The National Women's Soccer League awarded Columbus an expansion franchise for $205M, with Haslam Sports Group operating the team beginning in 2028. The fee is the highest in women's professional sports history and 24% above Atlanta's $165M commitment announced last year.
The Columbus deal closes five weeks after Boston Legacy FC and Denver Summit FC began play as the league's 15th and 16th teams. Atlanta's franchise, announced in October 2024, will enter in 2026. Columbus becomes the 18th NWSL market and the second Ohio presence after a dormant Columbus Crew-affiliated effort collapsed in early development. Haslam Sports Group owns the NFL's Cleveland Browns and a stake in the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks. Jimmy Haslam's net worth exceeds $7B through Pilot Flying J truck-stop revenue.
The valuation floor matters more than the headline. Atlanta's $165M fee was structured with performance triggers and league-wide revenue thresholds that created settlement risk for existing owners. Columbus paying $205M in cash removes that conditionality. The league now has two datapoints above $160M within six months, which resets negotiation posture for markets 19 and 20. Philadelphia, Charlotte, and Nashville remain in formal conversations. San Francisco and Las Vegas groups have held preliminary meetings with league staff. The implicit bid floor is now $180M, assuming no material attendance or rights-fee deterioration before 2026.
Sponsorship allocators gain clarity. NWSL's national partnerships with Nike, Google, and Ally Financial were negotiated when the average franchise value sat near $50M in 2022. The league's next media cycle begins in 2027, one year before Columbus launches. CBS and ESPN hold matching rights under the current $240M four-year deal. The Columbus fee implies enterprise value above $3.7B for the league, using standard 18x expansion-multiple math. That figure gives CBS and ESPN a reference point when the league opens discussions in early 2026. If the per-team average holds at $205M by then, the league will argue for a domestic rights floor near $120M annually, double the current average.
The Haslam move also clarifies ownership strategy. NFL owners now hold stakes in six NWSL teams, including Arthur Blank in Atlanta, Robert Kraft in Boston, and the Walton-Penner group in Denver. The cross-ownership model imports front-office infrastructure and sponsorship relationships but raises questions about brand independence. Haslam Sports Group operates Lower.com Field in Columbus, the $400M stadium opened for MLS in 2021. The NWSL team will share the venue, avoiding the expansion-franchise capital trap that plagued early Angel City and San Diego buildouts. Rent terms are not public, but comparable MLS-NWSL splits in Portland and Seattle run 12-15% of gate revenue to the building operator.
The Ohio governor's office has quietly pursued NWSL expansion for 18 months, viewing it as workforce-brand signaling for Columbus's insurance and logistics corridor. The city added 65,000 residents between 2020 and 2023, the fastest growth rate among Midwest metros above 500,000 population. Corporate season-ticket deposits from Nationwide Insurance, American Electric Power, and Cardinal Health will determine whether the franchise breaks even in year three, the standard NWSL underwriting threshold.
Three follow-on events now have tighter timelines. The league will name Columbus's head coach by September 2025, giving the hire two full years to build a technical staff and begin international scouting. Nike's kit deal runs through 2027; the Columbus franchise will enter negotiations for its own apparel sponsor in mid-2026, using Atlanta's $8M annual deal with Delta as a floor. The expansion draft occurs in November 2027, six months before the first match. Existing teams may protect 11 players, leaving Columbus to select from a pool of unprotected contracts and allocation money.
The league's 2028 schedule will expand to 26 regular-season matches per team, up from 24 in 2027. That means 234 total matches and 117 broadcast windows for CBS and ESPN to fill or sublicense. Columbus adds approximately 4.2M residents to the league's total addressable market when including the Dayton and Akron metro areas. The franchise will play its first match in March 2028, assuming no construction delays at Lower.com Field.
The takeaway
Columbus's **$205M** fee eliminates Atlanta's payment risk and establishes **$180M** as the new floor for NWSL's next two expansion markets.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
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.