The WNBA might be the American sports league with the most potential for growth. It’s hard to imagine the NFL or NBA getting that much bigger than they already are, and although Major League Baseball seems to have mostly leveled its decline, the sport isn’t winning new converts by the millions. Soccer, meanwhile, has been five years away from dominating the nation’s sports landscape for several decades now.
But women’s basketball is a different story. The game is steadily minting new superstars at the college level. Last spring, for the first time ever, the women’s NCAA championship game drew more viewers than the men’s final. In the pros, one of the major challenges the WNBA has faced is that there simply aren’t enough teams to ensure that every elite player fans became acquainted with during her college days will find her way onto one of the league’s twelve active rosters.
To that end, the WNBA has been aggressively pursuing expansion. Portland, Oregon, was announced this week as the city of what will be the league’s fifteenth franchise, following San Francisco and Toronto, as numbers thirteen and fourteen respectively. To get to a nice, round, easily divisible number, the WNBA plans to include one more team in a to-be-determined city. And this morning, the Houston Chronicle reported that H-Town is in the mix, with Houston Rockets owner and restaurateur Tilman Fertitta putting in a bid to bring the W back to his hometown under the brand of the now-defunct Houston Comets, which played in the league from 1997 until 2008. That team folded after its owner, Houston furniture store mogul Hilton Koch, was unable to find a buyer at his then–asking price of $10 million (almost $15 million, adjusted for inflation), a sliver of the $125 million that the Portland bidders reportedly paid.
It’s far from a done deal. Sports Illustrated reported that, in addition to the acknowledged bids from investors in Houston, Denver, Miami, Nashville, and Philadelphia, there are as many as twelve to fifteen cities in the mix for the final expansion slot.
The prospect of a revival is a feel-good story fans of the WNBA’s first dynasty, but if a new WNBA is coming to Texas, Houston is a baffling choice. Yes, it’s the largest U.S. city that’s actually growing (the only three bigger—New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—are all losing population), but Houston is also saturated with professional sports.
On the ticket resale website SeatGeek, at press time, the get-in-the-door price for tickets to the Texans’ October 6 home game against the Buffalo Bills is a whopping $227. That’s more than 50 percent higher than the cheapest seats for the Cowboys game against the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday. But the demand for live pro sports in Houston falls off a cliff from there. The cheap seats for the Rockets’ home opener start at just $27; the same for the Mavericks will set you back $111, while it’ll take at least $40 for the cellar-dwelling Spurs. If you want to see the first-place Astros play at home tonight, you can get into the stadium for a mere $14, just $7 more more than the price to see the Texas Rangers up in Arlington.
The picture is even more grim for franchises outside of the Big Four U.S. pro sports leagues. Tickets for the next home game for the Houston Dynamo, the city’s Major League Soccer team, start at $20, roughly half of what it’ll take to see the squads in either Austin or Dallas, both of which trail the Dynamo in the standings. Tickets for the National Women’s Soccer League’s Houston Dash are even cheaper, despite the team being the only Texas-based organization in the league, with prices for Friday’s home game starting at $15, all fees included. It’s worth noting that the WNBA, despite its prospects for growth, is closer in stature to the MLS and NWSL than the NFL or NBA.
We aren’t saying that Houston fans don’t support local teams, but their attention sure does seem to be split.
Meanwhile, fans in two other Texas cities have proven to be extremely loyal. The San Antonio Spurs haven’t been to the NBA Playoffs since the 2018–2019 season, but basketball-crazed locals still clamor for tickets. Austin FC, meanwhile, has become a bona fide institution in the state capital, despite the club being A) pretty bad and B) a soccer team. The loyalty’s largely because residents were desperate for a pro sports team to support. Either city would almost certainly embrace a WNBA team with gusto. (Fans in the Alamo City previously supported the WNBA’s San Antonio Stars, until a casino group purchased the organization and relocated it to Las Vegas in 2017.) There would probably be more Austinites with tattoos of a new women’s hoops team’s logo before its inaugural season than Houstonians aware that an expansion team had even arrived in their town.
There are other options. El Paso is the largest U.S. city without a single professional sports franchise; it’s also bigger than Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, or any city in Connecticut, all of which will be home to WNBA franchises by the 2026 season. If you thought Austin’s embrace of its soccer team was fervent, just imagine how season ticket sales would go in El Paso!
Sports leagues do consider factors besides grassroots support when deciding where to place franchises. Season ticket sales are important, but much of a modern-day pro sports organization’s revenue comes from corporate suites. Twenty-six Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in Houston; Austin has three, which is one more than San Antonio has. (El Paso gets a goose egg there.)
But a company doesn’t need to be on that particular list to have money to spend. Austin-based Tito’s Vodka, Vrbo, Whole Foods, and Yeti, as well as a number of less-recognizable tech firms, all pull in annual revenues of more than a billion dollars; San Antonio’s corporate community keeps the Spurs’ arena full. A WNBA team in either market would likely thrive, especially as interest in the league grows.
Houston is a great city, but it is not a great sports city—nor is it the Texas city best positioned to support a new WNBA franchise. The revived Houston Comets would always trail several other local teams in stature. During a winning season in Austin, meanwhile, a WNBA squad could be the city’s most popular pro team. If the league wants its growing fan base to see its sixteenth team receive some of the loyalty San Antonians show for the Spurs, or the downright unhinged enthusiasm Austin FC supporters feel, Texas has cities that can deliver it. But if the WNBA wants fans to watch the best women’s basketball players in the world dribble, pass, and shoot in a half-empty arena, well, there’s always Houston.
