For the first time in a while, there was no consensus on who would go No 1 overall in the WNBA draft this year. When the Dallas Wings did make their pick, they chose Azzi Fudd, who had distinguished herself under Geno Auriemma at UConn, including a national championship in 2025.

The moment she was picked was pure: a delighted and seemingly nervous Fudd joined WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert onstage. She took photos with her jersey, made it through the ESPN interview that immediately followed, and beamed at her family and teammates in the audience. Paige Bueckers, who played alongside the 23-year-old at UConn and was the No 1 pick for the Wings in 2025, was there also to celebrate a well-deserved honor for Fudd.

Fudd was considered one of the best shooters in the college game, was named All-American by the Associated Press, and was a member of the All-Big East first team – and that’s just in her final season.

But rather than looking at the impact Fudd will have in the professional game, it was her relationship with Bueckers that dominated the draft night discourse. The pair confirmed they were dating last year but have offered few public details about their relationship since, and it’s possible they’re no longer together at all. It’s their right to leave fans in the dark if they wish. It’s also how players in the league have always moved.

The WNBA is entering its 30th season. Like any workplace, the league has been home to romantic relationships as long as it has existed. Women dating women isn’t anything new in the W, but a fixation on the love lives of grown women who are the best at the game in the world is.

Frankie de la Cretaz, author of the Out of Your League newsletter, notes that while the league’s foundational audience was largely queer, the “dominant culture” is now imposing its own narratives on a league where a quarter of players are out.

As a result, says De la Cretaz, “the cultural context and history is erased. The WNBA and its locker rooms are culturally lesbian spaces, and those spaces come with different social norms than straight ones do.”

While large portions of WNBA newcomers may obsess over players’ relationships, for the athletes themselves it’s business as usual. Some of those norms include “the fact that members of the sapphic community regularly socialize with their girlfriends, their exes, and/or their exes’ new girlfriends,” De la Cretaz adds. “WNBA players have been dating each other for a long time, and for every couple that we know about, there are dozens that we never will. There are hookups, situationships, and breakups on WNBA teams all the time. These insular, overlapping social dynamics are not just common in women’s sports locker rooms – they’re a core aspect of how lesbian communities operate, too.”

To a large degree, the surge of interest in the love lives of WNBA players is fueled by social media. It’s never been so easy to hop on your phone, type in an athlete’s name, and find no shortage of posts speculating about their social life. Parasocial relationships are simpler than ever to form; Instagram and TikTok, which are popular with WNBA players, make such attachments even easier.

But there’s also something else at work, says Dr Alicia Smith-Tran, an associate professor of sociology and comparative American studies at Oberlin College. “Obviously, the status of women’s sports is elevating,” says Smith-Tran, who played on Oberlin’s basketball team as an undergraduate. But despite the surge in popularity of leagues such as the WNBA, she says “women who are professional athletes continue to be seen as lesser than their male counterparts”.

The focus on the romantic lives of players “is kind of a manifestation of how women athletes continue to be marginalized, and the focus is taken off their skills and contributions in the workplace,” Smith-Tran adds. In short, it’s “another way that women athletes are being painted as less worthy, or less talented, when compared to men”. They become the object of gossip columns rather than sports columns.

The public’s resistance to seeing women as athletes in the same way we view their male counterparts is due to the fact that culturally, “we tend to see athleticism as a masculine trait,” says Smith-Tran.

That’s especially true for basketball, which requires attributes – such as height and strength – that don’t neatly square with how most of us frame femininity. NBA stars like LeBron James and Steph Curry also have romantic relationships – notably, not same-sex ones – “but that’s kind of just a nice side fact that we know about them, compared to seeing [what happens] with women in the WNBA, where the focus [may be] on their relationship first – and then we watch and see if they prove themselves as athletes who are worthy in the same way.”

There’s another problem with the conversations around romance in the WNBA: they contribute to the fetishization of queer couples and relationships. Whether Fudd and Bueckers are still in a relationship is a side point; what’s more relevant is the exoticization of the idea that they may be.

“I think the idea of two superstars of a sports league potentially being in a relationship with each other plays into so many tropes from people’s favorite romance novels, and it can be easy to get carried away in the fantasy,” says De la Cretaz.

This was highlighted during the frenzy around the gay ice hockey drama Heated Rivalry.

“All too often, queer relationships are fetishized and dehumanized, becoming fodder for people to project their own desires on to,” says De la Cretaz. “The problem, however, is that Paige and Azzi are not characters in a novel; they are real people and these are their actual lives.”