The Caitlin Clark Effect and the Inconvenient Truth Behind It

It’s not surprising that businesses like fans line up along the arena fence to get Caitlin Clark’s autograph. The former Iowa star is a transcendent talent who has proven herself to be as adept at breaking viewership records as she is at scoring numbers, drawing big crowds at home and on the road and even drawing 17,000 spectators to an open practice during the Final Four weekend. Her WNBA jersey sold out within hours of being drafted No. 1 overall by the Indiana Fever, and multiple teams have moved upcoming games to larger venues to accommodate “unprecedented demand” for Fever games.

So it makes perfect sense that she’s been hired to pitch everything from home and car insurance to performance drinks, from trading cards to supermarket chains, from cars to financial investment companies. She not only deserves every opportunity, but she has it earned any endorsement agreement presented to it, including a $28 million Nike pact that includes her own signature shoe line, as reported by The Athletics.

That said, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that her appeal as an influencer is based solely on basketball, because it isn’t. To say otherwise is an insult to history and reality. Clark’s attractiveness to local and national companies is heightened by the fact that she is a white woman who has dominated a sport considered predominantly black; a straight woman joining a league with a significant LGBTQ+ player population; and a person who comes from the heartland of America, where residents often feel like their beliefs and values ​​are ignored or disrespected by the country’s geographic borders.

Because sport and society are made of the same fabric, it is impossible to separate them. That’s why it’s foolish to pretend that basketball is the only thing fueling the Caitlin Clark effect. The most important? Yes. But not the only thing.

The bidding war for Caitlin Clark wasn’t even close in the end

• Nike: 8 years/$28 million
• Adidas: 4 years/$6 million
• Under Armour: 4 years/$16 million
• Puma: *quit after hearing $3 million*

Nike is looking at the entire competition pic.twitter.com/wsuwiHEn1m

— Morning Brew ☕️ (@MorningBrew) April 24, 2024

Some will try to turn these words into a disparagement of Clark or her achievements. They are not. She is a great player and, by all accounts, a quality person. But several things can be true at the same time, especially when it comes to why one player is seen as a better brand ambassador than another. Looking for perspective on the topic brought me back to an interview I did last month with Flora Kelly, a vice president of research for ESPN.

On the eve of the Women’s Final Four, I was intrigued by the question of what is the biggest TV draw: a great player or a great team? Kelly acknowledged the importance of a generational talent like Clark, and how her presence alone can push viewership to record highs, but she also emphasized that other factors can push viewership well beyond the roof and into the stratosphere. Factors such as the legacy of a franchise or program, rivalry between a team or players, and cultural or societal elements that create viral moments.

“We’re in kind of a unique moment where social media can really pivot and create a kind of hyper-awareness around these athletes, creating a moment that goes beyond sports,” Kelly said at the time. “But there are so many other factors that people just flat out ignore and just make it Caitlin Clark. There are a lot of storylines surrounding her that lift it up. Maybe it’s not the chicken or the egg. Maybe it’s both.”

The racial component when discussing brand ambassadors may make people uncomfortable, but it is a conversation that deserves attention. Sue Bird, white and gay and one of the legends of women’s basketball, spoke about it in 2020 while discussing the league’s inability at the time to capture the nation’s attention in the same way the U.S. women’s national soccer team had done.

“Even though we are female athletes playing at a high level, our worlds, you know, the football world and the basketball world are just completely different,” she said. “And to put it bluntly, it’s the demographics of who’s playing. Women’s soccer players tend to be cute little white girls, while WNBA players – we come in all shapes and sizes… lots of black, gay, tall women. … There might be an intimidation factor and people are fast to judge it and put it down.”

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Paige Bueckers, a star guard for the University of Connecticut, echoed similar sentiments the following year when she accepted the ESPY for the top college athlete in women’s sports. She stated that 80 percent of the WNBA postseason awards that season were won by black players, but they received half the attention from white athletes.

“With the light that I now have as a white woman leading a black-led sport and being celebrated here, I want to shine a light on black women,” she said. “They don’t get the media attention they deserve. They have given so much to the sport, the community and society as a whole and their value is undeniable.”

Her words were particularly poignant in 2023, when nine of the 10 starters in the WNBA All-Star Game were Black, but Sabrina Ionescu, a reserve guard who happens to be white, was selected as the cover athlete for NBA2K24. Ionescu was a college icon at Oregon, where she set the NCAA record for triple-doubles, but she had yet to achieve that status as a professional. So NBA2K24’s decision to ignore several dominant Black players — including A’ja Wilson and Jonquel Jones, frontline stars who won league MVPs in 2020, 2021 and 2022 — was particularly striking. But like Clark, she checked certain boxes that the others didn’t as a straight, white player.

The topic of sexual orientation and identity is as old as the WNBA itself due to the significant percentage of LGBTQ+ players in the league. The fact is that in its infancy the league struggled to find the right balance between promoting inclusivity and not alienating the wider community.

Initially, it tended to show promotional advertisements of married players with children, despite many of the players being non-heterosexual. Sue Wicks, a member of the WNBA’s first draft class who became the league’s first openly gay active player in 2002, has said she felt boxed in as the league tried to find the right message.

“It would always irritate me if someone said, ‘You can’t say you’re gay,’” she said The Athletics in 2020.

The league, which is the most inclusive in professional sports today, has come a light year since then, even if that is not the case for society as a whole. In the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas cited three other rulings that he would like to see the court adopt in the near future, each of which played an important role in creating the path to national same-sex marriage rights. The topic of sexual orientation and identity remains an issue for some, which explains why Clark is perhaps viewed even more favorably as an influencer.

That is not a setback for her personally or a slight for her sublime basketball skills. It’s a nod to the reality that brand ambassadorship at her level isn’t simply a commentary on someone’s athletic abilities. It is also a reflection of society’s impact on who gets the biggest bags.

(Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Empire State Realty Trust)