As the 2025 WNBA regular season closed this week, almost every team delivered higher attendance than the prior year, supporting the notion that the growing popularity of the league isn’t isolated to the star power of Caitlin Clark. The average attendance across the league was just over 11,000 per game, up more than 12% from last year average of about 9,800.
Each team played 44 games in 2025, up from the 40-game seasons of 2024 and 2023, the 36-game season of 2022, and 32-game season of 2021.
Expansion team Golden State Valkyries reporting sell-out attendances for all 22 home games in its inaugural season. They led the league with an average attendance of 18,064.
For combined home and away attendance, the Indiana Fever led the league. That was the case even as Fever star Caitlin Clark was out injured for most the season, playing in just 13 of the Fever’s 44 games. She did join the team on the sidelines at many games she didn’t play in, though.
With No. 1 draft pick Paige Bueckers on the roster, the Dallas Wings drew the league’s second-highest away attendance, averaging over 11,000 for visiting games. That’s higher than the Wings’ home attendance average of 7,273, which is on the lower end of the league’s 13 teams.
The attendance data supports the notion that the league’s rise in popularity, isn’t isolated to the teams of individual new stars like Clark and Bueckers.
However, while there’s attendance growth for all teams since the last pre-Clark season of 2023, the data shows wide disparities across franchises. A few teams are drawing crowds in the 15,000 to 18,000 range, but many others are pulling less than half that and play in smaller venues. Teams like Atlanta and Washington, for instance, lag well behind front‐runners in average attendance. The figures suggest that while the league’s overall momentum is strong—driven in part by expansion, high-profile stars, and possibly venue size—local and market dynamics continue to shape how many fans show up for each team’s home games.
Attendance data here was extract from SportsRadar, visualizations by me.
