It’s only been five months since future hall-of-famer Candace Parker unexpectedly retired from the WNBA, where she won three championships with three different teams, and earned the league’s most valuable player award twice. Since then, her future career path has been rapidly coming into focus.
A month after announcing her retirement, Adidas made her president of women’s basketball, giving her power over product design and the responsibility to curate the next generation of players the German shoe giant signs to contract.
Speaking on Wednesday at the Goldman Sachs Builders and Innovation Summit in Healdsburg, California, Parker showed that her goals in business are as ambitious as those she had as a player. “I would love to own a WNBA team and an NBA team,” she told Goldman Sachs’ co-head of global banking and markets, Dan Dees, and an audience of about 200 Goldman Sachs executives and entrepreneurs.
To pull off such an acquisition Parker would have to continue breaking down barriers as she has since high school when she beat the boys at the 2004 McDonald’s All American high school slam dunk competition. Though Parker was reportedly the highest paid women’s basketball player in the world last year, with an estimated $8.1 million, she still earned $3 million less than the lowest paid NBA player.
That means she’d have to make up quite a gap to buy even the cheapest pro-basketball teams. The lowest valued WNBA team is the Atlanta Dream valued by Sportico at $55 million. The most affordable NBA team is the Memphis Grizzlies at $2.4 billion, according to Forbes.
In October 2023 Parker took a huge step towards closing that gap when she joined Stephen Curry, Michael Strahan and Lindsey Vonn as part of billionaire investor Marc Lasry’s Avenue Sports Fund. Earlier that year Lasry sold his stake in the Milwaukee Bucks for a reported $3.5 billion, making him a great mentor, according to Parker, as she pursues her own acquisitions. In June, Lasry’s Avenue Capital published documents that showed it had raised $445 million for the fund, and it’s reportedly seeking $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 told the Goldman audience. “We’re going to do it as an actual investment. We’re going to give it a chance to succeed.”
This work is part of her larger business ambitions, which include helping one of Adidas most important business lines and angel investing.
A cornerstone for Adidas
At Adidas, her current talent roster consists of rising female star athletes Aliyah Boston, Hailey Van Lith, Kahleah Copper, Aaliyah Edwards, Chelsea Gray, Betnijah Laney, Alysha Clark, Nneka Ogwumike, Chiney Ogwumike, and Erica Wheeler.
Already, Adidas is showing signs of growth, yesterday releasing its quarterly numbers—a 46% increase over the same quarter last year—two weeks early. But Adidas’ urgency to get those numbers out so fast belies a deeper obstacle at the company.
In many ways Adidas’ star has risen in tandem with Parker’s. When they hired her in 2008 Adidas stock was trading at $32 and Parker was virtually unknown outside the then-insular world of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career Adidas launched three shoes built around her. This culminated in the Candace Parker Part III Collection, which included Adidas’ new Exhibit Select shoes, their first designed from the ground-up for women’s feet. Adidas’ stock peaked in July 2021 at $189, the same year Parker won her second championship.
However, that month was a reality check for the rapidly growing company. Adidas’ stock plummeted 73% to $50 in October 2022, a level it hadn’t seen in six years. A Reuters report earlier this year blamed lower demand that led to overstocked stores.
Though part of that decreased demand certainly ties back to decreased popularity of the much more lucrative men’s basketball— the final game of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament was reportedly viewed by 24 million people compared to 14.82 million for the men—the firm also cut ties with Kanye West in 2022, following a series of antisemitic remarks, and stopped selling his cash cow Yeezy sneakers.
In spite of the dropping stock prices, the company barely held onto positive revenue until this March, when the German shoe giant posted its first annual loss in 30 years…the month before Parker announced her retirement.
Women’s sports slated for huge growth
Adidas appears to be looking to capitalize on women’s basketball’s rising star. But there’s still a long way to go. The WNBA last year reportedly made $200 million compared to the NBA’s $10 billion, and the average WNBA salary is $119, 590 compared to the NBA’s average of $11.9 million. With Parker’s new authority at Adidas she’s in a position to change that.
Though Parker isn’t just the face of Adidas women’s basketball—as she insisted she wouldn’t be before she joined—she is the face. And a very well paid one, all things considered. But her younger competitors include Indiana Fever rookie Caitlin Clark who reportedly signed an eight-year $28 million deal with Nike—who outbid Adidas—and the Chicago Sky’s 22-year-old rookie, Angel Reese, has reportedly already signed a $1 million deal with Reebok.
Such competition stands to create value for future generations of women athletes, beyond just basketball. Earlier this year accounting firm PwC said 85% of experts it polled predicted double-digit growth in the next 3-5 years and in June Fortune reported that wealthy Goldman Sachs clients were exploring women’s sports as a new investment category.
Parker’s interest also extends beyond basketball. Last year she joined NBA pro Kevin Durant to invest in League One Volleyball, which is building a professional volley ball league. Today Parker told the audience why: “My daughter’s a volleyball player.”
