How The New York Liberty Went From A Fire Sale To $200 Million WNBA Champions
How The New York Liberty Went From A Fire Sale To $200 Million WNBA Champions
The story starts with James Dolan...
The New York Liberty are one of the best stories in sports. They averaged more home fans than any team in the WNBA outside of Caitlin Clark’s Indiana Fever, and they just won their first-ever WNBA championship after finishing the regular season with the league’s best record. However, the Liberty are really an underdog story and the perfect illustration of how magic can happen when investment meets timing.
Six years ago, the Liberty were owned by James Dolan. The New York Knicks owner was the last remaining NBA owner to control one of the WNBA’s original eight teams.
But by all accounts, James Dolan was done. The Liberty were averaging fewer fans than they had in their inaugural season 20+ years prior. The WNBA team had lost $100 million since its founding, and there was seemingly no light at the end of the tunnel.
So, James Dolan put the New York Liberty up for sale. He then moved the team’s games from Madison Square Garden in the heart of New York City to Westchester County Center. The team’s new arena was only about 45 minutes north of its previous home, but this reduced potential fan capacity from 20,000 seats to just 3,000 seats.
Dolan did this to strengthen the team’s balance sheet for a potential sale, as nightly operating costs at Westchester County Center were 20 times less than they were at Madison Square Garden. However, it was a shocking visual for potential buyers. The Liberty went from sharing an arena with one of the NBA’s preeminent franchises to competing on the same floor where they held tattoo conventions and trade shows.
It was a disaster, plain and simple. The Liberty went from averaging nearly 10,000 fans per home at MSG to 1,886 fans per home game in Westchester, unable to fill even the league’s smallest arena. The players weren’t happy with the amenities, either. The locker room at the new venue could only be entered after climbing three flights of stairs, and players often went home to clean up because there weren’t enough showers.
“You want me to be honest?” said Shavonte Zellous, a guard on the 2018 Liberty team. “It was shit.”
The truth is that the New York Liberty’s situation was so bad that the WNBA’s league office even tried to help James Dolan facilitate a sale of the team. Several buyers entered into agreements with Dolan to purchase the team, only to later back out after looking under the hood and discovering how bad the financial situation actually was.
This is where Joe and Clara Wu Tsai came into the equation. The billionaire founder of Alibaba and his wife had recently agreed to purchase the Brooklyn Nets, spending more than $3 billion on the NBA team and its home arena, the Barclays Center.
The Tsai family was sort of the perfect fit for the Liberty because 1) they believed in the growth of women’s sports, and 2) the fact that they already owned the Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center provided them with synergies across their sports portfolio.
For example, WNBA games would help fill the Barclays Center on nights it would otherwise be empty. Brooklyn Nets sales reps could market higher-priced sponsorship packages by adding in the Liberty’s existing inventory, and ticket reps had thousands of existing Nets fans that they could immediately contact to buy WNBA season tickets.
So, more than a year after the team was initially put up for sale, Joe and Clara Wu Tsai agreed to purchase the New York Liberty for about $15 million. The Tsai’s had to take on the Liberty’s existing debt, but they planned to invest more in the team, anyway.
This is when things got interesting. Joe and Clara Wu Tsai immediately moved the Liberty from Westchester to Brooklyn. They renovated parts of the Barclays Center to make it more WNBA-friendly, like dedicated locker rooms. And they even invested millions in the team’s performance staff, hiring eight full-time employees.
However, that investment was really just a sign of more things to come. In 2023, Clara Wu Tsai and a group of Liberty employees flew from New York to Istanbul. The reason for the trip was to meet with WNBA All-Star Breanna Stewart while she played there in the offseason, hoping to convince her to join the Liberty the following season.
Well, Stewart agreed and signed with the Liberty, forming a super team that paired Stewart and other free-agent signings (Jonquel Jones and Courtney Vandersloot) with the Liberty’s dynamic No. 1 draft pick (and budding superstar) Sabrina Ionescu.
These offseason additions changed everything for the New York Liberty. Not only did the Liberty go from one of the league’s worst teams under James Dolan to its best under the Tsais, winning the 2024 WNBA Championship last week. But the Liberty’s on-court success has also fundamentally changed the team’s business model.
Season ticket sales for the Liberty have increased 200%, and they are now the first WNBA team to have a premium seating waitlist for their courtside seats. The team’s merchandise sales are also up 150%, with Fanatics saying the Liberty broke its WNBA championship merchandise record less than 24 hours after this year’s series ended.
How about attendance? Well, that’s flipped, too. The Liberty finished second this season with an average of 12,730 fans per game, second only to Caitlin Clark’s Indiana Fever. The Liberty also set a franchise record at Barclays Center with 18,090 fans in attendance to see them win the WNBA title and another 2.1 million watching at home.
2024 WNBA Finals Attendance (New York Liberty)
Game 1: 17,732 fans
Game 2: 18,040 fans
Game 5: 18,090 fans (Liberty record at the Barclays Center)
2024 WNBA Finals Viewership By Game
Game 1: 1.14 million average viewers
Game 2: 1.34 million average viewers
Game 3: 1.39 million average viewers
Game 4: 1.67 million average viewers
Game 5: 2.153 million average viewers
These aren’t just vanity metrics, either. Sportico estimates that the New York Liberty produced a league-leading $18 million in revenue last season.
So, while many people are quick to point out that the WNBA is losing money, the arrival of Caitlin Clark and a new $2.2 billion media rights deal could make this one of the best sports acquisitions in decades. That’s because the Tsai family sold a minority stake in its parent company last year that valued the WNBA team at $200 million, and owner Clara Wu Tsai thinks it will be worth more than $1 billion over the next decade.
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