This is categorically not true. Thanks to a combination of no salary caps, unsavory oligarch ownership, and in some places big-spending owners attached to very profitable men’s soccer clubs who have their women’s team as a vanity project— a top tier (like, maybe a dozen) of American players can land big salaries. The vast majority make nowhere near that much and it needs to be repeated: that is mostly thanks to no salary cap which means teammates are all really on the struggle bus.
This debate about women’s sports overseas and especially Europe is so unanchored in reality. In every metric from fan attendance to participation at the youth league Europe lags far behind America in women’s sports. There is no mass audience for women’s basketball in Europe, viewership and attendance lags well below the W.
The W is actually trying to put the league on a viable footing and have some equity in the revenue sharing (hence the CBA, a thing that does not exist in overseas leagues and the non-stars make basically nothing). The salaries for Americans in Turkey at the top clubs are sort of like if Hal Steinbrenner and Jerry Jones decided to start women’s teams as a vanity project and pay whatever they felt like. Sure, you’d get some big money for 5-10 players but it’s not a way to grow the sport or make it a sustainable way of life for even most pro-level players.
Watching these sportswriters and players talk about salaries and benefits in Ekaterinburg pre-2022 was especially crazy making. They weren’t getting paid to play basketball. They were getting paid to serve as a cut-out in a complicated money laundering and international sanctions evading scheme for one of Putin’s favored oligarchs. And yeah, that was a pretty sweet gig but is wholly irrelevant for the economics of a legitimate women’s basketball league.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/4456252/2023/04/27/wnba-salaries-overseas/