The Golden State Valkyries, one of the WNBA’s new expansion teams broke the record for season ticket deposits for a U.S. women’s sports franchise before the start of their inaugural season with a whooping 15,000 deposits. Each seat deposit costs $25 meaning the franchise has generated almost $400,000 before they’ve played a single game in deposits alone.
Valkyrie home games will be played at the Chase Center in San Francisco, California, home of their brother team, the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. The arena first opened its doors in 2019 and seats around 18,064.
Less than a week after announcing they would be called the Valkyries, the team took to X May 17 to announce they had already sold just over 10,000 season tickets. Almost two weeks later, they announced they were sitting at over 12,000 deposits.
The Valkyries are a part of the Golden State Warriors ownership group, led by Joe Lacob and Peter Guber. The group paid a record $50 million expansion fee for the Valkyries, which ownership believes will pay off, stating that they see the Bay Area as the perfect market for a WNBA team.
“We have been interested in a WNBA franchise for several years, due in part to the rich history of women’s basketball in the Bay Area, and believe now is the ideal time to execute that vision and build upon the legacy,” Lacob said in a statement confirming the expansion. “The WNBA continues to solidify itself as the preeminent women’s professional basketball league, and we look forward to supporting the best women’s basketball players in the world and our team starting in 2025.”
The Valkyries will take part in an expansion draft in December 2024, a crucial step in building their roster for the upcoming season. They will choose from a pool of experienced athletes, establishing a competitive core that will help them hit the ground running in their inaugural season. This will set the team up for their first WNBA draft in April 2025, where they will have the opportunity to further enhance their squad.
In December, the Valkyries will have an ‘expansion draft’, an important step in gearing up ahead of the WNBA draft in April. In this draft, the Valkyries have the opportunity to set a core group of players to further build on when the official draft comes around a few months later.
Though the league has not revealed all the particulars of the expansion draft, the WNBA Collective Bargaining Agreement states that the WNBA could make current teams decide which players to make available for the expansion draft without a set limit. If a team does make players available, that player’s salary and negotiating rights will transfer over to the expansion team, and expansion teams can designate a player as a core player if that player is moving into unrestricted free agency.
In 2008 when the Atlanta Dream participated in an expansion draft, the other teams were allowed to protect six players from being picked up by the Dream, leaving the rest up for grabs. The Dream received the fourth overall pick in the 2008 WNBA Draft two months later.
News of the Valkyrie’s record came just days after news of the WNBA’s 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal with Disney, Amazon Prime and NBC. The deal begins before the 2026 season and runs through 2036, with the potential to be reevaluated after three years to increase the amount of money the league will receive.
With many new opportunities coming to the league in the next few years between league expansion and media rights deals, more and more fans are coming along for the WNBA’s explosive growth.
Amara Bullard is a Marketing + Media student at Loyola University in Chicago aspiring to work in basketball operations.
