On 26 August, the Los Angeles Sparks, a team in the WNBA, the US women's basketball league, placed the final steel beam on the structural frame of their practice facility in El Segundo, California, and players and club leadership attended the ceremony. Two months later, according to Bloomberg, owner Mark Walter wants to sell the team together with the facility for more than $700 million, even though Sportico estimated the club's value at $400 million in May. The Sparks missed the play-offs this year, and the new facility is due to open before the 2027 season.
The practice facility is part of the Sparks sale
When it announced the $150 million facility in September 2025, the club called it the largest single-team investment in the history of women's sport. During construction it grew even larger. Alongside two courts, it is to include an outdoor spa pool for recovery. The circular locker room and the nap rooms are being sold together with a team that has not yet played in them. At the ceremony, Sparks forward Nneka Ogwumike said the facility is a home for the players and that "players have had a voice in shaping the walls of their future home".
Sportico, a US sports business website, includes real estate and practice facilities in its team valuations, and according to Sportico the highest revenue multiples in the league belong to teams at the bottom of the financial table. It attributes this to the soaring price of entry into the league. Yet last year each team received only about $3.5 million from the league's central revenue. Under the new TV deals, which apply from this season, teams are set to receive significantly more, according to Sportico. The Sparks also had a record 31 nationally broadcast games this season.
According to a Deloitte estimate, broadcasting rights are expected to make up a quarter of elite women's sport revenue worldwide this year, and sponsorship, partnerships and merchandising 45%. The European market is expected to take 14%. The top Czech women's football league only gained its first general and title partner, the betting company Fortuna, in August 2024. The league has carried its name ever since. At the end of July this year, the league unveiled the FORTUNA LYGA identity, in which the letter y refers to Czech subject-verb agreement with a feminine subject, as in the sentence "ženy vyhrály" ("the women won").
Walter's sales and the price of entry into the WNBA
Walter owns the entire women's professional hockey league in North America. In August this year he sold a majority stake in the Lakers basketball club at a valuation of $12.5 billion, and later also a minority stake in London's Chelsea. According to Yahoo Sports, he is raising as much cash as possible to pay off the deals made by his insurance companies, which federal prosecutors have been examining since last autumn. At the end of August, his holding company denied that Walter was holding a fire sale of his assets. The Dodgers baseball club, it said, will not be sold.
At both the purchase and the sale of the Lakers, Sportico's estimates sat more than a billion dollars below the valuation at which Walter bought and sold the club. Bloomberg's figure for the Sparks comes from one of the people familiar with the talks, who was not authorised to discuss private dealings. The highest price yet for a team in the league, $300 million, was agreed in March this year for the Connecticut Sun by the family of the Houston basketball club's owner. The pair who bought the Lakers from Walter later held talks about the Sparks. They are not, however, among the interested buyers.
The groups the league admitted last June with new teams in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia are each paying an entry fee of $250 million. The owner of the Golden State Valkyries paid a $50 million fee to join the league at the end of 2023. That is roughly a fifth.
On top of the fee, the owners of the Toronto team, which the league admitted in 2024, also committed to building a practice facility. At the final beam in El Segundo, Sparks president Stacy Johns called it a big deal for the club to have a home of its own that it controls and where it sets the rules. In women's sport, she said, "so many teams don't own their buildings that they play in".
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