No. 2 in All U.S. Basketball Behind Curry

Caitlin Clark is outselling LeBron James, Luka Doncic, and Michael Jordan. That sentence requires no qualification and no asterisk. According to data from Fanatics, the Indiana Fever guard’s No. 22 jersey ranked second in overall U.S. basketball sales across both the WNBA and the NBA, trailing only Stephen Curry. The framing of this as a WNBA story undersells what the numbers actually represent. Clark is not the top-selling women’s basketball player in the country. She is the second-highest-selling basketball player in the country, period, in a combined market that includes the NBA’s most bankable stars. Jordan’s vintage jerseys have been a consistent retail force for decades. LeBron James is still an active superstar with global commercial reach. Luka Doncic won an NBA championship. Clark outsold all of them.

The commercial momentum behind Clark’s jersey began before she played a single professional minute. Following her selection as the overall No. 1 pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft, her Indiana Fever jersey sold out in under an hour, making her the top-selling draft pick across any sport in Fanatics history. That distinction held across every sport, not just basketball, not just the WNBA. The velocity of demand that day established a baseline that her rookie season then built on continuously. Fanatics reported that WNBA player-specific merchandise saw a 1,000 percent year-over-year increase during Clark’s rookie campaign, a figure so large it reads as a category transformation rather than a commercial uptick. Her draft class contributed broadly, Angel Reese ranked second in WNBA sales, and Kate Martin fourth, but the architecture of that increase was built around Clark’s specific commercial gravity.

Caitlin Clark Jersey Sales: What the Numbers Actually Mean

Passing LeBron, Luka, and Wemby in jersey sales truly sounds unreal 👀

But that’s exactly what Caitlin Clark has been doing since her WNBA debut.

The latest data shows that the No. 2 spot for the top-selling basketball jerseys since 2024 does NOT belong to an NBA superstar.

It… pic.twitter.com/PlafkEMktp

— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPoints) May 19, 2026

The Clark Effect has been discussed extensively, but the Fanatics data gives it a specific and concrete form that conversation-level analysis cannot. Outselling Michael Jordan in jersey sales in any given year is not something that happens by accident. Jordan’s commercial profile has outlasted his playing career by more than two decades. His jersey is purchased by people who never watched him play, as a nostalgia product, as a cultural artifact, as the default gift for the basketball fan in any demographic. Clark outselling that market while competing in a league that four years ago had a fraction of the retail infrastructure the NBA maintains is a data point that reframes what the WNBA’s commercial ceiling actually looks like.

The comparison to Stephen Curry is equally instructive. Curry is the only basketball player who has sold more jerseys than Clark in this period, an active NBA superstar with four championships, two MVP awards, and a playing style that transformed how basketball is coached at every level. The gap between first and second place is, in isolation, a reasonable outcome. What is not reasonable, or was not until recently, is that the second-place position belongs to a player in her second year in a league that spent most of its history arguing for basic commercial recognition.

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Where the WNBA Goes From Here

since 2024 Caitlin Clark has been outselling these NBA stars

(via: @gettyimages/ h/t @fanatics) pic.twitter.com/ZeS1Aso3RK

— Complex Sports (@ComplexSports) May 22, 2026

The retail numbers Clark is producing do not exist in isolation from the league’s broader commercial expansion. Television deals, arena attendance records, and merchandise infrastructure have all shifted in the years surrounding Clark’s arrival, and separating cause from effect is genuinely complex. What is clear is that the market for women’s basketball merchandise is no longer a speculative bet. It is a documented and growing reality, and Clark sits at the centre of it with numbers that can be placed directly against the NBA’s most recognised names without requiring a separate category.

Paige Bueckers enters the WNBA this season as the next high-profile arrival, and the expectation is that she will add to the commercial momentum Clark and the 2024 draft class built. Whether any individual player can replicate what Clark has done commercially is an open question; once-in-a-generation commercial profiles do not simply regenerate on a draft cycle. What Clark has demonstrated is that the audience for women’s basketball at this level of visibility is real, large, and prepared to spend. The jersey numbers are where that argument is made most concisely.

Featured image: Nike