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- NWSL growing to 16 teams this season and has confirmed Atlanta franchise for 2028
- Denver’s home-opener set to break attendance record for professional women’s sports game in US
- Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland all linked with NWSL expansion
National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) commissioner Jessica Berman has confirmed that the league expects to award its 18th franchise “later this year”.
The new team will begin play in 2028, the same year another new franchise in Atlanta will join the competition.
The NWSL has previously stated its intention to add another franchise for 2028 but until now had not shared a timeline.
In terms of potential candidates, ESPN reported in February that a group led by the Haslam family, which owns the National Football League’s (NFL) Cleveland Browns and Major League Soccer (MLS) Columbus Crew, is ‘seriously exploring’ bringing an NWSL expansion team to Ohio. Cincinnati and Cleveland also previously missed out on securing a franchise.
Berman said confirming the franchise this year would allow the new organisation enough time to prepare for its debut season, aligning with the NWSL’s decision last year to switch to a rolling expansion process.
“I think we have been intentional about extending the ramp up period for all of our expansion teams as we move forward,” Berman said, speaking at her annual season kickoff address in New York. “It’s the reason we’re working on team 18 in 2026 and hope to give them a very long runway. It is also the reason that we changed to a rolling process, as opposed to having arbitrary deadlines that are based on our timeline as opposed to their readiness.”
North America’s preeminent women’s soccer competition has grown rapidly in recent years, expanding from nine teams in 2019 to 16 for the upcoming 2026 season, which will see the Boston Legacy and Denver Summit join the NWSL.
Berman revealed that the Summit have already sold more than 50,000 tickets for their inaugural home game at Mile High Stadium, which would be a record attendance for a professional women’s sports game in the US.
The Legacy, meanwhile, are set to host over 25,000 fans for their home-opener at Gillette Stadium, illustrating the appetite for women’s soccer in the NWSL’s newest markets.
That demand has seen both expansion fees and team valuations soar. Arthur Blank’s AMB Sports & Entertainment is paying a record US$165 million for the Atlanta franchise, while Sportico’s most recent estimates show that the average NWSL club is now worth US$184 million, up 179 per cent since 2023.
Amid heightened investor interest, Berman has previously said she believes the league can grow to 32 teams. While the switch to a rolling process means there is no set timeframe for the next round of expansion, it essentially indicates that the league is always open to conversations with interested parties.
“We have a dozen or so groups that we are continuing to talk to, and depending on their readiness, will help inform our strategy beyond team 18,” said Berman, who last year signed a contract extension until 2028.
“We’re also thinking about a whole bunch of other factors, one of which, for example, is the fact that 2028 will be the first year of our new media deal, and that will extend likely through the Women’s World Cup.
“So all of that will be taken into account when we decide what we do beyond team 18.”
The addition of two new teams for this season has also created new media rights inventory for the 2026 campaign, which kicks off on 13th March.
There will be more games on CBS and ESPN, with the latter set to broadcast a handful of fixtures during primetime on Sunday nights, filling a slot previously occupied by Major League Baseball (MLB).
FAST network Victory+ has also come onboard as the league’s fifth domestic broadcaster for the current cycle and will launch a dedicated content hub for its coverage.
Berman said there is no timeline for when the NWSL’s media rights for 2028 onwards will hit the market, but noted that the league is evaluating what the right distribution mix will look like after the current deals expire at the end of next year.
“We’re currently undergoing some of that analysis,” she said. “This chapter of our media rights has helped us to accomplish our intended objective, which was to maximise reach and discoverability, to put our games on different platforms that actually reach specific audiences, and each of them actually reach a different demographic, or have a different target demographic.
“It is our hope that as we build connectivity with those new audiences that they begin to – and have already started to – travel around with us to the different platforms. Whether and how that same dynamic needs to exist in 2028 and beyond is still something that we’re going to analyse as we think about the next media right cycle.”
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