It’s solely been 5 months since future hall-of-famer Candace Parker unexpectedly retired from the WNBA, the place she gained three championships with three completely different groups, and earned the league’s most precious participant award twice. Since then, her future profession path has been quickly coming into focus.
A month after saying her retirement, Adidas made her president of girls’s basketball, giving her energy over product design and the accountability to curate the subsequent era of gamers the German shoe large indicators to contract.
Talking on Wednesday on the Goldman Sachs Builders and Innovation Summit in Healdsburg, California, Parker confirmed that her targets in enterprise are as formidable as these she had as a participant. “I would love to own a WNBA team and an NBA team,” she instructed Goldman Sachs’ co-head of world banking and markets, Dan Dees, and an viewers of about 200 Goldman Sachs bankers, traders, and entrepreneurs.
To drag off such an acquisition Parker must proceed breaking down obstacles as she has since highschool when she beat the boys on the 2004 McDonald’s All American highschool slam dunk competitors. Although Parker was reportedly the very best paid girls’s basketball participant on the planet final 12 months, with an estimated $8.1 million, she nonetheless earned $3 million much less than the bottom paid NBA participant.
Which means she’d should make up fairly a niche to purchase even the most cost effective pro-basketball groups. The bottom valued WNBA staff is the Atlanta Dream valued by Sportico at $55 million. Probably the most inexpensive NBA staff is the Memphis Grizzlies at $2.4 billion, in accordance to Forbes.
In October 2023 Parker took an enormous step in direction of closing that hole when she joined Stephen Curry, Michael Strahan and Lindsey Vonn as a part of billionaire investor Marc Lasry’s Avenue Sports activities Fund. Earlier that 12 months Lasry offered his stake within the Milwaukee Bucks for a reported $3.5 billion, making him an awesome mentor, in keeping with Parker, as she pursues her personal acquisitions. In June, Lasry’s Avenue Capital printed paperwork that confirmed it had raised $445 million for the fund, and it’s reportedly looking for $1.5 billion.
“When I started working with Avenue Capital, I said, I need a promise that we’re going to invest in women’s sports, and we’re going to do it not as a charity or support,” she instructed the Goldman viewers. “We’re going to do it as an actual investment. We’re going to give it a chance to succeed.”
This work is a part of her bigger enterprise ambitions, which embrace serving to certainly one of Adidas most vital enterprise traces and angel investing.
A cornerstone for Adidas
At Adidas, her present expertise roster consists of rising feminine star athletes Aliyah Boston, Hailey Van Lith, Kahleah Copper, Aaliyah Edwards, Chelsea Grey, Betnijah Laney, Alysha Clark, Nneka Ogwumike, Chiney Ogwumike, and Erica Wheeler.
Already, Adidas is exhibiting indicators of development, yesterday releasing its quarterly numbers—a 46% improve over the identical quarter final 12 months—two weeks early. However Adidas’ urgency to get these numbers out so quick belies a deeper impediment on the firm.
In some ways Adidas’ star has risen in tandem with Parker’s. After they employed her in 2008 Adidas inventory was buying and selling at $32 and Parker was just about unknown exterior the then-insular world of girls’s basketball. Over the course of her profession Adidas launched three sneakers constructed round her. This culminated within the Candace Parker Half III Assortment, which included Adidas’ new Exhibit Choose sneakers, their first designed from the ground-up for ladies’s toes. Adidas’ inventory peaked in July 2021 at $189, the identical 12 months Parker gained her second championship.
Nonetheless, that month was a actuality test for the quickly rising firm. Adidas’ inventory plummeted 73% to $50 in October 2022, a degree it hadn’t seen in six years. A Reuters report earlier this 12 months blamed decrease demand that led to overstocked shops.
Although a part of that decreased demand actually ties again to decreased reputation of the far more profitable males’s basketball— the ultimate sport of the NCAA girls’s basketball match was reportedly considered by 24 million individuals in comparison with 14.82 million for the lads—the agency additionally lower ties with Kanye West in 2022, following a collection of antisemitic remarks, and stopped promoting his money cow Yeezy sneakers.
Regardless of the dropping inventory costs, the corporate barely held onto constructive income till this March, when the German shoe large posted its first annual loss in 30 years…the month earlier than Parker introduced her retirement.
Ladies’s sports activities slated for enormous development
Adidas seems to be trying to capitalize on girls’s basketball’s rising star. However there’s nonetheless an extended option to go. The WNBA final 12 months reportedly made $200 million in comparison with the NBA’s $10 billion, and the common WNBA wage is $119, 590 in comparison with the NBA’s common of $11.9 million. With Parker’s new authority at Adidas she’s ready to alter that.
Although Parker isn’t simply the face of Adidas girls’s basketball—as she insisted she wouldn’t be earlier than she joined—she is the face. And a really properly paid one, all issues thought-about. However her youthful rivals embrace Indiana Fever rookie Caitlin Clark who reportedly signed an eight-year $28 million cope with Nike—who outbid Adidas—and the Chicago Sky’s 22-year-old rookie, Angel Reese, has reportedly already signed a $1 million cope with Reebok.
Such competitors stands to create worth for future generations of girls athletes, past simply basketball. Earlier this 12 months accounting agency PwC stated 85% of consultants it polled predicted double-digit development within the subsequent 3-5 years and in June Fortune reported that rich Goldman Sachs shoppers had been exploring girls’s sports activities as a brand new funding class.
Parker’s curiosity additionally extends past basketball. Final 12 months she joined NBA professional Kevin Durant to put money into League One Volleyball, which is constructing an expert volley ball league. Right now Parker instructed the viewers why: “My daughter’s a volleyball player.”
