Haslam Sports Group will pay $205 million to operate the NWSL's 18th franchise in Columbus, Ohio, the league's highest expansion fee and a 24% premium over the $165 million Atlanta committed five months earlier. The deal, structured to close before the league's summer transfer window, guarantees Atlanta's earlier payment and establishes a new valuation benchmark for the remaining expansion slots the NWSL expects to award through 2028.
The Columbus franchise joins Boston Legacy FC and Denver Summit FC, which began play five weeks ago as the league's 15th and 16th teams at undisclosed fees believed to be in the $110 million to $125 million range. Atlanta, awarded in November 2025, had represented the previous high-water mark. The Haslam bid—submitted through a partnership that includes the Edwards family, minority stakeholders in the Cleveland Browns—signals that scarcity pricing now governs NWSL expansion rather than operating-cost models. The league launched in 2013 with eight teams; twelve years later, it commands fees that exceed recent NHL expansion benchmarks on a per-team basis.
What matters here is the compression of the expansion calendar and the resulting price discipline. The NWSL awarded three franchises in five months—Atlanta in November, Boston and Denver operational in March, Columbus announced in April—and extracted a $40 million step-up between Atlanta and Columbus without pausing to assess on-field performance or attendance curves. That pace suggests the league office and its financial advisors believe current media-rights negotiations, expected to close before July, will justify even higher entry fees for the 19th and 20th slots. Haslam Sports Group, which controls the NFL's Cleveland Browns and a stake in the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks, brings institutional sponsorship relationships and Midwest venue infrastructure that the league has explicitly targeted. Columbus sits 125 miles from Cleveland, creating a regional rivalry cluster the NWSL has lacked outside the coasts. The Edwards family, meanwhile, operates Pilot Flying J, the truck-stop chain with 750 locations and a customer base the league has not yet monetized at scale.
The fee structure also reflects a bet on Columbus's youth soccer economy. The city hosts the league's second-largest youth tournament by participation, behind only Dallas, and fielded a successful women's professional team in the defunct Women's United Soccer Association two decades ago. Haslam Sports Group inherits no legacy stadium debt and will likely negotiate a shared-tenancy deal at Lower.com Field, the MLS venue that seats 20,000 and sits six miles from Ohio State's campus. That setup mirrors the Kansas City Current's model, which turned profitable in its second season by anchoring a purpose-built stadium with concert revenue and youth clinics. The Haslams, who have operated the Browns since 2012 with decidedly mixed results, are positioning the NWSL franchise as the sports-entertainment anchor for a demographic—college-educated women under 35—that has stopped attending NFL games in meaningful numbers.
Watch for three follow-on moves. First, the league will announce its 19th and 20th expansion markets before the July media-rights deadline, likely targeting either Tampa or Charlotte to complete Southeastern coverage. Second, Haslam Sports Group will name a technical director before the NWSL's summer transfer window closes in late June, a hire that will signal whether the franchise is importing European coaching infrastructure or promoting from the U.S. college system. Third, the league will renegotiate its collective-bargaining agreement with the players' union before the 2027 season, and the $205 million Columbus fee—along with whatever Atlanta, Boston, and Denver actually paid—will anchor the union's revenue-sharing demands.
The Columbus franchise begins play in the 2027 season, meaning Haslam Sports Group has fourteen months to hire a front office, sign a kit sponsor, and secure local broadcast distribution before the league's roster-expansion draft. The $205 million fee is payable in three installments, the final tranche due sixty days before the first match.
The takeaway
NWSL expansion fees rose 24% in five months, setting a new floor for remaining bids and anchoring upcoming CBA talks.
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