In 2018, the best women’s basketball player coming out of college flew coach to her professional games, played in front of half-empty arenas and 2,000-seat auditoriums, and, when the season wrapped, got on another plane to China to supplement a salary of $52,000. That player was A’ja Wilson, the 6-foot-4 center who has since won three championships and a record four MVP awards with the Las Vegas Aces, with a fifth widely expected this season, per a Forbes profile published this week. Wilson, who recently turned 30, told the magazine that back then she said yes to every sponsor and media opportunity that came along, because “you really didn’t know what was going to happen.” Eight years later, she will earn $1.4 million from the Aces this season, and Forbes estimates she will earn more than $5 million from a sponsor portfolio that includes Nike, Chase and AT&T.
The mechanism here is worth dwelling on, because it is not that women’s basketball players suddenly got 500% better at basketball. In the last three years, according to Forbes, WNBA viewership and sponsorship have nearly tripled, and in May the players signed a new collective bargaining agreement that pushed top salaries up more than 500%. The league got bigger, and then the players got a bigger cut of the bigger league. Wilson’s telling of the negotiations has the flavor of every labor standoff ever: “I think everyone kind of expected us to fall after the first deadline. Because we didn’t budge, it gave us a sense of, no, we are going to stand up for what we believe in and understand that we are the business.” “We are the business” is the whole thing, really. A league is a vehicle for selling tickets and commercials against the labor of about 150 people, and the people figured that out and held a deadline hostage until the economics moved.
What moved, specifically: minimum salaries went from around $66,000 per year to more than $270,000, and supermax deals are now tied to 20% of team salary caps, which are expected to rise from $1.4 million this year to $2.4 million by the end of the agreement’s six-year term. This is transformative by WNBA standards and still, by the standards of the sports economy next door, a rounding error. The lowest-paid players in the NBA earn just under $1.4 million — the league minimum across the hall equals the league max here. Top women’s tennis players can clear $10 million from prize money alone. Wilson’s position on this is admirably honest: “I’m greedy, so of course I’m like, ‘Give me more.’ But I’m really happy with where we are.” She also told Forbes the raises have eased tensions in locker rooms, which is what you would expect when the difference between the minimum and the max stops being a difference in who needs an offseason job.
The more interesting economics are off the court. Wilson is, by résumé, plausibly the best women’s basketball player ever, and yet, Forbes notes, she still trails Caitlin Clark and a handful of other WNBA players in off-court earnings. She has the signature sneaker — Nike’s A’One sold out its initial stock within minutes of release in 2025, and an A’Three is likely coming — plus a bestselling memoir, a Cardi B name-drop, a voice role in the Steph Curry–produced movie GOAT, and appearances spanning the Wheaties box, The Tonight Show and Hot Ones. Meanwhile the league’s surge in attention has come with a strange tax: coverage that fixates on racial and gender dynamics rather than the basketball, fans throwing sex toys onto the court, ex-NBA players publicly claiming to identify as female to try to join the league.
Her agent, Jade-Li English of Klutch Sports Group, describes having “difficult conversations” with brands so they “understand who she is as a Black woman,” and puts the question to them directly: “‘Would you go to a LeBron James and approach a partnership with him the same way that you would approach A’ja Wilson?’” The implied answer is no, and the question is really about pricing. The brands are, by their own account, not buying jump shots. Ben Vonwiller, McKinsey’s head of global sports and co-author of a 2025 report sizing women’s sports as a $2.5 billion opportunity, told Forbes that one of the top two reasons sponsors gave for investing more was a desire to champion inclusion and gender equality in their messaging. “They value the power of the female athletes, their character, their values, their reputation, their personality,” he said. Which is lovely, and also a description of a product that is mostly the athlete herself, her history and her willingness to be a symbol.
Wilson has largely stayed above the fray, though not entirely by choosing her moments. A mild comment last December about the Caitlin Clark attention boom — “Let’s not lose the history. It was erased for a minute. And I don’t like that” — produced a racially tinged backlash anyway. “They’re trying to project these types of issues onto us because they feel like we’re just easy to clamp onto, because we are women that have been at the forefront of so many different issues,” Wilson told Forbes. “I’m like, let’s not let that pull the attention away from how great our league is and how far we’ve come in 30 years.”
The rest of the ledger: she wrote that memoir — Dear Black Girls: How to Be True to You — at 27, recalling her childhood as one of the few Black students at a private school in Columbia, South Carolina, learning the game from her father, Roscoe Wilson Jr., a former overseas pro who named her after the Steely Dan song “Aja.” She led the University of South Carolina to its first national championship in 2017 and the Aces to their first WNBA title in 2022. She runs the scented candle brand Burnt Wax Candle Company with her mother and is expected to marry Miami Heat forward Bam Adebayo, who himself earns rather more than the WNBA supermax.
“Whether you like me or hate me, you know who I am,” Wilson says of life in the WNBA now, and: “One thing about greatness is it never hides; it always shines.” Eight years ago the model was to say yes to everything because the money might vanish. The new model is to build a sneaker line and a candle company and become half of a sports power couple, on the theory that the money compounds. For eight years of growth and a new CBA, that is, at minimum, a less anxious trade.