raise

After 17 months, the WNBA has agreed to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement and players will be paid more than in any other professional American women’s sports league.

It is the latest in a trend of increasing equity for women athletes.

• In 2022, the U.S. women’s soccer team won a $24-million settlement with U.S. Soccer after players disputed making significantly less than the less successful men’s team.
• Then the Professional Women’s Hockey League was born in 2023 following many players defecting from the National Women’s Hockey League to form the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Assn., then merging with the Premier Hockey Federation until a historic bargaining agreement.
• The National Women’s Soccer League announced a new CBA in the summer of 2024 that included giving players agency on where they are traded and abolishing expansion and collegiate drafts.

That momentum put considerable pressure on WNBA negotiations. Could the players set a new benchmark for future contract negotiations across women’s pro sports leagues?

The Sky’s Angel Reese and the Fever’s Caitlin Clark shake hands before a game at Gainbridge Fieldhouse on May 17.

(Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)

The WNBA’s CBA was a flashpoint because of the boom in popularity in supporting women’s sports, with players such as Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese becoming household names. Last season, the WNBA made enough revenue to trigger revenue-sharing for the first time and this season marks the start the league’s new 11-year, $2.2-billion media rights deal.

Unlike in the NBA, where players get around 50% of the league’s revenue before expenses, the WNBA’s first revenue-sharing kicked in only after the league hit a benchmark determined by a formula of revenue targets, which had been difficult to achieve since the start of the deal was the 2020 COVID season played in front of empty stands.

The WNBA broke its single-season attendance record in 2025. As league interest grew, so did the tension between the league and the players’ union.

Many viewed this negotiating cycle as an opportunity to pounce on the increased visibility, and in a lot of ways, the union did. Players are going to be paid significantly more and they got a win in revenue sharing, earning 20% of the league’s revenue before expenses — a big jump from the previous 9% share.

The average player salary before revenue-share payments will be around $584,000.

But was it as much as they should have gotten?

Tamika Tremaglio, former NBPA executive director and advisor to the WNBPA during the 2020 CBA negotiations, said observers were less concerned about the start of training camps looming on April 19 and more focused on whether negotiations would end with a stable deal that would hold for the length of the agreement as market conditions evolve. Increased salaries are always celebrated, but both sides agreeing to a new revenue sharing model was a consequential step forward for players.

“The real story is the revenue share,” Tremaglio said. “At the end of the day, that’s what is going to drive the future.”

The fallout from the new deal will take months or years to fully understand. Free agents will be able to begin signing with teams in April, and since 80% of the players are eligible for free agency, there will be higher figures being floated around than ever.

A’ja Wilson and her Las Vegas Aces teammates celebrate while holding the 2025 WNBA championship trophy.

(Chris Coduto / Getty Images)

That might affect what talent comes to the league, too.

“More European players might come into the league,” a WNBA team consultant not authorized to speak about the league publicly told The Times. “Now that the money is better, that might knock out several college players in the draft.”

There are some WNBA-level players who have stayed in Europe due to restrictive prioritization rules that force players to participate in all WNBA practices and games even if they conflicted with international league obligations. Many WNBA players compete in international leagues during the offseason and prefer the option to keep playing in lucrative foreign leagues if there is an overlap with the WNBA season.

While the new rules for international play in the WNBA CBA are not yet clear, compensation changes could open the door for more players to choose to prioritize the league.

The general consensus among people operating within the WNBA is relief that a deal is in place.

“It’s huge,” one player agent told The Times. “They made big strides. This is important for women’s basketball.

Sparks players Dearica Hamby, Rickea Jackson, Azura Stevens, Kelsey Plum and Julie Allemand talk during a game against the New York Liberty at Crypto.com Arena on Aug. 12.

(Katelyn Mulcahy / Getty Images)

“Anytime both sides don’t get everything they want,” the agent added, “that’s a good deal.”

That agent also noted that this CBA will set the precedent for the next negotiations to continue to raise the revenue-sharing if the league continues to make more money.

Under the new CBA, the 20% revenue-sharing is tied to the league’s gross revenue, a significantly different number than the net revenue, which is calculated after all expenses are taken into account. The players were fighting for a percentage of the gross revenue, even if it is a smaller percentage than the net revenue the league offered because it is guaranteed.

The NBA first reached 53% of gross revenue in their CBA in 1983 and has stayed around that number ever since.

“If it was net, you’d have all these other expenses and you sort of lose control of the actual expenses,” Tremaglio said. “You have no control from the perspective of where the players are. But now, you don’t even have to go look at the minutia of auditing every single expense line item. That’s what makes such a difference.”

More details around the CBA, including player housing, expansion draft format and roster spots, will become clearer as the deal reaches ratification.

For now, even if 20% revenue sharing is less than the 40% the players first proposed, the deal represents a significant, stable increase in player compensation.

“This will impact women’s sport globally, not just the game of basketball,” Tremaglio said. “This will impact everything, soccer, everything.”

China’s foreign minister tells Israel to end attacks; Russian FM Lavrov says no sign Tehran seeking nuclear bomb.

Russia and China have criticised the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, with Moscow saying it had seen no evidence that Tehran was developing nuclear weapons, and Beijing demanding an immediate halt to the joint attacks.

Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang ⁠Yi told his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar, on Tuesday that the attack on Iran came as negotiations between Washington and Tehran had “made significant progress, including addressing Israel’s security concerns”, China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“Regrettably, this process has been interrupted by military action. China opposes any military strikes launched by Israel and the US against Iran,” Wang told the Israeli foreign minister during a phone call, according to the ministry.

“China calls for an immediate cessation of military operations to prevent the further escalation and loss of control of the conflict,” Wang said.

“Force cannot truly solve problems; instead, it will bring new problems and serious long-term consequences,” he added.

According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Saar agreed to a request from Wang to take “concrete measures to ensure the safety of Chinese personnel and institutions” in Iran.

The call on Tuesday with Israel and Beijing’s apparent efforts to stabilise the spiralling regional situation followed calls Wang made on Monday to discuss the conflict with the foreign ⁠ministers of Iran, Oman and France.

‘US doesn’t attack those who have nuclear bombs’

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also criticised the US and Israel on Tuesday, saying their war on Iran could lead to the very outcome they claimed they wanted to prevent: nuclear proliferation.

Lavrov told a news conference that the logical consequence of the US and Israel’s actions could be that “forces will emerge in Iran… in favour of doing exactly what the Americans want to avoid – acquiring a nuclear bomb”.

“Because the US doesn’t attack those who have nuclear bombs,” Lavrov said.

Lavrov also said that Arab countries could now join the race to acquire nuclear weapons, given the experience of recent days and “the nuclear proliferation problem will begin to spiral ⁠out of control”.

Israel is widely seen as the Middle East region’s only nuclear-armed state, which it neither confirms nor denies.

“The seemingly paradoxical declared noble goal of starting a war to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons could stimulate completely opposite trends,” he said.

Lavrov, who said that Moscow had still seen no evidence that Iran was developing ⁠nuclear weapons, spoke with his Iranian counterpart, ⁠Abbas Araghchi, on Tuesday, and said that Russia stood ready to help find a diplomatic solution to the conflict, while rejecting the US and Israel’s use of “unprovoked military aggression” in the region.

As the US and Israel launched their first strikes on Iran on Saturday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry accused the close allies of carrying out a “premeditated and unprovoked act of armed aggression against a sovereign and independent UN member state”.

The two countries had hidden their true intention of regime change in Tehran “under the cover” of negotiations to normalise relations with Iran, the ministry said.

The US and Israel were “swiftly pushing the region toward a humanitarian, economic, and potentially even radiological disaster”, the ministry warned.

“Responsibility for the negative consequences of this manmade crisis, including an unpredictable chain reaction and spiralling violence, lies entirely with them,” the statement added.

Russia has faced its own accusations of aggression against a sovereign state after it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a war now in its fifth year.

According to President Trump, the United States attacked Iran because the Iranian regime posed “imminent threats” to the U.S. and its allies, including through its use of terrorist proxies and continued pursuit of nuclear weapons.

“Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies throughout the world,” he said in a recorded statement Saturday.

According to leading Democrats in Congress, Trump’s justification is questionable, especially given his claims of having “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities in separate U.S. bombings last year.

“Everything I have heard from the administration before and after these strikes on Iran confirms this is a war of choice with no strategic endgame,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and part of a small group of congressional leaders — the Gang of Eight — who were briefed on the operation by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

That divide is bound to remain an issue politically heading into this year’s midterm elections, and could be a liability for Republicans — especially considering that some in the “America First” wing of the MAGA base were raising their own objections, citing Trump’s 2024 campaign pledges to extricate the U.S. from foreign wars, not start new ones.

The debate echoed a similar if less immediate one around President George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, also based on claims that “weapons of mass destruction” posed an immediate threat. Those claims were later disproved by multiple findings that Iraq had no such arsenal, fueling recriminations from both political parties for years.

The latest divide also intensified unease over Congress ceding its wartime powers to the White House, which for years has assumed sweeping authority to attack foreign adversaries without direct congressional input in the name of addressing terrorism or preventing immediate harm to the nation or its troops.

Even prior to the weekend bombings, Democrats including Sen. Adam Schiff of California were pushing Congress to pass a resolution barring the Trump administration from attacking Iran without explicit congressional authorization.

“President Trump must come to Congress before using military force unless absolutely necessary to defend the United States from an imminent attack,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the armed services and foreign relations committees, said in a statement Thursday.

In justifying the daylight strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei just two days later, Trump accused the Iranian government of having “waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder” for nearly half a century — including through attacks on U.S. military assets and commercial shipping vessels abroad — and of having “armed, trained and funded terrorist militias” in multiple countries, including Hezbollah and Hamas.

Trump said that after the U.S. bombed Iran last summer, it had warned Tehran “never to resume” its pursuit of nuclear weapons. “Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland,” he said.

Other Republican leaders largely backed the president.

“The United States did not start this conflict, but we will finish it. If you kill or threaten Americans anywhere in the world — as Iran has — then we will hunt you down, and we will kill you,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“Every president has talked about the threat posed by the Iranian regime. President Trump is the one with the courage to take bold, decisive action,” said Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi.

While Iran’s coordination with and sponsorship of groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas are well known, Trump’s claims about its ongoing development of nuclear weapons systems are less established — and the administration has provided little evidence to back them up.

Democrats seized on that lack of fresh intelligence in their responses to the attacks, contrasting Trump’s latest claims about imminent threats with his assertion after the separate summer bombings that the U.S. had all but eliminated Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

“Let’s be clear: The Iranian regime is horrible. But I have seen no imminent threat to the United States that would justify putting American troops in harm’s way,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Gang of Eight. “What is the motivation here? Is it Iran’s nuclear program? Their missiles? Regime change?”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement that the Trump administration “has not provided Congress and the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat,” and must do so.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the Trump administration needs congressional authority to wage such attacks barring “exigent circumstances,” and didn’t have it.

“The Trump administration must explain itself to the American people and Congress immediately, provide an ironclad justification for this act of war, clearly define the national security objective and articulate a plan to avoid another costly, prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East,” he said.

After the U.S. military announced Sunday that three U.S. service personnel were killed and five others seriously wounded in the attacks, the demands for a clearer justification and new constraints on Trump only increased.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) said Sunday he is optimistic that Democrats will be unified in trying to pass the war powers resolution, and also that some Republicans will join them, given that the strikes have been unpopular among a portion of the MAGA base.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who partnered with Khanna to force the release of the Epstein files, has said he will work with him again to push a congressional vote on war with Iran, which he said was “not ‘America First.’”

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, said that whether or not Iran represented an “imminent” threat to the U.S. depends not just on its nuclear capabilities, but on its broader desire and ability to inflict pain on the U.S. and its allies — as was made clear to both the U.S. and Israel after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which Iran praised.

“If you are Israel or the United States, that’s imminent,” he said.

What happens next, Radd said, will largely depend on whether remaining Iranian leaders stick to Khamenei’s hard-line policies, or decide to negotiate anew with the U.S. He expects they might do the latter, because “it’s a fundamentalist regime, it’s not a suicidal regime,” and it’s now clear that the U.S. and Israel have the capabilities to take out Iranian leaders, Iran has little ability to defend itself, and China and Russia are not rushing to its aid.

How the strikes are viewed moving forward may also depend on what those leaders decide to do next, said Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology who teaches courses on Iran and Middle East politics at the UCLA International Institute.

If the conflict remains relatively contained, it could become a political win for Trump, with questions about the justification falling away. But if it spirals out of control, such questions are only likely to grow, as occurred in Iraq when things started to deteriorate there, he said.

Israel and the U.S. are currently betting that the conflict will remain manageable, which could turn out to be true, Harris said, but “the problem with war is you never really know what might happen.”

On Sunday, Iran launched retaliatory attacks on Israel and the wider Gulf region. Trump said the campaign against Iran continued “unabated,” though he may be willing to negotiate with the nation’s new leaders. It was unclear when Congress might take up the war powers measure.

United States President Donald Trump has doubled down on his new global tariffs, raising them from 10 to 15 percent, days after the Supreme Court struck down his sweeping levies on imports.

The move on Saturday came as businesses and governments around the world sought repayment for the estimated $133bn that Washington has already collected.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump announced the raise “effective immediately” and said the move was based on a review of the “ridiculous, poorly written and extraordinarily anti-American decision” issued by the Supreme Court on Friday.

By a six-to-three vote, the court had ruled that it was unconstitutional for Trump to unilaterally set and change tariffs, because the power to tax lies with the US Congress.

The court’s decision struck down tariffs that Trump had imposed on nearly every country using an emergency powers law, known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

Trump railed against the majority justices as “fools and lapdogs” in a news conference after the ruling, calling them an “embarrassment to their families”. He quickly signed an executive order – resting on a different statute, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 – to impose the blanket 10 percent tariff, starting on Tuesday.

The 15 percent hike announced on Saturday is the highest rate allowed under that law.

However, those tariffs are limited to 150 days unless they are extended by Congress. No president has previously invoked Section 122, and its use could lead to further legal challenges.

It was not immediately clear whether an updated executive order was forthcoming.

The White House said the Section 122 tariffs include exemptions for certain products, including critical minerals, metals and energy products, according to the Reuters news agency.

Lawsuits

Trump wrote on Saturday that his administration will continue to work on issuing other permissible tariffs.

“During the next short number of months, the Trump Administration will determine and issue the new and legally permissible Tariffs, which will continue our extraordinarily successful process of Making America Great Again,” he said.

The president has already said his administration intends to rely on two other statutes that permit import taxes on specific products or countries based on investigations into national ‌security or unfair trade practices.

Tariffs have been central to Trump’s economic agenda, which he has used as a tool to address a range of goals – from reviving domestic manufacturing to pressuring other nations to crack down on drug trafficking, and pushing warring countries toward peace.

He has also wielded tariffs, or the threat of them, as leverage to extract trade concessions from foreign governments.

Federal data shows the US Treasury had collected more than $133bn from the import taxes the president has imposed under the emergency powers law as of December.

Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, more than a thousand lawsuits have been filed by importers in the US to seek refunds, and more cases are on the way.

While legally sound, the path forward for such claims is not straightforward, especially for smaller firms, said John Diamond, director of the Center for Tax and Budget Policy at Rice University.

“It’s pretty clear that they will win in court, but it’ll take some time,” Diamond said. “Once we get the court orders in effect, I don’t think those refunds will be all that messy for larger firms. Smaller firms are going to have a much more difficult time getting through the process.”

But foreign governments are managing “the real mess”, Diamond said.

“What do you do if you’re Taiwan, or Great Britain, and you have this existing trade deal, but now it’s kind of been turned upside down?”

The US-Taiwan trade deal lowers the general tariff on Taiwanese goods from 20 percent to 15 percent, the same level as Asian trade partners South Korea and Japan, in exchange for Taipei agreeing to buy about $85bn of US energy, aircraft and equipment.

The US-United Kingdom deal imposes a 10 percent tariff on imports of most UK goods, and reduces higher tariffs on imports of UK cars, steel and aluminium.

‘Pickpocketing the American people’

After ⁠the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump’s trade representative, Jamieson Greer, told Fox News on Friday that those countries must honour their agreements ⁠even if they call for higher rates than the Section 122 tariffs.

Exports to the US from countries such as Malaysia and Cambodia would continue to be taxed at their negotiated rates of 19 percent, even though the universal rate is lower, Greer said.

Indonesia’s chief negotiator for US tariffs, Airlangga Hartarto, said the trade deal between the countries that set US tariffs at 19 percent, which was signed on Friday, remains in force despite the court decision.

The ‌ruling could spell good news for countries like Brazil, which has not negotiated a deal with Washington to lower its 40 percent tariff rate but could now see its tariff rate drop to 15 percent, at least temporarily.

Governments around the world have reacted to the Supreme Court decision – as well as Trump’s subsequent tariff announcement – with a mix of cautious optimism, trepidation and frustration.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he would coordinate a joint European stance before talks with Trump in early March, while Hong Kong’s secretary for financial services and the Treasury, Christopher Hiu, described the situation surrounding Trump’s new tariff moves as a “fiasco”.

With the November midterm elections in the US looming, Trump’s approval rating on his handling of the economy has steadily declined during his year in office.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Monday showed 34 percent of ‌respondents ‌saying they approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 57 percent said they did not approve.

Democrats, who need to flip only three Republican-held seats in the US House of Representatives in November to win a majority, have blamed Trump’s tariffs for exacerbating the rising cost of living.

They were quick to condemn Trump’s new tariff threat on Saturday.

Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee accused Trump of “pickpocketing the American people” with his newly announced higher tariff.

“A little over 24 hours after his tariffs were ruled illegal, he’s doing anything he can to make sure he can still jack up your costs,” they wrote on social media.

California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, a Trump nemesis, added that “he [Trump] does not care about you”.