The Women’s National Basketball Association -WNBA- will spread its All-Star programme across four venues in Chicago over three days. WNBA Live will run from 23 to 25 July at McCormick Place; the three-point contest and the new Shooting Stars, which replaces the Skills Challenge, will take place on Friday at Wintrust Arena; and the game will be played on Saturday at the United Center. The Obama Presidential Center will complete the schedule with practices, community activities and educational events. The league is turning its main midseason occasion into a platform combining competition, sponsorship, culture, investment and social impact.
The structure reflects the transformation of the NBA All-Star over recent years. The game remains at the centre of the programme, but it now creates additional commercial opportunities through fan zones, exclusive products, digital content, premium hospitality and business events. The WNBA is adapting that model to its own history and the growth of women’s sport. This edition also coincides with the beginning of a new national broadcast rights cycle, initially valued at around $200 million a year and approximately three times the value of the previous agreement. The All-Star therefore becomes one of the first major commercial showcases of this new era.
Cooper and Weatherspoon bring the inaugural WNBA Championship back into focus
Cynthia Cooper and Teresa Weatherspoon will serve as honorary general managers of the two teams. Their selection revives a rivalry from the beginning of the league. They both featured in the inaugural WNBA Championship game in 1997, when the Houston Comets defeated the New York Liberty 65-51. Cooper scored 25 points, was named Finals MVP and led Houston to the first of four consecutive championships. Weatherspoon guided the New York team, which would face the Comets again in the 1999 and 2000 Finals.
Team Coop and Team Spoon will carry that history into the league’s 30th season. The teams will wear the red and blue colours originally used by the WNBA and bring together several generations of players. Paige Bueckers, Breanna Stewart and Angel Reese feature on Team Coop, while Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson and Nneka Ogwumike are part of Team Spoon. The league is using its own past to shape the sporting narrative of the weekend instead of reproducing the geographical or international formats recently used by the NBA.
A prize designed to keep girls involved in sport
The result of the game will also determine how a $100,000 community fund is distributed. The organisation represented by the winning team will receive $70,000, with the other receiving $30,000. Team Coop will compete on behalf of Angels Athletics, while Team Spoon will represent Girls in the Game. Both organisations work in Chicago to help girls remain involved in sport and gain access to education, mentoring and leadership opportunities.
The initiative gives an exhibition game a direct community outcome. The WNBA retains a competitive incentive but connects the result with projects in the host city. The fund complements the other activities taking place throughout the weekend and represents one of the clearest differences from the men’s All-Star: a significant part of the programme is designed not only to attract consumers but also to expand the future participant base and keep young women within the sporting system.
The three-point contest costs more than the game
Ticket prices reflect both increased demand and an unusual feature of the weekend. The cheapest tickets available on the secondary market were around $110 for the three-point contest and Shooting Stars, slightly above the $105 entry price for the game. The main explanation is venue capacity. Wintrust Arena holds approximately 10,500 spectators, while the United Center can accommodate more than 20,000. The lower supply makes Friday’s session more expensive even though the All-Star Game remains the headline event.
The change from 2025 is more significant than the five-dollar difference. In Indianapolis, tickets for the Friday contests initially started at $25 and fell as low as $12 on the day. In 2026, order volume is up 53% from the previous year and nine times higher than when Chicago hosted the All-Star in 2022. There was already evidence of this commercial demand in the television figures: the 2025 game attracted an average audience of 2.2 million, while Friday’s contests reached 1.3 million viewers, an increase of 89% from the previous edition. Despite that growth, prices remain considerably lower than those usually seen at the NBA All-Star.
The WNBA arrives at the Obama Presidential Center
The league will become the first professional sports organisation to hold activities at the newly opened Obama Presidential Center, located in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side. The venue will host Media Day, practices for both teams, the third edition of Changemaker Day and a Jr. WNBA programme. It will also be the first time an official All-Star practice has taken place at a venue of this kind.
Much of the programme will be held at Home Court, a 60,000-square-foot sports building featuring a regulation-size WNBA court. The Jr. WNBA will organise sessions covering basketball fundamentals, leadership, science and technology, alongside workshops for girls. Changemaker Day will bring the league together with the Chicago Sky, Chicago Public Schools and the Girls Opportunity Alliance. Using the presidential centre adds education, youth participation and leadership to a programme that would traditionally have remained concentrated inside sports arenas.
Thirty-four brands turn WNBA Live into a business showcase
WNBA Live will feature 34 sponsors and licensees, the highest number in the event’s history. There were 25 participants in 2025, representing growth of 36%. The festival is also expanding from two days to three, increasing the time available to present products, arrange player appearances and turn in-person activations into digital content. The organising committee offered sponsorship opportunities valued between $50,000 and $1 million, according to ‘Chicago Sun-Times’, although neither the amount sold nor the total revenue generated has been disclosed.
The activations illustrate the variety of commercial spaces created around the game. AT&T will allow spectators to purchase temporary mobile data priority inside the United Center and turn baskets scored by fans into donations of up to $150,000 for three small Chicago businesses. WNBA Live will offer clothing customisation, digital trading cards, beauty products, limited-edition merchandise, a Barbie and Reebok space and podcast recordings. Deloitte will also organise the second private Unstoppable Women’s Sports Business Summit, focused on how to invest in women’s sport at scale, while Pinterest, Gatorade and J.P. Morgan will support discussions about artificial intelligence, media, performance and investment. Each additional day, venue and activity expands the inventory available to brands: the WNBA All-Star is no longer selling only a game, but an ongoing connection between basketball, business, culture and community.
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