The Golden State Valkyries are worth $1 billion, according to CNBC's 2026 WNBA franchise valuations released Tuesday. The franchise tipped off its inaugural season in May 2025. Fourteen months later, it leads the league in enterprise value.
CNBC's methodology weights revenue, operating income, and market-adjusted EBITDA multiples. The Valkyries' valuation reflects $87 million in first-year revenue—triple the league median—and a 42 percent operating margin driven by Chase Center co-tenancy with the Warriors. The parent ownership group, Joe Lacob and Peter Guber, structured the WNBA entity as a separate Delaware LLC but shares back-office infrastructure, digital sales stack, and sponsorship inventory with the NBA franchise. Season-ticket deposits for year two closed in November at 18,400 accounts, the highest baseline in league history.
The $1 billion mark matters because it redefines the price floor for future expansion. The Valkyries paid a $50 million expansion fee in January 2024. Portland's franchise, awarded six weeks ago, carried a $125 million tag, and commissioner Cathy Engelbert told *Forbes* in March that the league now models new markets at $150 million minimum. Family offices circling the rumored Nashville and Philadelphia slots are using the Valkyries' trajectory to justify nine-figure commitments, per three sources with term sheets in motion.
The valuation also clarifies what institutional capital is pricing: not the team in isolation, but the infrastructure arbitrage. The Warriors absorbed the Valkyries' capex—practice facility build-out, video systems, performance staff salaries—into their existing $1.9 billion annual operating budget. Chase Center adds twenty-one dates of premium inventory without incremental fixed costs. Levy, the building's food concessionaire, reported Valkyries games averaging $68 per cap in F&B spend, 11 percent above Warriors preseason games. Sponsorship grew faster. Rakuten, the Warriors' jersey patch since 2017, added a Valkyries patch for $6 million annual value, then extended both deals through 2030 in a combined $280 million package announced in January.
The Valkyries are not the most profitable WNBA team—the Las Vegas Aces, valued at $780 million, carried a higher EBITDA margin in 2025—but they are the most leveraged against adjacent enterprise value. Lacob told *The Athletic* in February that Valkyries season-ticket holders convert to Warriors partial plans at a 23 percent rate, the inverse of every other dual-market franchise. The data suggests the WNBA entity is functioning as a $50 million-per-year customer acquisition channel for a $7.7 billion NBA asset.
Two other franchises cracked $500 million: the New York Liberty at $780 million and the Los Angeles Sparks at $620 million. Both operate in dual-tenant arenas but lack the same ownership overlap. The Liberty's owners, Clara Wu Tsai and Joe Tsai, run the team separately from the Brooklyn Nets, limiting back-office synergy. The Sparks share Crypto.com Arena with the Lakers and Kings but pay AEG a per-game lease, not a revenue share.
Expansion pricing will move again before the Philadelphia decision in June. Nashville's ownership group, led by Oracle's Safra Catz, submitted a $160 million offer in April, according to *Sportico*. If accepted, it sets the Valkyries' effective return at 220 percent in twenty-six months. The WNBA's collective bargaining agreement, extended in January through 2031, splits expansion fees evenly among existing franchises but excludes future clubs. That structure incentivizes current owners to approve high entry prices now, before dilution resets the math.
Watch whether Lacob decouples the Valkyries' media rights from the Warriors' RSN deal when both expire in 2027. NBC Sports Bay Area currently bundles twenty-eight Valkyries games into the same carriage fee that covers seventy Warriors games, but the WNBA's national package with ESPN, Amazon, and NBC is up for renegotiation in eighteen months. If the Valkyries negotiate separately, the implied rights value becomes the next valuation input. The league averaged 1.2 million viewers per national window in 2025, up 48 percent year-over-year, but the Valkyries' local audience skews younger and more affluent than comparable RSN inventory, per Nielsen data shared with potential bidders in March.
The $1 billion number is the headline. The $950 million appreciation in twenty-six months is the product.