Transcript: Why we love women’s basketball

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Why we love women’s basketball’

Lilah Raptopoulos
So these kids get to see professional basketball up close.

Unnamed person
Yeah. The dad holding his daughter on his lap on the court.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. That’s amazing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. What you’re hearing is the crowd roaring for women’s basketball. In this tape, I’m at the Barclays Centre in Brooklyn, New York to watch the New York Liberty. That’s one of the best teams in the WNBA, which is the women’s professional league. They’re playing the Indiana Fever. I’m with my colleague who’s an actual sports reporter. She’s the Financial Times’ US sports business correspondent Sara Germano. And the energy is incredible. People are screaming. The halftime show is a spectacle, and I’m having the time of my life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I think I’m actually becoming an active Liberty fan. Sara and I went to this game because I’m not alone. Women’s basketball is having a huge moment right now with record-breaking TV viewership. The star players have name recognition even with people who don’t watch basketball. And this may finally be the moment that women’s basketball breaks through to the mainstream. So today, Sara Germano is here with me in the New York studio to talk about the growth of the NBA, its fan base, and how one becomes a sports fan. Sara, hi. Welcome to the show.

Sara Germano
Hello. I’m so excited to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So happy to have you here. OK, so why don’t we start by setting the scene of this game? What was the vibe? Who were the fans? Let’s paint a picture.

Sara Germano
So this is a very early-season WNBA game. This was the home opener for the New York Liberty, which is based in Brooklyn. It was their first game of the 2024 season, which open this month, May. And they’re facing the Indiana Fever, which is a team, you know, based in Indianapolis. And they are the hot team this season because they have basically the hottest thing going in basketball, which is the star, Caitlin Clark, who just graduated from the University of Iowa. She broke all these records, you know, generated a huge fan base, you know, for her and her team there and is now coming into the WNBA for the first time.

And we should say the Liberty, you know, they were in the finals last year. They are a super team. They’re built with, you know, tremendous stars. They have Breanna Stewart who is the MVP of the league, Sabrina Ionescu, who participated in the male NBA All-Star game three point contest. That’s how good she is. So there was a lot to see here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. It was basically one of the best teams in the league playing what was one of the worst teams in the league that now has like the biggest college star on their team in the WNBA for the first time. Huge game. Yeah. They sold out the whole thing and the crowd was really interesting. It was like really diverse. The age range was nuts. It was like completely split in gender. There were a lot of young kids with their parents. There were a lot of like old lesbian women who clearly had been WNBA fans for a long time.

Sara Germano
There was a lesbian couple that got married after the game that they put on the jumbotron.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But there were also like a lot of like big guys wearing Liberty gear and little boys wearing Liberty gear.

Sara Germano
It’s like, honestly, one of the most diverse crowds you’ll see in sports — age, gender, race, orientation, what you name it, everyone was there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It was really fun. And then I want to ask you about the basketball itself. Like, I’m not an expert again, but to me, it was really exciting to watch. It moved really fast. There were these, like, really great passes. There were these, like, big three-point shots. It was pretty beautiful. Is there something about the way the WNBA plays basketball that’s different from the NBA?

Sara Germano
It’s a good question because I think people, if you’re not used to watching basketball in general or you’re used to watching the NBA and you’re coming to this fresh, maybe you think, oh, if it’s women’s basketball, you know, is the hoop different? The three-point line technically is different. It’s a little shorter. But other than that it’s really well fundamentally played basketball. There’s really sharp passing, great offensive and defensive schemes. One of the things that we saw when we were there was this really aggressively tough screen on Caitlin Clark by the MVP Breanna Stewart, who just set a screen stopped in her tracks. And Caitlyn came barrelling into her and got knocked on her ass.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What’s a screen?

Sara Germano
Screen is a defensive play where yo, u if you’re on the defensive side, you stand in front of the player coming on the offence, trying to score a basket and prevent them from trying to either pass or get through the lane.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Like Caitlin Clark would like, shoot this incredible three-point shot and then Sabrina Ionescu would come and shoot an incredible three-point shot right after her and be like, what?

Sara Germano
It’s technically brilliant. It’s defensively aggressive. It’s passionate. If you’re someone who likes, you know, the three-point scoring, if you’re used to Steph Curry in the NBA and that kind of highlight excites you, it’s there. If you’re into the trash talking the sort of what we call 90s NBA-style aggressive defence, that’s also there. So there’s a lot to enjoy if you’re coming at this as just a general basketball fan or an appreciator of athletics.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. It was so fun.

Sara Germano
It was.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so if we back up a little bit, can you tell me about this surge in interest in women’s basketball? The WNBA’s first season was in 1997. So it’s in its 28th season now. Why is the fan base growing so rapidly? It feels like rabidly.

Sara Germano
There’s a few ways to answer this question, right? Like, we can talk about the growth of the league, which has been, you know, fits and starts, but over the last few years, organic. You know, 28 years, that’s like a generation. You know, we are now at a point where the newest crop of WNBA players, the people who are rookies this year, have grown up in a world where there has always been a WNBA. They could find idols, you know, like Maya Moore and Sheryl Swoopes and all these other trailblazing women in the late 90s and early 2000 who were playing it and saw this is a possibility for me. This is what I want to do. So this is step one of why this is happening now, right? Two is the rookie class itself: Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink. Several of these women who are first years in the WNBA grew their own fan bases in the college game.

Lilah Raptopoulos
They have millions of fans on Instagram. They’re like superstars.

Sara Germano
They’re absolute superstars. Caitlin Clark is the leader of this group in a way because she now has the college total scoring record for men and women.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.

Sara Germano
She’s a dynamic three-point shooter. She has no poker face whatsoever. So she’s really exciting to watch play because she gets into it with people. She’s a vicious trash talker. She developed this rivalry with Angel Reese, who is, you know, the other superstar. So you’ve already seen this grow at the college level, and that is now being imported to the WNBA.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. And that happened, you told me that that happened with Magic Johnson and Larry Bird back in the . . . Like it grew, that the NBA grew in a similar way.

Sara Germano
Yes. So this is a very important point, which is it’s hard for people of today to remember that, you know, the NBA wasn’t even something that was mainstream culture until the 1980s.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s so nuts.

Sara Germano
But in the 1970s, there was a college rivalry between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Ever heard of them?

Sara Germano
Ever heard of them? So when they came to the NBA, a few things happened. They brought their fan bases with them. And a man named David Stern, who would eventually become the commissioner of the NBA, decided to shift some of the marketing around the league to emphasise the rivalry between these players. Those changes grew the league a little bit. And then you had someone like Michael Jordan come in 1984 and just take it to the next level.

So in the WNBA, they’re hoping this Caitlin Clark-Angel Reese moment is effectively the same paradigm for the women’s league.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, so I guess I want to know from you, Sara, like, in your opinion, is this actually a tipping point? You know, sometimes we think that women’s soccer is going to take off and then it doesn’t really. Or like women’s sports, there’s like this enthusiasm around it and then it doesn’t really. And it’s kind of disappointing. Is this real? And, how can you tell?

Sara Germano
There is empirical evidence to suggest that this is a real dynamic growth point for the WNBA. If we want to talk about television ratings, which is, you know, a huge barometer of these types of things, the ratings the WNBA are getting right now are astronomical. The game that we watched, Liberty Fever, that was on ABC free-to-air television, got 2.1mn viewers, which, for reference, is double the average of this season’s NBA games.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. It’s a big deal.

Sara Germano
It’s a big deal.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That NCAA championship, the big game in women’s college basketball, didn’t it get around the viewership of the Academy Awards?

Sara Germano
It did, 19mn people watched this year’s college national championship between Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes and Dawn Staley’s University of South Carolina Gamecocks. And that was at 3pm in the afternoon on a Sunday. It was the most watched sporting event in the US outside of American football.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s pretty nuts. OK, so that’s happening. And then when we were at the game and then we watched the next game on TV that afternoon, there were a ton of ads, like there were Barclays and State Farms, like bank and insurance ads. There were a lot of women’s brands like Glossier and make-up brand and Skims.

Sara Germano
There’s an official WNBA pill. They have an official pill sponsor.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Social networks like Snapchat. A lot of these players have sponsored sneakers. Yeah. OK, I believe you. It’s real.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK. Let’s talk about how the league is bringing people in. You’ve talked a lot about how sports leagues across sports, not just the WNBA, really want new fans.

Sara Germano
Sports are the only thing keeping live television going. It is the only appointment-viewing live television left. Like you said, it’s all sports. So to the extent that sports are the kingmaker of this industry, getting and sustaining fan bases is the way to go. It drives up the media valuations for these leagues, which is, you know, by and large, their largest source of funding. You know, it also contributes to merchandise sales and advertising like . . . so a lot of stakeholders in this so you may say it stands to reason that they want to get more fans. With leagues like the W, which are growing and we may, you know, describe them as not endemic yet, like they’re not mainstream, there’s all the more reason to want to grow the league because the W just isn’t as developed as some of the other pro leagues.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. OK. At this point, I want to ask you, Sara, why all of this matters. I was surprised when I was watching the game. I’ve been to a lot of men’s professional sports games, and they’re fun. But something different happened to me when we were at the Liberty game. We were watching the Liberty warm up. They were like in ponytails and, I don’t know, they were girls. And I was sort of like I was when I saw them. I was placed right back into seventh grade, like practising basketball in my middle school gym. I was a terrible player, but I had an image of myself in that moment and I kind of realised like, oh, most men, when they watch sports that they played when they were young, they can sort of put themselves on the soccer pitch. They can put themselves on the court. They can, like, envision what it’s like to do that play under a helmet on a football field. Then I thought like, oh, when I’m watching the WNBA, I can sort of live vicariously in that way. And that really surprised me. That, like, feeling really surprised me.

Sara Germano
Completely. I mean, I . . . look, I obviously write about sports for a living. And, you know, it’s probably no secret that I’m a sports fan. But to your question, like when we think about this culturally, what does it mean? You know, sports isn’t just about the athletics, it’s about who we allow ourselves to be. Like, if you were in seventh grade now and you’re watching this and you see strong, beautiful women playing a sport, excelling at it, generating all of this fan interest, it changes your perceptions of what you think is possible for yourself. It’s changing the perception of what you think is possible for yourself now. It’s just as important for young boys to see this and think, OK, women can ball too. To be a really elite female athlete, you have to do things that we don’t consider to be socially feminine, you know, kind of elbows out in people’s faces. It’s part of why Caitlin Clark became popular. Because we’re seeing someone who is conventionally attractive, a nice girl from Iowa . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Be, like, sweaty and mad and aggressive. Yeah.

Sara Germano
Trash talk and aggressive. And a little part of her appeal is little girls are watching that and seeing, like, I want to be like her.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Pretty cool. Yeah. OK, so for the last part of our conversation, I want to talk about this question of how to become a fan.

Sara Germano
Yeah, I feel like I should be asking you this question.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, first I want to hear from your point of view. So I turn to you around halftime and I said, all right, I’m in. I want to be a Liberty fan. I just don’t know how to like, not to use a corporate term, but like on board, like, I don’t know how to become a fan from scratch. And you really, like, latched on to that question. You’re like, what does it take for a non-sports fan to become a fan? And I’m curious why that question interested you as a reporter.

Sara Germano
As a reporter and just as someone who, like, I feel like I’m in the cult, so to speak, it’s interesting because if you aren’t someone who normally consumes — to use more corporate terms — sports, this is the billion dollar question for all of these leagues, for all of these owners, like how do we convert people to being basically a customer of what we’re selling, which is women’s sports in this case? You can ask me as a reporter why I think this question is especially relevant, but it’s almost a question that’s more suitable for you to answer because you are basically the prototype of what we’re talking about here, someone who’s like, maybe passively interested in sports. What do you think that you need for you to keep watching games?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that since we went. The last time, I was like a real fan of a team and was really following, I was in middle school and high school and my famously cursed hometown baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, finally won the World Series. So it was pretty easy to be a fan back then because everyone around me was talking about it all the time. So I would basically need, I would need to not be the only person kind of like putting the games in my personal calendar. Like, I would need to know that a game was coming up because I had some community around me, like, also into it. So I would need like a group chat.

Sara Germano
You can’t underestimate the power of a group chat. This is also part of being a modern fan, right? It’s like you’re sending each other look at that interview that so-and-so gave. They were, you know, throwing shade at the other player or whatever meme comes up, or even just to talk about that was so unfair in this game, etc.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, jokes.

Sara Germano
The jokes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The drama.

Sara Germano
Absolutely. There’s a lot there’s a lot of interpersonal drama.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. The other thing that I realised has helped is just the algorithm. Like I just followed Breanna Stewart and I followed Sabrina Ionescu and I followed Caitlin Clark and I followed JJ.

Sara Germano
JJ, she’s great.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And I followed Betnijah. And so now I’m kind of in it and they’re like sending me ads for buying weeknight tickets and that sort of thing. Now I know Breanna Stewart’s baby.

Sara Germano
Ruby?

Lilah Raptopoulos
And wife, yeah it’s good. What got you hooked on sports? Like, where are you coming to this from? What was your entry point?

Sara Germano
It’s a great question. My family were always big sports fans. That was the centrepiece of our lives growing up. We watched a lot of sports together. I grew up in the New York area. So I already had that kind of supportive network, right? And then I developed my own, sort of niche interests. Like, I got really into certain Olympic sports. You know, to the latter point, if you were growing up in the 90s, what did you think was available to you as a young girl? Being a figure skater, being a gymnast and some of these so-called, like, feminine sports where you were still expected to look and kind of behave like a, what we expect from young women, right?

And so to see that changing now is really powerful because, you know, when I watch women’s basketball, when I watch women’s soccer, you know, even women’s golf to a certain extent, like these weren’t spaces that I even thought I could belong in. And even as a, you know, cis, straight white woman, there are times when, you know, I am a diehard Knicks fan. It’s pretty bro-y and kind of aggro. I’m willing to put myself there because I just kind of don’t care if that’s the environment around me because I really enjoy watching the game. But I think it would mean a lot to me if the fan bases of other sports became more diverse, too.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I really love what you’re saying about, like, being a fan at a game live, having that experience be, like, more inclusive and also just more fun for you. If it’s more diverse, it’s like more fun for you. Why is it good to be a fan?

Sara Germano
We’re living in an age now, we all feel estranged from each other in different ways, and sports tends to be this common denominator across class and race and gender. If you are a fan of, you know, the Knicks or the Red Sox, you already have something in common with every other fan of that team and you can find a way to have a conversation. One of the best experiences in life, honestly, is like wearing a hat from your favourite team and someone yells at you from across the street like, great game last night. I can’t believe they fouled so-and-so. And it’s just another way to bring people together. So I think that is really necessary at this moment in time. You don’t have to watch a women’s basketball game, but like think of opportunities you may have to form community with other people. Like, is sports possibly it for you?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Sara, thank you for bringing me on this journey.

Sara Germano
Thanks for coming. We’re gonna see you. See you at the stadium next time.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, exactly. See you at Barclays. This has been so much fun. Really appreciate it.

Sara Germano
Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend, the culture podcast from the Financial Times. Make sure to subscribe to the show if you don’t already. Or rate and review us. That really helps the show a lot and take a read through the show notes. We have linked to some of Sara’s reporting on women’s basketball, and all of our links that take you to the FT will get you past the paywall. Also in the show notes are ways to stay in touch with me on email and on Instagram. I love hearing from you.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my brilliant team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Kyra Assibey-Bonsu is our contributing producer and produced this episode. Our sound engineers today were Simon Panayi and Katie Mcmurran. With original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. And our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.