Professional sports in the US is dominated by male teams whose players get the big contracts and media focus and thus are able to build up a big fan base. Soccer is one instance where the women’s teams have been much more successful than the men in international competitions and thus get a lot of attention though this has still not translated into financial parity.

Now it appears that women’s basketball, after a rocky start, is gaining in popularity and not just with female fans.

This season, the W.N.B.A.’s fan base was 57 percent male and 43 percent female, according to statistics provided by the league. Men have actually made up more than half of viewership for years, but they were mostly middle-aged before. Now they’re skewing younger. The number of boys under 18 who watch W.N.B.A. games has grown by 130 percent over the past four years.
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“The quality of the players has definitely gotten better,” said Joe Lacob, the billionaire who owns both the Valkyries and the Warriors. He said 55 percent of ticket holders at the women’s games in San Francisco were male.

The women are gritty and fierce, playing fast and sinking more 3-pointers than ever before.

Lacob sits courtside for most Valkyries games, and his guy friends are constantly asking him for tickets, he said. At one recent game, I spotted several heavily tattooed football players for the 49ers sitting beside him.

“People are not dumb,” Lacob said. “They see that it’s better. It just clicked.”

The Valkyries managed to become the first W.N.B.A. team to sell out all their home games, helping to propel the league to record attendance numbers. When you’re in their arena, the Chase Center, it feels like one big party.

Unlike the mens teams in the NBA and NFL and their start players who tend to avoid taking any stand politically, no doubt for fear of losing lucrative endorsements, the WNBA players have not been shy about taking stands and voicing their opinions.

The WNBA is America’s most prominent women’s professional sports league. But in recent years, it has also been a showcase for something else: defiantly anti-MAGA politics. 

The WNBA has partnered with groups like Planned Parenthood and GLSEN, an LGBTQ+ youth organization. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the league dedicated its entire season to “social justice.” Players went so far as to wear “Black Lives Matter” warmups and gameday jerseys emblazoned with the name of Breonna Taylor, a victim of police violence

The politics don’t stop at symbolism. The Seattle Storm franchise publicly endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race, and players on the Atlanta Dream donned T-shirts that same year endorsing Democrat Raphael Warnock against then-Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler — despite the fact that Loeffler was the team’s co-owner at the time. A handful of New York Liberty players, knowing they’d be photographed, showed up at a 2024 game wearing Kamala Harris T-shirts.
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Unlike other professional sports leagues where players tiptoe around politics and league commissioners have worked assiduously to remain in Trump’s good graces during his second term, the WNBA continues to advocate for positions that place the league in direct opposition to Trump administration thinking. On the issue of race, there is the “Educational Resources” section of the WNBA website, which promotes titles such as How to be An Anti-Racist, The 1619 Project, and works by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kimberlé Crenshaw. And on the issue of immigration, the WNBA Players Association recently put out a joint statement with the National Women’s Soccer League Player’s Association in support of undocumented immigrants — at the exact moment that Trump was conducting controversial ICE raids in Los Angeles.

“This is a league that is dominated by women of color, Black women. At least within the last couple of decades, it’s been a very openly queer league,” said Cheryl Cooky, a professor who studies the intersections of gender, sport, media and culture at Purdue University. When it comes to players’ progressive politics, Cooky said, “it’s just who they are.” 

However, this has predictably raised the ire of the MAGA crowd for whom anything other than white male dominance in any activity is considered an affront. They do not like uppity women.

Those stances have caught the notice of the online right, which frequently trolls the WNBA over the quality of play and its player activism. When the league was recently vexed by an epidemic of disruptive fans throwing green dildos on the basketball court — a practice that was condemned as misogynistic and also dangerous to players — some conservatives laughed it off or encouraged more disruptions.

“This is what Trump fought for. THROW! THROW! THROW!” wrote Autism Capital, a popular conservative social media account, after one incident.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and one of his closest advisers, also made light of the trend in early August, posting a doctored image on X of his father throwing a sex toy at some WNBA players. 

The right has tried to foment divisions among the WNBA players by asserting that Black players are jealous of the media attention given the Caitlin Clark and are ganging up on her, though the evidence for that is scant.

There isn’t universal agreement on whether Clark is being singled out. According to some league experts, complaints about Clark’s tough treatment don’t always measure up.

“I think that narrative is overblown and not the overarching feeling among players,” said Maria Marino, a WNBA analyst and commentator at ESPN. Clark herself has shrugged off some incidents as merely part of the game. 

Even so, in early August, a widely circulated op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The WNBA and Caitlin Clark’s Civil Rights,” laid out a legal framework for Trump administration intervention.

The racists and the misogynists in the MAGA world never cease to tire of fomenting conflict. It is what they thrive on. So far, the WNBA players have largely avoided taking the bait. I hope they keep that up because it is clear that fans are flocking to watch them because of the quality of their playing, not because of any drama.