The Connecticut Sun changed hands at a valuation north of $100 million, according to people familiar with the transaction, marking the highest price paid for a Women's National Basketball Association franchise and continuing a valuation surge that began when the Golden State Warriors ownership group bought a controlling stake in the Los Angeles Sparks for $50 million in May 2024. The deal closed last week. The buyer is a consortium that includes private equity and family office capital; names have not been disclosed.
The Sun had been owned by the Mohegan Tribe since 2003, when the franchise relocated from Orlando. The tribe purchased the team for roughly $10 million at the time. The new valuation represents a 10x return over two decades, but the acceleration is recent: comparable transactions eighteen months ago would have priced the franchise closer to $35 million. The difference is attributable to three factors—media rights, expansion appetite, and sponsor flow. The WNBA's new eleven-year media deal with Disney, Amazon, and NBCUniversal begins in 2026 and will pay the league approximately $200 million annually, up from $60 million under the expiring contract. Each of the league's twelve teams will see revenue per franchise rise accordingly, and buyers are pricing in that certainty.
The Sun are profitable on an operating basis, unusual in women's professional sports until recently. The franchise drew an average of 8,104 fans per game in 2024, fourth in the league, and sold out 15 of 20 home dates at Mohegan Sun Arena. Sponsorship revenue has doubled since 2022, driven by national brands—Ally Financial, Google, Nike—layering commitments on top of local partnerships. The team's payroll, capped at $1.46 million per the current collective bargaining agreement, remains a fraction of operating revenue, leaving meaningful EBITDA for ownership. That margin profile is attractive to financial buyers who might have dismissed the WNBA as a subsidy play five years ago.
The timing also reflects the league's expansion cadence. The WNBA will add a 13th team in San Francisco in 2025, a 14th in Portland in 2026, and a 15th in Toronto in 2027. Expansion fees have climbed from $10 million for Atlanta in 2007 to $50 million for San Francisco. The league is expected to announce a 16th franchise by mid-2025, with bids from Philadelphia, Denver, and Nashville circulating. Each new team raises the replacement cost for existing franchises, and buyers are pricing that scarcity into current deals. The Sun's sale follows the $80 million transaction that brought new ownership to the Atlanta Dream in February, signaling that $100 million is the new floor for franchises in top-15 media markets.
What to watch: The new ownership group is expected to announce its executive team within 30 days. League sources expect at least one senior hire from an NBA front office, consistent with the talent migration that brought Natalie Williams from the Sacramento Kings to the Sparks and Ohemaa Nyanin from the Los Angeles Clippers to the Golden State Valkyries. The Sun's current general manager and head coach are under contract through 2026, but front-office restructuring typically follows ownership changes within six months. Separately, the WNBA's next collective bargaining agreement is up for negotiation in 2027, and player agents are already positioning for salary cap increases tied to the new media revenue. The Sun's sale price will be cited in those discussions as evidence of franchise value growth that has not yet flowed to player compensation.
The Mohegan Tribe has not indicated whether it will redeploy proceeds into other sports assets. The tribe also operates Mohegan Sun Arena, which will continue to host the Sun under a lease arrangement with the new ownership group.
The takeaway
Connecticut Sun sold for over **$100M**, setting a WNBA franchise record and confirming valuations have tripled since mid-2023 media deal.
Two hundred brands. Eight months on the desk. $0.003 an impression.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — imprinting on real authorized stock for Nike, YETI, Patagonia, The North Face, Carhartt, Stanley, Peter Millar, TUMI, Montblanc, Moleskine, Waterford, and 190 more. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign: The Stash Edge, Markets Edge, Sports Edge, Voyage Edge, Black's Edge, House Edge, the Article Engine, Ramen, and Fending.
$0.003per impression · vs ~$0.007 digital CPM
8 monthson the desk · vs 0.8s for a digital ad
200+authorized brands · Nike · YETI · Patagonia
9 deskspublishing daily · since 1997
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.