Cathy Engelbert is leaving the WNBA at the end of the season, and the league’s next commissioner won’t be walking into the same job she took in 2019.

Back then, the WNBA was still fighting for more attention, more money, and more stability. Now, they've got bigger audiences, bigger media deals, more teams, and owners willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a franchise. The league has gone from trying to prove they belonged to trying to keep up with how quickly they've grown.

Engelbert announced that she’ll step down on Dec. 31. She told the Associated Press she’d originally planned to stay for about three and a half years, not seven and a half, and said the decision to leave was hers. If a successor isn’t ready by the start of January, she’s willing to hang around long enough to help with the transition.

She leaves behind a league that’s richer and more popular than ever. But they're also dealing with much bigger expectations, tougher labor negotiations, player frustration, expansion questions, and the growing pains that come with suddenly being one of the most watched leagues in sports.

Her successor won’t have to convince people the WNBA can survive. That part’s already been settled. The real challenge will be figuring out how to manage everything this league has become.

Engelbert Turned the WNBA's Potential Into A Real Business

The easiest way to understand Engelbert’s tenure is to look at how much the league grew. When she got there, the league office had 12 employees. Now it has close to 100. The WNBA had 12 teams then and has 15 now, with Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia bringing the total to 18 by 2030. Each of those three expansion teams reportedly committed to a $250 million fee just to get in.

The audience grew just as fast. The 2024 regular season drew more than 2.35 million fans, a 48% jump from the year before and the league’s highest total in 22 years. ESPN platforms averaged 1.19 million viewers, up 170%, while merchandise sales rose 601% and League Pass subscriptions climbed 366%. Attendance crossed 3 million for the first time in 2025.

Franchise values followed the attention. The reported average rose from roughly $10 million when Engelbert started to about $460 million in 2026. Those are obviously just estimates, but the overall direction is pretty hard to argue with. Buying into the WNBA used to feel like a bet on what the league could become. Now established sports owners and deep-pocketed groups are fighting to get a piece of something that’s already valuable.

The media business might be the clearest example. The league’s new rights have been reported at $3.1 billion over 11 years, or about $281 million annually. That’s roughly six and a half times the value of the previous deal. A record 216 of the league’s 330 regular-season games are being put on national TV in 2026.

Engelbert deserves real credit for turning all that interest into something the league could actually build on. The WNBA played a 22-game season inside the Wubble in 2020 instead of disappearing during the pandemic. The Commissioner’s Cup came in 2021. Full-time charter travel, which once seemed financially impossible, became the standard in 2024.

That doesn’t mean the commissioner created the boom by herself. A’ja Wilson, Breanna Stewart, Caitlin Clark, Napheesa Collier, Angel Reese, and a long list of other players gave people a reason to care. Rivalries and better basketball drove the interest. Engelbert’s job was to make sure the league could capture as much of that demand as possible, and on the business side, she mostly did.

The WNBA’s Biggest Win Created Their Biggest Test

The next commissioner's getting a league with a much healthier balance sheet and a seven-year collective bargaining agreement that would’ve sounded completely ridiculous a few years ago. More than $1 billion in player salaries and benefits through 2032. A salary cap that jumped from $1.5 million in 2025 to $7 million in 2026.

That’s not a typo. That’s the WNBA now.

These are massive gains. They’re also not gifts from the basketball gods. They came after 17 months of tense bargaining and a very real threat of a work stoppage. The players opted out of the old deal because the league’s economics had changed and their share hadn’t changed enough with them.

They were right. And the terms of the agreement prove it.

But a bigger paycheck doesn’t magically fix a bruised relationship.

Collier made that clear last September when she accused Engelbert of brushing off player concerns:

She told me, 'only losers' complain about referees... [and] players should be on their knees thanking their lucky stars for the media rights deal that I got them... I also asked how she planned to fix the fact that players like Caitlin, Angel, and Paige, who are clearly driving massive revenue for the league, are making so little for their first four years... Her response was, 'Caitlin should be grateful she makes $16 million off the court, because without the platform that the WNBA gives her, she wouldn't make anything.'

Engelbert denied those allegations, but she also acknowledged the bigger issue: if players didn’t feel appreciated, the league — and she personally — needed to do better.

That wasn’t just one personality clash that got blown up for a week and then disappeared. Stewart said she respected Engelbert but didn’t have much of a relationship with her. Wilson joked during All-Star weekend that their relationship mostly involved Engelbert handing her trophies. In June, Alyssa Thomas accused Engelbert of staying silent after Thomas received racist abuse and death threats following a game against Indiana.

So it certainly hasn't been smooth sailing for her in her role lately.

The WNBA hasn’t ignored the uglier side of their growth. Their No Space for Hate program added a lot to help keep the players safe on the court. Still, there’s been a gap between the league doing something and players feeling like the leadership actually understands how urgent the problem is. If we're being honest, the public statement usually only comes after a player forced the issue into the public eye.

That’s the trust problem. Players don’t just want a commissioner who can close a TV deal or sell expansion franchises. They want someone who can handle difficult situations before they turn into a press conference.

The CBA gives the next commissioner a much better starting point than Engelbert had. It doesn’t give them automatic credibility, though. That still has to be earned in a league where players have more leverage and more options than ever.

Unrivaled has already shown what a player-led domestic league can look like. The WNBA can’t keep acting like they're the only serious player in women’s professional basketball anymore.

More Teams Mean More Ways To Get It Wrong

The WNBA’s old problem was scarcity. There weren’t enough teams, roster spots, money, national broadcasts, or top-level facilities. The new problem is adding all of that without letting the quality slip.

The league is moving to a 50-game regular season in 2027, up from 44, and the new CBA leaves room for that number to go up to 52 later in the deal. That gives media partners more games to show and puts more money on the table for everyone. But it also makes scheduling a lot tougher in a league where players have already raised concerns about recovery time.

Expansion will only make that worse. Six new teams between 2025 and 2030 mean dozens of new jobs and a national footprint that finally matches the demand. They also mean expansion drafts, more arenas, more practice facilities, new ownership groups and a talent pool that has to grow enough to support 18 competitive rosters.

The ownership decisions won’t always be simple, either. The Connecticut Sun are moving to Houston in 2027. There will be more decisions like that. Once franchises are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, every expansion slot and relocation request turns into a fight over real money.

The broadcast deal comes with its own headache. National reach is great, but the games are spread across a crowded group of partners. The next commissioner has to make the league easy enough to follow that new fans don’t need five subscriptions just to find their team. Visibility only works if people can actually find their team.

The Next Commissioner Has To Win The Locker Room

That’s the job now. The next commissioner's going to have to manage owners who paid record prices, media companies that paid for more games, sponsors expecting the attention to keep coming, and players who know exactly how much value they’re creating. They’ll also have to protect the actual basketball.

Engelbert certainly had her ups and downs. She helped move the WNBA from a league people were constantly mocking into one investors are lining up to join. But she also leaves behind a reminder that business growth and player trust aren’t the same thing. A league can be richer and more popular even though the people who matter most still feel ignored.

The next commissioner won’t have to convince anyone that the WNBA can survive. The players already answered that question. Now the hard part is keeping what they built without wasting the kind of momentum every sports league dreams of.

That’s a much better problem than the WNBA used to have. It’s still not an easy one.

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