The Women Rewriting Who Owns Women's Basketball

Women's basketball has never been worth more. Record audiences, billion-dollar valuations, unprecedented investment. And yet the most consequential story in the sport right now isn't happening on the court — it's happening in a boardroom, and it's about a question the sport has mostly avoided asking out loud: when the money finally arrives, who actually owns it?

Project B is the venture forcing the question. As Forbes reports, in an industry where Black women have historically generated labor and cultural value in women's basketball without receiving proportional economic ownership, Project B is built explicitly to challenge and change that pattern. The mechanism is the part that matters: the athletes who play in Project B receive a direct equity stake in the league, plus compensation meant to reflect their global reach — not just a salary, a stake.

To understand why that's radical, look at the ownership math the sport is starting from. Forbes notes that a record 55 women lead Fortune 500 companies in 2026 — still just 11% — and, citing McKinsey, that women hold only 29% of C-suite roles while Black women hold just 7%. Sport is no better: the majority of NBA and WNBA team owners are white men, with women listed explicitly as principal or co-owners for just four WNBA teams and six NBA teams. The people who built the cultural value of the women's game have, by and large, not been the people who own it.

So Project B built its cap table as a rebuttal. Per Forbes, its investor board includes Robin Washington, an Alphabet and Salesforce board member and former Gilead CFO, and Merline Saintil, a board director at Rocket Lab, TD Synnex and Symbotic — the two are co-founders of Black Women on Boards — along with CapitalG managing partner Laela Sturdy, PagerDuty CEO Jenn Tejada, Nestlé COO Stephanie Hart, Uber chief audit and risk officer Brandy Thomas, former TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot, WNBA legend Candace Parker, and WTA Grand Slam champion Sloane Stephens. Co-founder and Chief Basketball Officer Alana Beard, herself a former WNBA champion, is blunt about why the composition is the point: she tells Forbes it's important not to approach this from a performative standpoint, and that building a genuine community of collaboration means putting action behind the words.

Saintil frames the thesis in plain financial terms, telling Forbes that ownership is where generational wealth gets created and where women get a seat at the table, and pointing to the players having ownership from day one. Stephens, who came in as both investor and advisor, adds the athlete's angle: players who have invested aren't only invested in terms of money — they're invested in the sport itself, and that's what's pushing all sports forward faster.

This is where Project B diverges from every "empowerment" pitch that came before it — the empowerment is a term sheet. Forbes reports that as the league moves toward its inaugural season with global hubs named in cities including Tokyo and Valencia, it has unveiled a roster that includes Azzi Fudd, Sophie Cunningham, Leonie Fiebich, Jonquel Jones, Jewell Loyd, Kamilla Cardoso and Nneka Ogwumike, among others. And the access is structured, not incidental: rookie star Azzi Fudd tells Forbes what makes Project B unique is being able to sit down with women like Beard, Stephens, Saintil, Washington, Parker and Sturdy to talk about her brand, explore business opportunities and learn from women who have built companies. Las Vegas Aces guard Jewell Loyd, an entrepreneur in her own right, specifically sought out the opportunity to build her business portfolio while playing in front of international audiences.

The reason to lead a business digest with Project B rather than a bigger-name story is that it's a test of a model the entire sports economy is circling. As Forbes frames it, the approach reflects a broader shift across sports where the people closest to the game are increasingly seeking meaningful roles in shaping its future — and by bringing women investors and advisors into positions of ownership and influence, Project B is creating a model that challenges basketball's traditional structures. Beard's summary is the thesis in a sentence: if you understand that there can be multiple winners in one ecosystem, it's only going to be better for the future of the game.

Whether the equity model survives contact with the economics of a startup league is the open question. But the framing is already doing work — it reframes "growth in women's basketball" from a story about attendance and TV ratings into a story about who holds the paper when the growth pays off. That's a business story, and it's the one everyone else in this Digest is quietly having too.

If Project B is about who owns the future, the NBA's expansion race is about who can afford the present. Per a Sportico report confirmed by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie and her husband Bill Laurie are weighing a bid for a Las Vegas expansion franchise. The Review-Journal notes they have an estimated net worth of $17.8 billion and once owned the NHL's St. Louis Blues, which they sold in 2006. They join a genuinely stacked field: the paper lists the Jerry Colangelo-led "Las Vegas Jacks," Golden Knights owner Bill Foley's "Vegas Wants the NBA" group, a group including former Disney CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Joshua Kushner, and a group fronted by Earvin "Magic" Johnson. Monday was the last day for ownership groups to detail their financing and management plans to the NBA and PFT Partners, the investment bank the league hired in March to lead its exploration of Las Vegas and Seattle. This is the direct sequel to Digest #1: the Review-Journal quotes Silver saying several serious groups are presenting to the league's bankers, the majority of them not making their efforts public — a signal the expansion economics we flagged earlier are pulling in exactly the ultra-wealthy field the league hoped for.

The patch economy we covered in Digest #2 just hit a new milestone. Per the Associated Press, Cleveland's incoming WNBA team — which doesn't play its first game until May 2028 — announced Progressive Insurance as its jersey patch sponsor, and it's the first time in the WNBA that a single sponsor has bought both spots on the jersey: the upper-left corner and the larger placement under the front numbers. The fit is unusually neat: the AP notes Progressive is based in Cleveland with headquarters in suburban Mayfield Heights, has held naming rights to the city's baseball stadium since 2008, and its CEO Tricia Griffith is an investor in the Cleveland Astra women's soccer team. The demand signal underneath is the real story — the AP reports Cleveland has logged 9,000 season-ticket deposits over the past year for a team that is still nearly two years from tipping off and whose name hasn't yet been announced. A patch sold this early, at double placement, on a team that doesn't yet exist, is its own comment on where women's-sports sponsorship pricing is heading.

A brand-rebuild story with a basketball engine. Per Forbes, after Authentic Brands bought Reebok from Adidas in 2022 for $2.5 billion — less than Adidas originally paid — CEO Todd Krinsky has been rebuilding a brand that, under Adidas, was pivoted away from sports and literally exited the basketball, tennis and golf businesses. Forbes reports Reebok's share of Adidas's sales had fallen from about 18% in 2010 to 7% by 2020. The comeback plan leans on star power with real operational roles: Krinsky tells Forbes he created a president of basketball position and gave it to Shaquille O'Neal — who is also an Authentic Brands stakeholder and, in Krinsky's telling, one of Reebok's most active employees, involved in strategy and player signings rather than marketing or design. Allen Iverson serves as vice president of basketball, and Krinsky says O'Neal was key to bringing in WNBA star Angel Reese, a fellow LSU alum. Forbes reports Reebok is about halfway through Krinsky's five-year plan, aiming to become a top-five player in every market — timed to a moment when even market leader Nike is mid-turnaround under returning CEO Elliott Hill.

The "Visit Rwanda" sponsorship machine moves into athlete-led marketing. Per Consultancy.africa, the Rwanda Development Board, advised by ELLVEE, appointed NBA prospect Nate Ament as Visit Rwanda's Global Ambassador — a first-of-its-kind ambassador partnership for the brand, announced on the eve of the 2026 NBA Draft, ahead of Ament being selected 13th overall and joining the Milwaukee Bucks. The report says the multi-year partnership has Ament promoting the country internationally while engaging communities through basketball development initiatives and youth programs. It's a deliberate strategic evolution: Consultancy.africa notes Visit Rwanda's portfolio already includes Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Atlético Madrid, the LA Clippers, the LA Rams, SoFi Stadium and the Basketball Africa League, and this deal shifts the model from traditional rights-based partnerships toward athlete-led storytelling and long-term brand engagement. For a Digest tracking how basketball sells things, Rwanda selling a country through a rookie is the logical frontier.

A neat contrast with Digest #2's ASVEL collapse. In Lithuania, stability: per BasketNews, Kaunas municipality is raising its annual funding for Zalgiris Kaunas by €1 million — up from the €2 million per year it has provided since 2020 — rewarding one of the most successful seasons in the club's recent history. BasketNews reports Zalgiris won every domestic trophy available last season, lifting the King Mindaugas Cup and defending its Lithuanian Basketball League title, and finished fifth in the EuroLeague regular-season standings. Club president Paulius Jankunas told the outlet the municipality's continued and increased backing is central to the club's stability and consistent growth. Set against ASVEL's rejected investor guarantees and slashed €59M-to-€24M budget from last edition, the two clubs sketch the two poles of the European model right now: one propped up by steady municipal money and sporting results, the other exposed by the volatility of chasing outside private capital ahead of NBA Europe.