The Valkyries built a major franchise before they built a long history

Most expansion teams spend a few years looking like a tryout. They get the arena dates nobody else wanted, a logo that reads as the men’s club’s little cousin, and a first season spent explaining themselves to their own city. You can see it in the empty upper deck and in merchandise that still says “inaugural” like an apology.

Golden State started from a better place than most. The Bay Area already knew how to fill Chase Center, and the Warriors had proved the building works. That does not automatically sell a WNBA night, though, and the split shows up in the ticket data: only about 8 percent of the Valkyries’ 12,000 season-ticket holders also hold Warriors seats. Team president Jess Smith has said the ownership group wanted two teams that could each stand on their own. The season-ticket list says they got one.

The name helped. When the San Francisco Chronicle ran a write-in survey, about a quarter of respondents landed on Valkyries — Norse warrior women, not a hand-me-down from the Warriors — and the club built around violet rather than the NBA team’s blue and gold. The logo is a V shaped like the Bay Bridge, linking the Oakland offices to the San Francisco games. Merchandise moved like a fashion label: Sports Business Journal reported roughly $200,000 in sales per home game last season. Fans were buying this team, not a souvenir of the other one.

Winning kept the building loud. No WNBA expansion team had ever reached the playoffs in its first season until Golden State went 23–21 in 2025 and got there, then pushed the top-seeded Minnesota Lynx to the final possession before losing Game 2 by a point. This year has been better. Monday’s win over Dallas moved the Valkyries to 25–9, two wins past last season’s total with weeks still to play, and back into the postseason. Fans who bought in for the novelty found a team worth watching.

Ballhalla is the lighting and the noise, and it is also scarcity. Season tickets sold out past 12,000 this spring, and the club opened a waitlist. You can still find a single-game seat here and there; you cannot buy a full season. The game-night feel is settled because nobody treated the first season as a trial run.

What other clubs can borrow is the seriousness. Pick a name the market actually wants instead of a variation on the men’s team. Light and staff the night like a major-league show, and keep enough cheap seats — the Valkyries have sold some in the $12 to $15 range — that the arena fills for real rather than looking full on camera. Smith put the ambition plainly at a conference this spring: they were not trying to sell 4,000 tickets a night, they were trying to sell out every game and build a brand from a clean slate.

The part you cannot copy out of a brand book is the money. Joe Lacob and Peter Guber already owned Chase Center when they paid a $50 million expansion fee in 2023. This spring CNBC valued the Valkyries at $1 billion, the first women’s sports team anywhere to reach that mark, on league-leading revenue that reports put in the $70 million range. Bay Area sponsors, a host committee fresh off a Super Bowl and a World Cup, and a city that will have staged NBA, WNBA, and MLB All-Star weeks inside four years: none of that transfers to another market. Portland and Toronto can copy the instinct to build something separate from the men’s team next door. They cannot copy the arena or the checkbook.

When the All-Star crowd arrives next July, the weekend will feel like a destination because the Valkyries spent two seasons making ordinary home nights feel that way first. That is the part other markets can actually take home.