Caitlin Clark has now spent almost three full years in the WNBA. In that stretch, she has played almost 50 regular-season home games at Gainbridge Fieldhouse for the Indiana Fever. So, how is it possible that WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has never attended any of those games? Well, according to Sports Business Journal, that is actually the case.
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Engelbert has never attended a regular-season Fever home game since Clark entered the league in 2024. For former ESPN host Linda Cohn, the revelation further reinforces her longstanding criticism of Engelbert. Reacting to the report, which she appeared to have only recently learned about, Cohn was once again vocal in her criticism of the WNBA commissioner.
“I learned this week that I almost could not believe,” Cohn said during Friday’s episode of The Linda Cohn Show. “According to reporting by Sports Business Journal, Cathy Engelbert, who is retiring at the end of this year, has never attended a regular-season Indiana Fever home game at Gainbridge Fieldhouse since Caitlin Clark entered the WNBA…. I have been posting videos and saying this forever: the league is being led by small minds.”
On September 18, she opened her latest episode of the show with this remark.
“Not one regular-season Caitlin Clark home game in Indianapolis since she entered the league in 2024. How does that not happen? And why was that ever okay?” she continued on the show. “So the next commissioner has to build their league through their most popular player, not go out of their way to ignore her.”
Engelbert did, however, attend the 2025 WNBA All-Star Game, which happened to be hosted at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. However, for Cohn, that does not count as a Fever or Clark home game. And this revelation further reinforces Cohn’s belief that the WNBA and Engelbert, in particular, have been deliberate in their efforts to remove the spotlight from Clark and have been quite dismissive toward her.
So far this season, Cohn has had more than one instance to reinforce this belief. One of them was the omission of Clark from the league’s 30th-anniversary poster. Another came when ION Sports, while promoting a prime-time matchup between the Indiana Fever and Dallas Wings, chose to leave Clark out of its promotional graphic entirely.
Instead, the Fever side featured teammates Lexie Hull and Raven Johnson, while the Wings side featured key stars Paige Bueckers and Arike Ogunbowale.
Caitlin Clark’s arrival in the WNBA was paradigm-shifting. It helped send attendance, viewership, and other major business metrics soaring, while transforming the Indiana Fever into one of the league’s biggest attractions, with packed arenas and massive television audiences following the former No. 1 pick. The WNBA’s 2024 season, Clark’s rookie campaign, produced its highest regular-season attendance in 22 years and its most-watched regular season in 24 years.
There are a number of things WNBA Commissioner Engelbert often faces criticism for: how she handles toxic online fandom, her earlier reluctant rollout of charter flights, her failure to adequately address inconsistent officiating and player safety, and her prolonged silence and absence during crises.
One narrative or criticism that, however, seems to lack concrete evidence is the idea that the WNBA under Cathy Engelbert’s leadership is deliberately biased against Clark. Of course, there are instances like her omission from the 30th-anniversary poster, as well as concerns surrounding physical play against her that have gone uncalled. However, none of these, on their own, seem concrete enough to establish Engelbert’s deliberate bias against Clark.
However, with the revelation that Engelbert has never once attended a single Indiana Fever game at Gainbridge Fieldhouse since Caitlin Clark entered the WNBA, that narrative appears to take quite a bit of shape.