| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today freelance journalist Megan Greenwell profiles Clara Wu Tsai, the owner of the New York Liberty, as the defending WNBA champions prepares for their season opener on May 17. Wu Tsai has big plans for the franchise. You can find the whole story online here. You can also listen to it here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. Breanna Stewart—the WNBA scoring leader, two-time champion and Finals MVP, perennial All-Star, four-time NCAA champion, WNBA and Olympics MVP, guaranteed first-ballot Hall of Famer with a 7-foot-1 wingspan—was an unrestricted free agent, and Clara Wu Tsai was hell-bent on persuading her to choose the New York Liberty. “Stewie,” who’d played all of her seven pro years with the Seattle Storm, was already one of the best players in women’s basketball history. She was seriously considering staying in Seattle, but she wanted to weigh all her options. In January 2023 she informed four teams she’d meet with them, including the Storm and the Liberty. The contenders would have to fly to Istanbul, where Stewart was spending the offseason playing for Turkish club Fenerbahçe to supplement her $228,094 WNBA salary, then the maximum allowable under league rules. That the Liberty were in the conversation at all represented a major turnaround for one of the only three original WNBA franchises still around a quarter century after the league’s founding. While New York had made the Finals in four of the league’s first six seasons, owner and legendary sports villain James Dolan had unceremoniously put the team up for sale and relegated it from Madison Square Garden to a Westchester arena that felt like a glorified high school gym. Now, less than four years after Wu Tsai and her husband, Joseph Tsai, had taken over the franchise, the Liberty were on the cusp of creating a superteam. Just a few days before meeting with Stewart, the Liberty had traded for the reigning league MVP, 6-foot-6 post presence Jonquel Jones, and they were courting All-Star point guard Courtney Vandersloot. They already had sharpshooting guard Sabrina Ionescu on the roster, having drafted her with the first overall pick in 2020. Three years removed from a 2-20 season, New York suddenly looked capable of winning its first-ever championship—if it could land Stewart. When the Liberty’s executives got to Turkey, general manager Jonathan Kolb and head coach Sandy Brondello delivered a spiel about how Stewart could help them build a dynasty. But the team’s sales pitch ultimately rested on business, not basketball. Leaving Kolb and Brondello behind, Wu Tsai set out to close the deal, chartering a boat to take her, Stewart and Stewart’s wife and daughter on a cruise down the Bosphorus. Wu Tsai had almost no experience with recruiting, and she admits she was nervous. “It’s not something I had been familiar with, so I was learning,” she says. “It was really about listening to each other, because she’d also never talked to someone like me.”  Wu Tsai with her stars, Sabrina Ionescu, Jonquel Jones and Breanna Stewart. Photographer: Adrienne Grunwald for Bloomberg Businessweek What she did have was a plan, shaped by years as an executive at American Express Co. and Chinese auction site Taobao, to complete the Liberty’s overhaul from the WNBA’s most moribund franchise into its crown jewel. A basketball obsessive who’d grown up rooting for the University of Kansas, Wu Tsai was hungry to bring New York a championship—or, ideally, several. But her real goal was much larger: She was out to prove women’s basketball could make huge profits, if only team owners were willing to substantially invest in them. And with a multibillion-dollar fortune behind her—her husband co-founded Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.—Wu Tsai was prepared to do just that. In addition to titles, she committed to providing more and better facilities, support staff, brand partnerships, media exposure and business opportunities. For years, Stewart had advocated for improved benefits and amenities for WNBA players. Some of the world’s best (and tallest) athletes were still flying commercial to games, earning as little as $62,000 a season, practicing at community rec centers and risking injury by playing all offseason abroad. Now Stewart was sitting on a boat with someone whose ambitions were at least as grand as her own. Wu Tsai’s pitch boiled down to: Together we can upend the way things work—not just for the Liberty but for everyone in the league. “I wanted to go somewhere where not only could I fight for a championship but go lock arms with the people who are going to make this league better,” Stewart says. “She made me feel like everything I wanted was exactly what she was fighting for too.” A few days later, Stewart signed with New York. She even took less money than Seattle was offering, allowing the Liberty to add Vandersloot without exceeding the league’s salary cap. In a TikTok video announcing the news, Stewart tore away a generic jersey on which she’d written, “I want to do my part to make this world a better place,” revealing a sea-foam green Liberty warmup shirt underneath. During a three-hour interview earlier this spring at a performing arts center near her primary residence in San Diego’s tony La Jolla neighborhood, Wu Tsai doesn’t sound surprised that it all worked out. Short and slim, with highlighted black hair that brushes her collarbone, she looks a decade younger than her 59 years. She has a penchant for fashion, favoring patterned pants, chunky rings, trendy sneakers. She makes intense eye contact when she speaks but rarely raises the pitch of her voice, exuding calmness and confidence in equal measure. While she steadfastly refuses to publicly criticize her fellow WNBA owners, or anyone else, she also doesn’t shy away from conflict, especially on the question of what players deserve. As she heads into her seventh season as the Liberty’s co-owner and chief decision-maker, she seems more likely than any other single person to reshape the norms of women’s professional sports. Wu Tsai kept her promises to Stewart. Since buying the team, she’s moved it to Brooklyn’s 18,000-seat Barclays Center from the Westchester County Center—which could hold just 2,300 people for most Liberty games—tripled the number of front-office employees, overhauled the locker room, built an NBA-caliber staff of full-time trainers, nutritionists and physical therapists and helped compel the WNBA to finally make charter flights the norm. In March she announced plans to fund an $80 million practice facility that will include everything from remote cameras and data-tracking technology in the gym to child-care facilities and a beauty salon. Wu Tsai can’t single-handedly boost player salaries, which are governed by the league’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA), but the WNBA’s rapidly growing profile seems likely to result in a massive raise for everyone in the next contract. ESPN, which broadcast 24 regular-season games last season, reported a 170% jump in viewership for the year, averaging about 1.7 million viewers per game. Attendance was up 48% from 2023, thanks in part to Indiana Fever rookie sensation Caitlin Clark; and merch sales through the league’s website and its Manhattan store grew 601%. The Liberty saw even larger growth in many categories, according to Wu Tsai: up 64% year over year in ticket sales, 152% in season ticket memberships, 80% in corporate partnerships. An investment deal last summer valued the team at $200 million, more than 10 times what the Tsais likely paid. GQ called Liberty games the best party in New York City. A-list celebrities were regularly told there was no room for them in Barclays’ courtside seats. At the end of last season, Stewart and her teammates won the Liberty’s first championship. For Wu Tsai, hoisting the trophy validated her thesis. “By winning, we finally proved a point,” she says. “We proved that when you invest in women, you can get a championship team, and you can sell out arenas, and you can get a deeply engaged fan base, and you can get a product on the floor that’s as competitive and good as anything you see in the men’s league.” Wu Tsai isn’t stopping now. By the mid-2030s, she’s pledged, the Liberty will be the first women’s sports team valued at $1 billion. The question now is how many other owners will follow her lead. Keep reading: With the New York Liberty, Clara Wu Tsai Aims for the First $1 Billion Women’s Sports Franchise Sign up for Bloomberg’s Business of Sports newsletter for the context you need on the collision of power, money and sports. |
