The National Women's Soccer League awarded expansion franchises to Atlanta and Columbus on Monday, with the Haslam family paying a record $205 million entry fee for the Columbus club—exactly double the $100 million FC Cincinnati ownership paid to launch Bay FC in San Jose eighteen months ago. Atlanta's fee structure was not disclosed, though league sources indicate parity pricing. Both clubs begin play in 2026, bringing the NWSL to sixteen teams.
The Haslams—Jimmy and Dee, owners of the Cleveland Browns and Columbus Crew—secured the Columbus franchise through a joint bid with the Edwards family, operators of the Blue Jackets NHL franchise. Atlanta is backed by a consortium led by private equity executive Douglas Manzler and former Sixth Street Partners managing director Lowell Henry; the group includes Liberty Media board member Andrea Wong. Neither ownership collective disclosed stadium agreements, though Columbus has existing infrastructure at Lower.com Field and Atlanta is evaluating sites near Mercedes-Benz Stadium and in suburban Gwinnett County. The league expects facility announcements within ninety days.
The $205 million fee carries three implications. First, it establishes a new floor for distressed MLS ownership groups sizing women's soccer entry: at half the cost of a bottom-tier MLS expansion slot ($500 million for San Diego in 2023), the NWSL now represents a credible alternative for stadium operators seeking anchor tenants. Second, it suggests the league's enterprise value has crossed $2.5 billion—each franchise now holds implied equity of roughly $156 million at sixteen clubs, up from $85 million at fourteen. Third, it creates a two-tier ownership class: legacy investors who paid $2 million in 2021 sit alongside entrants who paid $205 million four years later, setting up awkward cap table dynamics when collective bargaining opens in 2026 or sale processes begin. Portland, purchased for $1 in 2019, has fielded inquiries above $180 million.
The timing matters for three reasons. The NWSL's national media deal with CBS, ESPN, Amazon, and Scripps expires after the 2027 season; adding two markets raises the linear footprint by 4.2 million TV households and improves the league's negotiating position against a fractured broadcast landscape. Atlanta specifically opens access to Delta's corporate hospitality budget—Delta spent $18 million on Atlanta United sponsorship in 2022—and positions the league inside the Coca-Cola and Home Depot C-suites. Columbus gives the league a contiguous Midwest corridor from Chicago through Cincinnati, useful for reducing charter flight costs and building regional sponsor packages.
The Haslam involvement carries secondary effects. The family runs the Pilot Flying J truck-stop empire, a $35 billion revenue business with negligible sports marketing spend; the Browns and Crew operate as holding-period assets, not activation platforms. That profile suggests the Columbus NWSL franchise is an acquisition play—buy at $205 million, operate through two media cycles, exit at $400 million+ when private equity discovers the league in 2029. The structure mirrors what Sixth Street attempted with FC Barcelona's media rights: pay a premium for early access to a repricing event. Worth noting: Sixth Street's Henry is on the Atlanta ownership slate.
The league now faces three operational questions. First, whether to accelerate the seventeenth and eighteenth franchise awards—commissioner Jessica Berman has indicated interest in reaching twenty clubs by 2030, and unawarded markets include Boston, Philadelphia, and Tampa. Second, whether to implement promotion-relegation with the USL Super League, which launched in August with eight clubs and ambitions to create a second division; that negotiation hinges on how legacy NWSL owners value their $205 million moats. Third, whether to open the next CBA early and reset the salary cap, currently $3.3 million per team, before player agents begin citing the Columbus fee in arbitration.
The Atlanta and Columbus kits, training facility partners, and head coach hires are expected between March and June. Haslam family representatives declined to specify whether Crew technical staff will oversee the women's club or operate independently. Atlanta has begun preliminary conversations with former USWNT assistant coach Twila Kilgore, per two people familiar. Both franchises are expected to announce jersey sponsors before the 2025 NWSL Championship in November, a compressed timeline that suggests deals were negotiated in parallel with league approval.
The takeaway
**$205M** entry fee doubles 2023 price, implies **$2.5B+** league value, and creates arbitrage opportunity for legacy owners holding **$2M** stakes.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.