For The First Time This Year, The WNBA May Be Reclaiming Leverage in Their Labor Fight
Nneka Ogwumike's signing with the new Project B league should be a concern for those rooting for a collective labor win over WNBA ownership.
Back in the early 1980’s, the biggest decision makers in women’s basketball had a choice to make.
On one end were pioneering athletic directors like Barbara Hedges at USC, who wanted to bring women’s sports under the NCAA’s governance. At the time, Hedges felt that the current governing body, the AIAW, wasn’t doing enough to help grow the game for the bigger schools that were starting to invest aggressively in women’s athletics. On the other side were equally legendary figures like Donna Lopiano at Texas, who felt that handing away governance to a male dominated organization would create problems of exposure in the long term.
In a way, both were right. Hedges — and those in her camp — saw immediate returns in the 1980’s as women’s basketball exploded in popularity and notoriety. But Lopiano proved to be right in the long term, as it took over four decades for financial unit disbursements and certain branding to even be applied to the NCAA Women’s Tournament.
I bring up that historical anecdote to explain that, in women’s athletics, there is always an unintended consequence regardless of choice. Had the AIAW remained, maybe Hedges would have been right and the lack of upfront infrastructure would’ve slowed the growth of the game to a point where the 1996 Olympic team isn’t as transformative as they ended up being. But the governance, being by-women and for-women, may have produced unforeseen positive results in the long-term.
Nneka Ogwumike’s Wednesday announcement about signing with Project B, the newly proposed 5x5 league founded by two former Silicon Valley tech executives, is another inflection point and a potential cautionary tale about the consequences people can’t see.
But before we get into that, let’s talk about what Project B actually is.
Former L.A. Spark Alana Beard is the league’s Chief Basketball Officer and her old WNBA teammate Candace Parker is an investor. Initially, the league attracted Maverick Carter, the longtime business partner of LeBron James, who is now no longer affiliated with the project.
As mentioned, Project B was founded by former Facebook executive Grady Burnett and Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice. Both are now part of their own venture capital firms. The marketing partner is Sela Sports, an arm of the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF, for short).
The format of the league would look similar to F1’s global schedule. Six teams of 11 players, 66 in total, would play in eight international cities on a two week rotation. As of January of this year, the league was reported by The Guardian to be looking for $5bn in startup funding and were, according to Bloomberg, looking at tapping sovereign wealth funds as a possible source of that capital. Current NBA rules don’t allow organizations like the Saudi PIF to have more than a 20% ownership stake in a team and they may not serve in ownership roles.
While those affiliated with the league have laundered the idea that the PIF isn’t directly involved in the league, the presence of Sela as a partner — and after Project B had already indicated their interest in an apparatus like it — gives reasonable skepticism to the idea that the league isn’t backed by sovereign states and the massive capital they possess.
We saw this play out in the Premier League already, as the PIF’s takeover of Newcastle United was done with the assurances that the state would have no say in day-to-day ownership. Within three years, leaked WhatsApp messages alleged that the approval of the sale would require the approval of the Kingdom’s Crown Prince, Mohamad bin Salman. And that’s before we get into the club’s owner, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, who is a close ally of bin Salman and the brain behind much of the Saudi state’s push into sports via his position as governor of the PIF (and also the chairman of the state owned petroleum company Aramco and Riyadh Air, a flagship air carrier owned by the PIF).
The Premier League, predictably, didn’t investigate the claims as Newcastle remains a mid-tier club that just makes more money now than it did in the past.
The tricky thing here, for those who want to see a more equitable solution to the player revenue share problem, is that Project B is offering equity stakes to all of its inaugural players. Unrivaled, the 3x3 league founded by Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart last year, utilized the same model and is now viewed by many (including myself) as a potential competitor to the WNBA inasmuch as they offer a different type of organizational structure that allows their labor to profit off their work.
If you’re simply operating from a utilitarian state (the greatest good for the greatest amount of people), then you can see Ogwumike’s signing with the league as a good thing. It’s another leverage point for the players to say, “If the WNBA doesn’t want to come to the table, then there are options for us elsewhere.” Couple that with Thursday’s Front Office Sports report that players in Project B are being offered multimillion dollar salaries and the discussion becomes a lot more defensible for players in the middle of a fight over pay. When equity stakes are also involved, it is even easier to say “This is what the players have been needing, so it doesn’t matter who gives it to them.”
Except, in this case, it kind of does.
For starters, the track record of Saudi affiliated sports ventures hasn’t been particularly great. F1, for instance, saw a 40% decline in online conversation in 2024 according to Buzz Radar and a 27% revenue decline in the first quarter of 2025. Fascinatingly, the headline Front Office Sports ran with was ‘F1 losing money, but Books $14.2B in Future Revenue.”
Kind of funny how people can see long term revenue over short term losses when they want to, huh…
Add that decline in with the complete faceplant that has been LIV Golf, which in just the last week effectively punted on their ‘paradigm shifting’ competitive format and is now aligning themselves closer to the PGA, and you get a pattern of bad business decisions fueled by ridiculous sums of money.
Ethical consumption is almost impossible in today’s world unless you’re living off the grid and, while the Saudi Arabian regime’s reputation is markedly worse especially as it pertains to human rights, I can understand the allure of financial stability and the idea of equity stakes and revenue sharing. The problem is that by aligning with an entity that very clearly seems rooted in the idea of a global barnstorming league that appears to prioritize entertainment over competition, Ogwumike is adding another faction to an already delicate labor discussion.
While I believe that Unrivaled is the best choice to be a potential successor to the WNBA on the basis that it was founded by players who seem to believe in putting the labor class first, there are fair questions around a conflict of interest with their owners. In the past, I’ve said that a conflict of interest is good if it advances the goals of the players. But I may have to reassess that belief if the prevailing opinion is to essentially align with the same type of monied class that doesn’t seem to take sports seriously other than as a marketing vehicle for their regime.
In a lot of ways, the WNBPA President just gift wrapped a set of talking points to the people sitting across the table from her. The mindless decision to use the PA’s official social media accounts to share her announcement displayed a sense of self-awareness during a year in which the union has been unwaveringly disciplined in their messaging. Now, with players deciding what (and what league) is best for them, the W has to simply sit back and watch the carnage unfold.
Already, the coalition of support for the players is wavering as criticism of Ogwumike and the PA that she presides over has amplified in the last 24 hours alone. The WNBA owners need to simply sit at the table now and say, “Have fun with the Saudis and their track record of successful sports ownership.”
While a lot of the discussion around Ogwumike’s signing will likely be rooted in the human rights abuses the Saudi government has allegedly committed, along with their long-standing track record of being less-than-friendly towards women’s rights, the real discussion is about whether or not this signing constitutes a breaking of the picket line or another leverage stake to make the WNBA come to the table.
I’ll say this much: the NBA and WNBA doubtlessly know that they won’t be able to compete with the bottomless well of resources the PIF can promise. But that can work both for and against the players. We’ll just have to find out what the unintended consequences are.
For the player’s sake, and for the first time in this whole process, I hope they know what they’re doing. Because now I’m not exactly sure the coalition is as together as we thought.