professional athletes. The Tsais say they offered to figure out how to pay for charter travel for every team, a $25 million cost; the league says it never saw a proposal. Instead, Engelbert began introducing charter flights for select major games like the finals. This season, as league finances improved, the WNBA finalized a charter flight deal with Delta. Engelbert’s priority was to grow the league in ways it could fund itself.

Aaron Richter for Fortune

There are also typical sports complaints that rankle fans, exacerbated by historical under-­resourcing: issues with referees, tight game scheduling, teams’ desire for more roster spots, and for months, impatience for just-announced details of an upcoming expansion draft.

Even the league’s new, historic media deal drew mixed reviews. The 11-year pact, negotiated with networks alongside the NBA, values the WNBA rights at $2.2 billion over that time frame to the NBA’s $76 billion—a split designated by the leagues. The deal is the top factor in how much players get paid and how the league can grow. WNBA chief growth officer Colie Edison called the deal a “dream come true” that will allow for unprecedented levels of investment. Others, like players’ association executive director Terri Jackson, questioned whether the 233% increase in the value of WNBA rights was enough—and whether an 11-year timeline was smart amid high growth. “The NBA controls the destiny of the WNBA,” Jackson said. League execs and owners argue that 11 years is an advantage in a turbulent media environment, and, with a short four-month season (the NBA’s is twice as long), the WNBA wouldn’t have been as attractive on its own. “There’s a part of me that hopes we were wrong” and the rights are worth more, Silver says. The deal includes an option to raise the price for the WNBA’s rights in 2028; there’s another tranche of media deals coming, too, that could generate as much as $100 million a year.

Then there’s expansion. With talent rising at high schools and colleges, fans are eager for more teams and roster spots. The commissioner is more worried about problems that could arise by bringing on the wrong team; she looks for “long-term, committed owners,” with high-quality facilities in cities likely to foster a strong fan base. More teams are good for business, too; Engelbert cites a Fortune 100 retailer that declined to partner with the WNBA because its teams represent only 12 markets to the retailer’s 100. That number is on its way to 15: Golden State Valkyries will begin play in 2025, and Toronto and Portland will join in 2026.

The newfound success has also pulled the league deeper into the culture wars. Clark, who is white and posts photos with her boyfriend, has some purported fans who attack her competitors in racist and homophobic terms on social media. In September, Engelbert faced blowback for not denouncing such abuse.

CNBC asked Engelbert if the league should step in when fans’ commentary gets nasty. Engelbert compared the Clark-Reese rivalry to Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, noting that iconic rivalries fuel sports. She didn’t address the racism and homophobia.

That response didn’t pass muster in a league that’s 81% people of color and significantly made up of queer women. On behalf of the players’ association, Jackson issued a statement “the commissioner should have provided” that rejected “vile hate,” racism, homophobia, and misogyny. “This is not about rivalries or iconic personalities fueling a business model,” Jackson said. Players liked and re-shared the statement—including Reese, who wrote, “thank you.” Engelbert later posted that “there is absolutely no place for hate or racism” and sent an apology to players. (Since then, this conversation has continued, amplified by the players’ association’s objections to a longtime sports reporter’s line of questioning during a playoff game.)

Before what she now calls an experience of “humility,” Engelbert sometimes had a knee-jerk reaction to harsh feedback. When asked, she admits she sometimes feels unappreciated. “In a public-facing role like this, you’re going to be misunderstood. People don’t understand the strategy,” she says. Of criticism of the media deal, she says, “Most people who are saying that have never run a public company, never run a company of 100,000 people like I have.” She doesn’t spare players, who “don’t take the time to understand the business, quite frankly” and “have no idea what it’s taken to get here.”

The league and teams have offered “business of basketball” seminars, Engelbert says, but some players don’t recall attending. If players haven’t engaged with the business, it’s because they had other priorities, like playing overseas, Sue Bird says. Engelbert concedes as much; running the business—“that’s our job.”

The league ran TV ads during the Final Four and the Olympics for the first time this year as well as a tongue-in-cheek “Welcome to the W” campaign to greet rookies’ fans. Engelbert upped the league’s marketing budget to 12 times what it was four years ago. For years, the WNBA only marketed itself. Now it’s pushing fandom for its teams and its players.

When Engelbert talks about the league’s stars, she names Clark, Reese, A’ja Wilson, and ­Breanna “Stewie” Stewart. She talks up other players: “DeWanna Bonner is my son’s favorite,” she says during All-Star weekend as the Connecticut Sun forward walks by. She urges brands to work with “amazing personalities that aren’t the stars.” Agents like Galer, meanwhile, are asking, “How do we take stars and make superstars?”

Players are already preparing for their next collective bargaining agreement. The current deal runs until 2027, but players or the league can opt out two years early by a November 2024 deadline. With advisers including Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin, who studies women’s labor, they’re evaluating all options. Nneka Ogwumike, president of the players’ association, wants retirement plans, improved health care plans, and pensions. In 2020, players got parental leave and fertility benefits. “I would love to see more former players working in the league office,” she adds. That’s something fans and other players want too, often calling Ogwumike “commish” online.

In the WNBA and NBA’s shared New York City office, the WNBA seems to occupy as much space as the G League, the NBA’s development league. Engelbert’s original team of 12 staffers is now 60, compared to the NBA’s 2,000. The leagues share back-office functions, like finance and HR, and some more consequential ones. Only NBA employees, for instance, service AT&T’s title sponsorship across both leagues. The WNBA sales force focuses on WNBA-exclusive deals like those with dating app Bumble and hair care brand Mielle.

The WNBA’s complicated corporate structure—42% owned by the NBA and otherwise split between owners affiliated with NBA teams and independent owners—got more so in 2022 when Engelbert oversaw a $75 million capital raise that sold 16% of league equity to a group of investors, including several NBA and WNBA team owners, who staked yet another claim to the league. It provided a much-needed capital infusion that set the stage for today’s growth. But some argued the reported $1 billion valuation it gave the WNBA and all its teams would soon seem impossibly low.

Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier says the WNBA is ready to stand on its own: “We can write our own narrative,” she says. Sue Bird sees signs that’s happening. When athletes’ names were called at this year’s draft, they said entering the league was a “dream come true,” she notes. “It was something they had worked for.” That wasn’t always the case during her 20-year playing career.

That’s because building a successful sports league takes time. “You’re asking someone to make a huge emotional commitment to your product in a way that they think about it every day of their lives,” Berri explains. True fandom is almost impossible to achieve until a generation of childhood fans grows up.

It seems three decades is finally enough time. Engelbert’s problem is no longer that no one cares about the WNBA; it’s that everyone cares so much—and her decisions are under a microscope.

A big question is whether the WNBA should remain part of the NBA. And while stakeholders argue in favor of both scenarios—Engelbert wants to stick with her NBA bosses—the conversations often ignore a factor beyond whether WNBA owners could afford to buy out the NBA’s stake. The league is named the “women’s NBA”—and the NBA brand may not be for sale, Silver says. “It’s a bit like asking if [Diet Coke] could be sold off from Coke. It’s the essence.”

Engelbert expects one team to become a $1 billion franchise, though she won’t say which one. (It’s likely the Liberty or the Aces, which she calls “super-teams.”) She predicts that $500 million will become the average team valuation, up from $96 million, according to Sportico. She’s committed to expanding to 16 teams but predicts the league will reach 20. She sees an opportunity to capture the global market like the NBA has.

If she were still at Deloitte, Engelbert would hit the mandatory retirement age in three years, but she says she’ll stay on at the WNBA for at least that long. Her legacy may be turning around the league’s business in a high-stakes moment—and preparing it for what comes after her. “If you’re making everyone happy, you’re not making hard decisions,” she says.

This article appeared in the October/November 2024 issue of Fortune with the headline “Can Cathy Engelbert handle the pressure?“