NBA: some mascots better paid than the stars of the Women’s League

In the United States, some NBA franchise mascots are paid much more than the stars of the North American women’s basketball league. Something to cringe on the other side of the Atlantic.

Revelations that have not gone unnoticed. Salaries for NBA franchise mascots were revealed earlier this week, and the publication kicked North American Women’s Basketball League (WNBA) stars like Angel McCoughtry out of their shoes. The Minnesota Lynx star was able to see that the Denver Nuggets mascot received a salary of 625,000 euros per year, or 52,000 euros per month. This is three times more than Diana Taurasi (three-time WNBA champion and five-time Olympic gold medalist with the United States), who is one of the three highest earners in the women’s league with annual emoluments of nearly 230,000 euros .

And if the average for other mascots is 60,000 euros per year, « Rocky, the mountain lion » is not an isolated case. The mascot of Atlanta affects 600,000 euros annually and that of the Chicago Bulls completes the podium with 400,000 euros per year. What give ideas to Angel McCoughtry. “I can learn to be a mascot,” she wrote in a tongue-in-cheek tweet on Wednesday.

I can learn to be a mascot pic.twitter.com/8wZlQNbJqP

— McCoughtry (@angel_35) October 5, 2022

“The pay gap between mascots and elite female athletes tells you everything you need to know about how the sports industry values ​​women,” wrote Caroline Fitzgerald, founder of the women’s sports marketing agency Goal Sports.

And these revelations have shed even more light on the salary disparities in American basketball between men and women. In the WNBA, the average salary of a player is around 103,000 euros, while in the NBA, it was close to 9 million euros last season. An abysmal chasm which is even greater between the ten best players, who receive more than 40 million euros per year, and the female headliners who receive 200 times less.