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It seems like new sports leagues are popping up every few weeks these days. TGL Golf, a six-team indoor simulator golf league debuted Jan. 7; the Women’s Pro Baseball League’s first pitch is scheduled for 2026; and Unrivaled — a 3-on-3 women’s basketball league — tipped off its inaugural season on Jan. 17.
“The players—who all have equity in the league—took the game as seriously as any WNBA championship,” reported FrontOfficeSports.com, referring to the league’s inaugural two games that aired on TNT from the 850-seat Kaseya Center in Miami.
Any why shouldn’t they? Unrivaled was announced in May 2024 as “a groundbreaking model of women’s sports compensation and ownership.” An “all-star group of investors” includes coaches, players, media professionals, actors and others.
Co-founded by WNBA stars Breanna Stewart (York Liberty) and Napheesa Collier (Minnesota Lynx), Unrivaled not only is owned by the players who have a vested interest in its success, but it also features TK “historic contract opportunities offering the highest average salary in women’s professional sports league history,” according to league officials.
Six teams — unaffiliated with geographic connections and with names like Laces, Lunar Owls and Vinyl — showcase 30 of the top women’s basketball players for a 3-on-3, compressed full-court style of play. Rosters boast the likes of Brittney Griner, Angel Reese, Arike Ogunbowale, Aliyah Boston, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Jewell Lloyd and Chelsea Gray.
“For years, women have relied heavily on off-court sponsorships for a majority of their income,” Stewart said when introducing the league. “With Unrivaled, we’re revolutionizing the game by prioritizing investments in our stars and ensuring their on-court performance is reflected in their pay.”

“With the growing popularity of women’s basketball and the WNBA, this is an opportunity for us to extend our visibility into the traditional basketball season,” Collier added. “Breanna and I set out to create a league that would change the way women’s sports are viewed and ultimately how sports leagues operate. We may have had the vision, but this isn’t just our league — it belongs to the players, and the Unrivaled model reflects that.”
Indeed, this is serious stuff.
According to CBSSports.com, the average player’s salary for Unrivaled’s inaugural season is more than $200,000. The league has a salary pool of $8 million, and players also split a 15% revenue pot. By comparison, under the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement, the highest annual player salary is about $208,000, and the most a veteran player can earn is $241,000.
“Leading up to its launch, Unrivaled raised more than $35 million from various sources and dozens of individual investors, including Dawn Staley, Geno Auriemma and Coco Gauff,” the Associated Press reported. “The league has also secured partnership deals with Ally, State Farm, Wilson, Under Armour, Opill, Miller Lite, Sprite, Sephora, VistaPrint and Ticketmaster to go along with a multiyear media rights deal with TNT Sports. Financial details about the partnerships have not been released.”
Can the new league sustain its lofty ambitions — and will it set a new standard for compensation of other startup leagues? According to one economics expert, Unrivaled might (true to an its name) be an anomaly and not the norm.
“It looks good right now. They have a lot of capital, have a lot of co-owners, sponsors who have bought into this who have equity,” Christina DePasquale, an associate professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, told the AP. “This is almost like a superstar league. That certainly will help get people to tune in and continuously tune in. A lot of the other professional league offshoots have become minor leagues in a sense and that’s not what this is.”
For now, Unrivaled is the biggest women’s sports launch since the WNBA made its debut in 1996. About the only thing missing is Caitlin Clark.
The New York Times reported that “the league made overtures to …Clark, but she elected to sit out the inaugural season, as she recovers from a nonstop last 12 months. Clark’s WNBA salary — around $75,000 — is supplemented by her countless endorsement deals, and she told Time she felt training privately in her own space would be beneficial. Clark, though, didn’t rule out playing in the league in the future. If she does, [Unrivaled investor and Horizon Sports and Entertainment co-CEO David] Levy said, interest in the league will ‘catapult,’ surely propelling its long-term outlook. But he stressed that Unrivaled isn’t built around one person.”