Success for a sports team can be measured in a number of different ways, on the court, the rink, the field or the diamond … and on the balance sheet. But for the most part one follows the other rather than one being paramount to the other.
At its simplest: You win, you win. Yes, you can win on the court but lose on the balance sheet, like the New Jersey Nets did in the early 2000s. Or can you lose on the field and win on the balance sheet, like a lot of New York teams have over the years. Ladies and gentleman, your New York … Jets. But as a matter of course, winning breeds winning. You don’t choose one and not the other.
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Indeed, there’s long been a rule in basketball: just get into the playoffs and you’ll make your fans and other other stakeholders happy. According to an often-cited datapoint, each playoff home game can get your NBA team a million dollar profit. Post-season revenue-sharing is different with metrics adjusted to reward the winners. Not to mention every other metric, including goodwill as defined by season ticket sales, merchandise sales, etc … and of course the franchise and league valuations. Those in turn can used to do things like sell pieces of your club to carry out arena enhancements, training centers and other amenities attractive to the free agents … and fans
There’s probably no better example than the New York Liberty. Clara Wu Tsai, co-governor the Libs, has said the team is close to being profitable but those numbers are not available. What is known, as Tom Friend of Sports Business Journal wrote earlier this month.
In less than 24 hours after their title, the Liberty shattered the WNBA’s previous all-time 30-
day record for championship merch sales. It wasn’t just Liberty Mutual signing on for 2025:
It was Pinterest, Fanatics, Amtrak, Essie, New York Lottery, Lola and Flamingo, among
others. It was increased local media rights deals with Fox 5 and My 9, putting the team in
7.5 million New York-area homes. It was sponsorship revenue climbing by 50% YOY. It was
ticket sales in Barclays Center’s upper bowl rising 68% YOY. It was overall social media
engagement spiking 665%. It was e-commerce sales widening 58% YOY. It was in-arena
merch on non-game days climbing by 241% YOY, which means random fans were just
stopping by. Which all started with the parade.
Indeed, Friend notes that the Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment marketing team — known to not miss many beats —- used the championship parade down Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes to further ingrain the championship motif into the team.
“When we turned the corner at Canyon of the Heroes, it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is
about the people,’” Keia Clarke, Liberty CEO, said Friend. “I cannot one-to-one correlate that winning feeling as the reason we’re averaging 16,000 fans this season, but make no mistake, there are people [at the parade] who said, ‘I need to go to a game, or I need to watch when they’re on TV, or I need to order something online, or I will follow them on social media, or I will take the time to learn a little bit about who [Breanna Stewart] is as a mom.’
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“How we celebrated this team was important. The investments made in the parade, in rings, in the gratitude for the team and the staff and the partnerships that we have. It was very intentional.”
SBJ looked at the big new sponsorship deal the Libs announced after the championship: a multiyear, multimillion dollar deal between the Liberty the WNBA team and Liberty Mutual, the insurance giant…
Natural as the mating may have seemed for years to a lot of people, it didn’t come to be until the basketball team got into the WNBA Finals in 2024 and the two sides met at a Finals game.
“I mean, it’s kind of Captain Obvious,” Clarke told Friend. “Liberty Mutual. We do share a name.”
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The success on the court also led not just to sponsorships and endorsements and TV deals etc. but an ability to sell a stake in the team — estimated in the “mid-teens” per Bloomberg News — to a group of investors that included Jack Ma, the founder with Joe Tsai, of Alibaba, as well as five New York sportswomen that brought in roughly $40 million. That gave the Liberty a valuation of $450 million. That in turn is being used by BSE to finance around half the cost of the Liberty’s new training center in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a 75,000 square foot facility that’s likely to be the WNBA’s best and a lure for the next class of free agents that’ll be need to keep New York’s dynasty going. It opens in time for the 2027 season.
“The ember has burned from October to this year,” Clarke said. “Everybody’s come in with this mindset of, ‘OK, let’s do it again.’”
At both ends.
