PORTLAND, Oregon — This story is courtesy of the Portland Business Journal, a KGW news partner. Read their story here.
Two months after the WNBA formally announced Portland as its 15th expansion franchise, the team has already sold a total of 7,500 season ticket member deposits.
While the number indicates a slowing number of deposits compared to the 5,000 season ticket deposits sold in the two weeks after the announcement, the team still has a lot of time to collect far more season ticket deposits before it begins playing at Moda Center in 2026.
The deposit, which ensures access to Portland’s WNBA season tickets when they become available, runs fans about $26, and does not include additional seating selections and costs that will become available “at a later date,” according to the team.
The 7,500 deposits means the Portland WNBA team has made roughly $195,000 in revenue from deposits alone. For perspective, the Golden State Valkyries only just hit 20,000 season ticket member deposits themselves, a little more than a year after the expansion was announced.
Ownership group RAJ Sports purchased both the WNBA team and the city’s NWSL team, the Portland Thorns, this year for a combined $188 million. RAJ’s Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal have touted Portland’s importance in women’s sports, and its potential to become a global epicenter for women’s sports, since it first bought the Thorns in January.
“I would love to see Portland really cement itself as the epicenter of women's professional sports,” Bhathal Merage told the Business Journal in August. “I think that the fans of the Thorns were really early adopters and saw the potential of women's sports and really moved the needle for what you see in this world today.”
RAJ Sports also recently hired the Thorns’ former General Manager Karina LeBlanc as the group’s executive vice president of strategic growth development, and Mike Whitehead, former senior VP of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, as the group’s managing director. (Merage and Bhathal are the children of Raj and Marta Bhathal, who own the NBA’s Sacramento Kings.)
