WNBA's influence felt as Women's World Cup vows schedule changes

NEW YORK, Sept 15 : The WNBA season resumes on Thursday after the league’s growing influence was felt at the FIBA Women’s World Cup, where a punishing schedule underlined the difficulty of staging major international tournaments without accommodating the world’s leading women’s league.

The WNBA paused its season for the tournament, frustrating some fans, while FIBA has already said the 2030 World Cup will be staged later in the year, another sign that the league’s growing power is reshaping the global basketball calendar.

"We are pleased that the collaboration between global women’s basketball stakeholders, and adjustments we are seeing in the global women’s basketball calendar, more easily allow players to fulfill both WNBA and international team commitments," a WNBA spokesperson told Reuters.

The season restarts only four days after Sunday’s final, in which the United States beat France 97-79. Many players had rushed from their WNBA teams to join their national squads in Berlin, leaving little time to prepare and adding to fatigue as the tournament progressed.

FIBA Secretary General Andreas Zagklis acknowledged concerns over the compressed schedule.

"We had to have a schedule here that will not be repeated, I can confirm that," Zagklis told reporters on Sunday, promising there would be no back-to-back games at the 2030 tournament in Tokyo.

"I'm still convinced we did the best we could in the circumstances we had... while admitting that it was not perfect."

Seventy current and former WNBA players went to compete in Berlin, compared with about 30 active players at the tournament four years ago, illustrating the league’s increasingly central role in the international game.

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The WNBA season,