2026 WNBA draft rookie salary scale (vs 2025) per sources:

1: $500,000 ($78,831)
2: $466,913 ($78,831)
3: $436,016 ($78,831)
4: $407,163 ($78,831)
5: $380,219 ($75,643)
6: $355,058 ($75,643)
7: $331,563 ($75,643)
8: $309,622 ($75,643)
9+: $289,133 ($72,455)

2nd+3rd round: $270k (new minimum)

Happy WNBA Draft Day. Tonight’s crop of rookies will be best paid in W history, with the No. 1 pick eligible for a $500k base salary.

The only question is who will get it?

@sportico.bsky.social has the draft rookie scale breakdown: www.sportico.com/leagues/bask...

"For the first time this century, figure skating has minted a mainstream, global celebrity in Liu" - @germanotes.bsky.social

Read more: wp.me/pc2RuA-1lzsO0

WNBA Season Poised to Expand to 52 Games Over Course of CBA The WNBA regular season will expand from 44 games in 2026 to as many as 52 games under terms of a proposed new CBA with players.

Scoop: the WNBA regular season is poised to expand from 44 regular season games in 2026 to 52 games over the life of new CBA, per verbal agreement with terms still to be ratified. www.sportico.com/leagues/bask...

Italy’s WBC Rise Comes as Country Weighs Who Can Be a Citizen The Italy team at the WBC, composed of Italian-Americans, is finding success at a time when the laws of citizenship are a hot political topic in Italy

To Americans, the Italian baseball team seems cartoonishly Italian. To Italians, they're "bizarre and cheerful."

The 4-0 Azzurri are sparking new debates about who, exactly, is Italian. Coincidentally, their WBC success comes as Italy debates who can be a citizen: www.sportico.com/leagues/base...

ClicknClear CEO Chantal Epp tells me they signed a "multi-year" partnership with the ISU in 2024, and assisted with the ISU's production of a free, online training module about music rights, screenshot here via
isu.org/erink/

Figure Skating Faces Music Licensing Headache on Eve of Olympics Spanish figure skater Tomas Guarino must scrap his "Minions" program for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan due to music licensing complications.

New story on Olympic figure skating music drama. Tomas Guarino said he submitted his "Minions" program to ISU's approved third-party, ClicknClear in August. But ISU tells
@sportico.bsky.social
it has no "contractual relationship" with ClicknClear. www.sportico.com/leagues/olym...

Largest U.S. Youth Sports Operator 3Step Explores Sale 3Step Sports, the largest operator of youth sports clubs in the U.S., has hired Goldman Sachs to explore a potential sale.

Scoop: the largest operator of U.S. youth sports clubs is for sale www.sportico.com/business/spo...

Sporticast 520: The Winter Olympics Are Almost Here The Winter Olympics are coming to Milan Cortina. This Sporticast sports podcast breaks down the biggest business stories of the upcoming Games.

FYI this feed is going to be 70% figure skating news for the next month. My Sporticast debut discussing all things Alysa Liu, our Winter Olympics preview, and much more: www.sportico.com/podcasts/spo...

NBC Pulls Olympic Champ From Milan Coverage for ‘Conflict of Interest’ Gabriella Papadakis' feud with ex-skating partner Guillaume Cizeron led NBC to alter ice dance coverage at the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics.

First story for @sportico.bsky.social: NBC pulls Olympic champion ice dancer Gabriella Papadakis from Milan Olympics commentary for "conflict of interest" with ex- skating partner Guillaume Cizeron. www.sportico.com/personalitie...

Hello! I’m now covering sports business for @sportico.bsky.social. Send all tips, ideas, fun banter and Olympics gossip to sgermano@sportico.com.

Sports Betting Everywhere: Prediction Markets Explode Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have gained popularity in the U.S. by letting people bet on everything from elections to Oscar winners to weather trends. But over the past year, a substa...

In 10+ years of covering the sports industry, nothing has broken my brain more than the intersection of sports betting & prediction markets.

How everything became a sports wager + why the Supreme Court might decide the most consequential event contract of all www.theinformation.com/articles/spo...

Can Weight-Loss Drugs Be Fair in Sports? Serena Williams Just Raised the Stakes An earthquake shook the sporting universe this week: Serena Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam tennis champion, has taken the first step toward a potential comeback by reentering the sport’s anti-doping...

Serena Williams says she “is NOT coming back” to tennis. But by re-entering the testing pool, she highlights a fraught discussion in anti-doping:

Should GLP-1s be banned in sports? Ozempic and Serena’s shot of choice, Zepbound, are currently in WADA purgatory www.theinformation.com/articles/can...

It’s giving

The most important thing you need to know about this article is that The Offspring are thrilled that Diana Davis and Gleb Smolkin are skating to their music, lol #figureskating

Figure Skating Aims to Get Its Groove Back—With AI Music and the Spice Girls Of all the places AI is seeping into, a program by a pair of Czech ice dancers angling for a spot at the Winter Olympics in February may be one of the most unexpected. Yet, at last weekend’s Skate Ame...

About 2mo from now, you'll see a lot of figure skating at the Winter Olympics set to the Spice Girls, Madonna, and The Offspring. Some will even have AI music.

Before they go viral, here's the crazy backstory to the complex world of music licensing in sports www.theinformation.com/articles/fig...

Comcast Cable Spinoff Versant Explores Sale of Youth Sports App Versant, Comcast’s planned spinoff of its cable channels, is exploring a sale of its youth sports management app, SportsEngine, people familiar with the matter said. It’s the latest indication that th...

Exclusive: Versant, Comcast’s planned spinoff of its cable channels, is exploring a sale of its youth sports app, SportsEngine.

Read more from @germanotes.bsky.social 👇
https://thein.fo/4p1oibL

The Next Wrexham? American Investors Bet on a Berlin Women’s Soccer Club When Kara Nortman was looking to start a women’s professional soccer team in Los Angeles, she and her co-founders—actress Natalie Portman and entrepreneur Julie Uhrman—took meetings with sports expert...

Curious sports business trend alert: the NFL, NBA, and venture capitalists are now taking their ambitions to Berlin. Why? It's the rare European capital without a successful globally recognized sports team, and US bigwigs want to change that:

www.theinformation.com/articles/nex...

Thank you for the validation, New Yorker

Clara Wu Tsai’s Plan to Build the First $1 Billion WNBA Franchise When Clara Wu Tsai and her husband, Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai, bought the WNBA’s New York Liberty in 2019, one of her first priorities was convincing her fellow team owners they needed to spend mone...

Clara Wu Tsai is building the first $1 billion WNBA team: The New York Liberty governor believes the team's recent $450 million valuation is just the start, with multiple teams potentially reaching the milestone in the next 5-10 years. Full story here: https://thein.fo/49sLV8E

Who Likes Nickelback? Nobody, Except for Millions The band may be one of the most successful rock acts ever, with more than 50 million albums sold and a dozen fully booked international tours under its belt. And yet it has become a punch line for a g...

www.wsj.com/articles/who...

Moneyball for Minors: Inside the Booming Business of Youth Sports Apps Lauren Drapp has a hectic job working as a gas scheduler for a private equity firm in Houston, triangulating natural gas between suppliers, pipelines and customers. But she’s arguably even busier as a...

Recently a friend told me, “you’ll never believe how many apps I’ve had to download to take my son to soccer.”

That got me digging into the $12 billion market for youth sports tech: apps that schedule, score, and stream kids’ games.

It’s Moneyball for minors www.theinformation.com/articles/mon...

Expanding on the issue of wealth inequality among sports owners with @mikevorkunov.bsky.social : why the net worth of your team’s owner matters more today

Is Steve Ballmer Too Rich for the NBA? Earlier this week, a handful of the richest people in the world convened at a five-star hotel in midtown Manhattan to discuss typical titans-of-industry fodder: overseas expansion, the future of media...

In 2019, Ballmer was the only decabillionaire among NBA owners. Today, roughly a third have net worths in the two-digit billions.

Why Aspiration-gate is a wake up call for sports leagues who entice the uber wealthy to buy in: www.theinformation.com/articles/ste...

The @pablotorrefindsout.bsky.social reporting that Steve Ballmer may have circumvented the NBA salary cap underscores one under-covered trend: the exploding wealth inequality between (already super rich) sports owners.

Since 2019, the wealth gap between Ballmer and the bottom tier has grown >3X

Can Tennis Connect With Young Fans Through the Metaverse and TikTok? For decades, the U.S. Open Tennis Championships has been a crown jewel of the global sports calendar. As the fourth and final Grand Slam of the tennis season, it has hosted historic athletic feats by ...

The Arena: Can Tennis Connect With Young Fans Through the Metaverse and TikTok?

Read more from @germanotes.bsky.social 👇
https://bit.ly/41vjn9X

This was the inevitable next step after Paris 2024 opened the floodgates to product placement www.ft.com/content/4db4...

Sports Leagues Hunt for Startup Investments in a Chummy Style of Venture Capital A couple weeks ago, LeBron James was in Las Vegas, seated courtside at the Thomas and Mack Center to watch his team, the Los Angeles Lakers, scrimmage against their crosstown rivals, the Clippers. The...

One of the biggest stories in the sports industry that not enough people are talking about is the recent trend of major leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, MLS) establishing their own, in-house venture capital funds.

I spent a month digging into it:

www.theinformation.com/articles/spo...

Say hi if you’re in the arena: sara@theinformation.com 🙃

I reported a deepfake of Caitlin Clark on X. Instead of it getting removed, here's what happened | Sporting News Trying to get a Caitlin Clark tweet taken down turned into a deep dive on the growing problem of deepfakes on X

I reported an offensive Caitlin Clark fake video on X to try and get it removed. Instead, I saw how deeply the platform is letting women down.

My story on one of the most disturbing issues affecting women in the age of AI, and X's failure to curb it:

www.sportingnews.com/us/wnba/indi...