Clara Wu Tsai and her husband Joe Tsai bought the New York Liberty in 2019 and immediately set about rebuilding the franchise from the ground up. The pair began investing money heavily into the franchise, and that has paid off spectacularly. The Liberty boasts some of the best facilities and one of the strongest rosters in the WNBA, two realities that are due in part to the work the Tsais have put in.
Now, Clara is ready to look toward the future — and to turn the Liberty into the WNBA's first billion-dollar franchise. She laid out exactly what she plans to do in an interview with The Information this week.
As Clara put it, the Liberty was not valued very high when she and her husband took over, and the team is now a $450 million franchise. She noted that it will be "a lot easier" to go from $450 million to $1 billion than it was to go from $0 to $450 million.
Doing so will come down to "trajectory of growth," something the entire franchise is "very positive" will happen. " In fact, I actually think there might be more than one WNBA team who actually reaches a billion-dollar valuation in the next five to 10 years. It’s obviously based on revenues," Clara explained. "We look at the trajectory of revenues, and for the last three to four years, we’ve been growing revenues on the order of 20% to 80% on all the key metrics. We fully expect all of that to continue."
The WNBA has a lot of avenues for monetization
Clara also noted that one aspect of the WNBA that's very "exciting" is the fact that there are a lot of ways to expand and implement monetization "because the revenues haven’t caught up with the viewership." One thing the league and individual team owners will want to focus on is changing that, she explained. "If we grow to some sort of parity on sponsorships and media, on a per-viewer basis, we could easily double our revenues, which would also mean that we would double our valuation."
The Tsais have invested in men's basketball, too
Clara and Joe definitely know what they're doing — the pair are also the owners of the Brooklyn Nets and the Barclays Center, so they should have no trouble reshaping the Liberty toward their $1 billion goal. In fact, Adam Silver approached the couple about taking over the Liberty after the original owner had moved them to a different venue. Though they labeled the team a "distressed asset" at the time, the vision for building the Liberty into something stronger was there — and clearly, that was exactly what needed to happen.