WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike lays out the players’ major goals for upcoming CBA negotiations

The 2025 WNBA season is the final one under the current collective bargaining agreement, and for all of the fascinating on-court storylines this year, the impending round of CBA negotiations between the WNBPA and the WNBA loom in the background of everything. 

With women’s basketball in a period of massive growth and surging in popularity, this CBA negotiation will set the power dynamics for an incredibly important time in the league’s history. As the season gets set to begin, ESPN’s Kevin Pelton and Michelle Voepel spoke with Seattle Storm star and WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike and executive director Terri Carmichael Jackson to get an idea of what the players will be pushing for in the upcoming negotiations. 

One of the biggest points made by Ogwumike is that WNBA players will no longer be happy that the league simply exists, and with the recent influx of money and interest in the league, players feel they have more leverage in negotiations than ever before. 

“With the benefit of hindsight, when you read the earlier CBAs, one of the takeaways is that the players were forced to feel grateful just to have a league,” Jackson said. “I believe we moved past that mindset in 2020. Our president, Nneka Ogwumike, and all of our player leadership are cognizant of the momentum we have and must seize.

“The stated goal for a 2026 CBA is transformational. Our hope is that the league and the teams are aiming for the same goal. In women’s sports, it is particularly true that when the players win, everyone wins.”

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Money is of course top of mind, but Ogwumike noted that the players aren’t just pushing for a big salary bump (which is a near guarantee). Instead they are looking to bring the revenue sharing thresholds to a more realistic level — to this they point have been set to where the players have almost no shot of reaching them — to ensure the players get their fair share of the league’s growing business. 

“No player has not talked about salary,” Ogwumike said. “But it’s not just about the number. I think it’s about the system, you know, creating a new structure around salary — one that doesn’t limit us the way it has in the past.”

“When we talk about salary and compensation, it’s not just about the number,” Ogwumike added. “It’s about revenue share and the salary structure. I think it’s taken people a long time to understand that’s how we’ve been thinking about it.”

The current CBA created some roadblocks that kept the players from hitting revenue sharing thresholds that could’ve increased how much players made, even with a record-setting 2024 season. The biggest hurdle was that the revenue goals were made to be cumulative and included the 2020 bubble season when there were no ticket sales. 

Salaries are expected to make a big leap in the new deal, with Pelton and Voepel noting a source from a WNBA team projected the supermax salary could reach $1 million — a huge jump from the current $249,244 figure. However, Ogwumike and the WNBPA will be not just wowed by a big increase to salary figures, but will be thinking long-term about getting the players a larger piece of the pie. 

There is also the issue of the hard cap, which players (and front office executives) would love to see softened to create more team-building flexibility. However, owners won’t give that up easily and players have plenty of other negotiating points they’ll be trying to win. Among them is locking in charter travel, which seems like a lock, but because the WNBA instituted charter travel temporarily through the 2025 season, they’ve made sure that’s something players have to negotiate to keep. 

While Ogwumike noted she doesn’t see a world where the players are willing to go back to commercial travel, owners will point to it as at least a mild concession in negotiations and use that to try and hold on to some of their own advantages (like the hard cap). Other areas Ogwumike discussed as focal points for players include the draft age limit and increasing roster sizes from 12 to 13. 

The draft age limit is currently 22 (at any point in the draft year) for college players but 20 for international players. That means that some, but not all, players are eligible to declare for the draft after their junior seasons, and moving the age limit to 21 could allow for more talent to make their way into the league sooner. 

“It’s been in conversation, exploring what the age limit can be,” Ogwumike said. “There are going to be a lot of different things that change the composition of our league. You see more international players. Even the footprint of our league — we’re expanding teams, we’re adding games. There are going to be so many different variables that kind of contribute to what perhaps could be a change in age limit.”

As is always the case in CBA negotiations, everything is going to come back to money. Any changes to travel or draft age limits or anything else will be viewed as a concession made to get back in the negotiation for a bigger piece of the financial pie. The challenge for the players and Ogwumike is to identify the biggest non-financial gains they feel are vital to add in this year’s CBA and what they’re willing to give on in return. If revenue sharing is the absolute top priority, getting that (which would be no small feat) would likely take something else off the table elsewhere. 

That’s just the nature of CBA negotiations, but the players do have more leverage than we typically see in this spot. As for a work stoppage, Ogwumike echoed the sentiments of Napheesa Collier from earlier in the year, which was that they don’t want any interruptions to play and believe a deal will get done in time, but as a union, they are making sure their players are making the necessary contingency plans for all outcomes. 

As the WNBA season gets set to begin, the on-court product will push to the forefront, but CBA negotiations will be lingering on the backburner. What the players can get out of it remains to be seen, but they’re hoping for more major strides to take advantage of the current surge of popularity in the sport.