The Golden State Valkyries, having opened their 2026 season at 2-1, are barely two seasons into existence, but the buzz around the franchise continues growing.
Revenue figures, sellouts, and ticket prices rival those of their NBA neighbors at the same arena. The numbers keep climbing. Now, team president Jess Smith has stepped forward with a forecast about where the WNBA is heading by 2027.
What Golden State Valkyries President Jess Smith Predicts for WNBA Franchise Valuations
The Valkyries launched in 2025 with a reported $50 million expansion fee. The next round of expansion teams, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia, each paid $250 million.
CNBC recently projected the Valkyries to be a billion-dollar franchise now, a first in women’s sports history, and Smith was leading this revolution as the WNBA’s first Business Executive Leadership award winner.
She sat down with Front Office Sports to lay out where she sees things going. She touched on the league’s media deal, international fandom, and the long-standing gap between men’s and women’s franchise valuations.
Without hedging, she said, “We are just at kind of the beginning of this journey and what you’re seeing, I think when you look to 2027, what you’re going to see is more hypergrowth, and there’s really tactical reasons for that.”
Smith’s case rested on three points. She explained the first, “In this current CBA, there’s an opportunity to play more games. More games equals more media, more visibility, more stories, also creates more ticketed experience, more revenue, also creates more partnership experience.”
Her second point discussed international exposure. “The WNBA started to talk about what the international landscape looks like. Just for the Valkyries alone, right when we launched our brand, we sold merchandise in all 50 states and 70 countries in the first two months.”
Third, the league’s media deal. Six outlets are locked into national broadcast commitments. She said it is a “massive opportunity for the WNBA and exposure.”
She stated how “transformative it has been for men’s sports” and that the WNBA is “on our way to that.”
She then immediately stated a stark warning to the NBA and the NFL.
“When you look at it today, and when you look at next season and the impact that this year will have and the increase of games, you can start to see that pathway toward these teams being more valuable than some of the men’s teams or leagues at some point in time.”
The numbers back up this climb: The Valkyries and the WNBA have recently seen it.
Golden State pulled in $78 million in revenue in year one.
Sportico pegged the franchise at $500 million. By early May, they had bumped it to $850 million.
CNBC went further on May 4, calling it a billion. Smith told FOS the billion-dollar number is one her team “definitely think[s] is accurate.”
Adding real weight here is the Connecticut Sun, who were sold to the Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta for $300 million earlier this year.
The New York Liberty also added investors at a $450 million valuation, again a record for a women’s sports franchise. The Liberty’s funding was anchored by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, with supermodel and entrepreneur Karlie Kloss and ABC’s Robin Roberts among the other names involved.
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Compare that to the NBA’s major and most recent sale, which was the late Paul Allen’s stake in the Portland Trail Blazers, which was sold to Tom Dundon for $4.25 billion.
The average NBA franchise sits at $5.52 billion, an almost 18% increase in one year. The lowest is the Memphis Grizzlies at $3.75 billion.
The average NFL team is worth $7.65 billion, which was approximately $1 billion in 2010.
The Valkyries made the playoffs as the first expansion team to do so in their inaugural WNBA season, with head coach Natalie Nakase winning the 2025 WNBA Coach of the Year.
