The Golden State Valkyries are worth $1 billion, according to CNBC's 2026 franchise valuations released Thursday. They are the first WNBA team to clear ten figures, doing so in their second season of operation.
The franchise launched in 2024 as the league's thirteenth team, paying a $50 million expansion fee. Twenty-four months later, the markup is 20x. The Valkyries play at Chase Center, share infrastructure with the Golden State Warriors, and carry Joe Lacob and Peter Guber's ownership imprimatur. Their inaugural season averaged 15,200 paid attendance, second in the league. Year two is tracking 17,100 through May.
The valuation matters because it resets the floor for future expansion and ownership transactions. The league is evaluating bids for a fourteenth franchise, expected to command a $100-150 million fee before this number published. That range now looks soft. Toronto and Portland groups are circling. If the Valkyries are worth $1 billion with two seasons of operating history, a Toronto franchise in a top-ten North American media market with Bell or Rogers infrastructure starts at a different number. The WNBA's last public expansion fee was $50 million for Golden State in 2023. The next one will test whether this valuation is an outlier or a benchmark.
Sponsorship inventory explains part of the gap. The Valkyries launched with eight founding partners, including Accenture, Kaiser Permanente, and Rakuten, at rates 30-40% above comparable WNBA deals, per two people familiar with terms. Their jersey patch, held by cloud company Contentful, is a three-year agreement in the low eight figures. That structure is borrowed from the Warriors, where Rakuten paid $60 million over three years in 2017. The Valkyries are running the same playbook one tier down, but the percentage of league revenue is higher. A WNBA team generating $35-40 million in annual revenue at 70% EBITDA margins—the rough profile for Golden State—produces better cash flow than NBA teams twice the size running at 35-40% margins.
The rest of the league is not close. The New York Liberty, privately valued near $200 million last year, would come next, followed by Los Angeles at $180-200 million. Legacy franchises in smaller markets—Indiana, Connecticut—sit near $80-100 million. The gap between first and fifth is wider than the gap between fifth and twelfth. That creates tension in revenue sharing and league governance. The Valkyries and Liberty want faster international expansion and higher salary caps. Minnesota and Phoenix want league subsidy and territorial protection. The valuation gap makes those arguments harder to split.
Two items to track: The next expansion franchise fee, expected by August, will clarify whether buyers believe the Valkyries are repeatable or singular. And Joe Lacob's comments at the next Warriors earnings call, typically held in July. He has been public about the Valkyries as a "growth asset." If he starts using IRR language, minority stakes start getting shopped.
The Valkyries play the Liberty in San Francisco on June 12th. Courtside is sold out. Ticket face value starts at $450.
The takeaway
Valkyries' $1 billion valuation resets expansion fee expectations and widens the gap between top and bottom WNBA franchises.
wnbavaluationgolden state valkyriesexpansionwomens sportsfranchise
Brand your brand — for real
70,000 products · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · imprinted since 1997
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.