2025-26 Fenerbahce Women
106 · 2026-04-19 · medium
Professional contracts to do hoop weren't always annual, with every contract year covering one indentured season, with a specific salary number attached to each annum. As far back as the 1890s, YMCA players were handed wads of surreptitious cash after games; if they felt like the envelopes were getting light, they'd defect to another team for the next game, rinse, repeat. There are a few terrible manga and anime series out there where the "bad boy" gets kicked off the team and then shows up on a rival roster just in time for the finals, but the folks who write those know more about doki-doki plot twists than sports. Point is that if a player suddenly shows up in a different uniform halfway through the season, it's because they were released or traded; unions brought this level of labor certainty to the game. One prominent exception to all of this is international women's basketball, where partial-season contracts have been common practice for decades. During the peak of gangland Russia, Spartak Moscow's Shabtai Kalmanovic splashed out millions to hire Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Tina Thompson and Lauren Jackson for the 2007-08 spring stretch run. Andrei Kozitsyn, a heavy-metals oligarch and steadfast Putin homie, bought the services of Emma Meesseman, Maya Moore and Courtney Vandersloot for UMMC Ekaterinburg on quickie six-digit fliers, then won four EuroLeague Women titles in six years. Brittney Griner was on a two-month contract with UMMC worth $1 million USD when she was wrongfully detained in February 2022; Russian teams have been banned from European basketball since then, and that seemed to be the end of that. But the tradition continues in Turkiye, where Fenerbahce has now won three of the last four continental championships. Potanın Kraliçeleri, the Queens of Hoop, no longer have an Erdogan-linked Covid profiteer as a naming sponsor, but they do keep Vandersloot and Meesseman on retainer for big games. On February 16, in the midst of WNBA labor strife and the Winter Olympics, the team announced that Breanna Stewart had signed a two-game contract for $200,000 – a number matching her salary for the entire 2025 WNBA season. She'd done the same kind of thing in 2021 with UMMC, helping the Foxes to their sixth (and most likely final) ELW title, and oh-yeah-by-the-way she was also named MVP of the tournament. In the 2026 semifinal and final, Stewie scored 11 total points on 4-of-15 shooting, but that's not to say she didn't earn her cash. Fener jumped out to an early lead against domestic archrival Galatasaray in the championship game on Sunday night, but the tide turned once number 30 in blue and yellow grabbed a towel and took a breather. Subbed back in with the score tied, Stewart immediately took the ball midwest-to-coast for a transition layup and her (temporary) team never looked back. The Turkish word for "goat" is keçi.
