The National Women's Soccer League awarded its 18th franchise to Columbus, Ohio, on Monday, with billionaire owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam—who control the NFL's Cleveland Browns—paying a record $205 million expansion fee. The team begins play in 2028.
The fee represents a 105% increase over the $100 million Denver and Boston paid in 2024 for franchises that entered play this season. The Haslams' purchase marks the third NWSL expansion awarded in twelve months, following Atlanta's November 2024 announcement at an undisclosed fee, and establishes a new pricing floor for what had been a $35 million market as recently as 2022, when the Bay Area and San Diego entered. Columbus becomes the league's fifth expansion market since 2023, a pace unseen in American women's sports.
The Haslams bring $6.9 billion in estimated net worth, according to Forbes, and operational overlap with their NFL holdings. Dee Haslam chairs the Haslam Sports Group board; Jimmy Haslam's Pilot Flying J fuels the Browns' sponsorship inventory. The Columbus franchise will share neither stadium nor front-office infrastructure with the Browns, but the ownership structure suggests potential cross-promotional leverage during Ohio State football Saturdays, when Columbus pulls 100,000-plus crowds within three miles of the likely NWSL venue, Historic Crew Stadium, which seats 20,000 and hosted a SheBelieves Cup match last month drawing 19,289.
The fee structure signals two movements. First, the league is banking on media-rights inflation. The current CBS-Amazon-ESPN package expires after 2027; Columbus kicks off in the first season of a new deal, with industry estimates projecting a 3x to 5x increase from the current $60 million annual average. Second, the Haslams' willingness to pay double the 2024 price suggests family offices are pricing in ancillary revenue streams—apparel partnerships, local broadcast windows, venue naming rights—that were negligible three years ago but now generate $8 million to $12 million annually for top-half clubs, per league financial disclosures.
Columbus had been circling an NWSL bid since the Crew's MLS ownership group, led by the Haslam family and Cleveland Browns minority owner Jimmy Haslam, explored dual-gender operations in 2023. That effort stalled over valuation disagreements; the record fee suggests the Haslams decided to separate the asset rather than negotiate shared economics. The city's SheBelieves Cup attendance—19,289 for a neutral-site friendly—was higher than 13 of 16 NWSL clubs' 2024 season averages, providing the league with proof of market demand without needing to rely on projections.
The Haslams now face a 36-month runway to assemble a front office, finalize a stadium lease, and activate sponsorship inventory before opening day in February 2028. The league's recent expansion playbook gives a rough schedule: general manager hired by Q3 2025, head coach by Q1 2026, roster construction beginning after the 2026 NWSL Draft. Denver and Boston each spent $15 million to $20 million on pre-launch operations; Columbus should expect similar burn, with additional costs if Historic Crew Stadium requires renovations to meet NWSL's evolving facility standards, which now include dedicated locker rooms and medical suites that did not exist when the venue opened in 1999.
Watch for the Haslams' choice of chief executive. If they hire from within Haslam Sports Group—where 78% of senior leadership came from NFL or NBA backgrounds as of last year—it signals an institutional sports approach. If they recruit from NWSL ranks, it suggests deference to league culture and a lighter governance hand. The hire should arrive by August, when the league holds its annual owners' meeting and typically sets expansion timelines for front-office milestones.
The $205 million fee does not include stadium capital expenditures, which could add $30 million to $50 million if the Haslams pursue a dedicated build rather than renovating Historic Crew Stadium. The league has not required soccer-specific venues for recent expansions—Boston plays in a 11,000-seat multi-use facility—but Columbus' strong attendance baseline and the Haslams' real-estate capacity make a purpose-built option plausible. That decision will likely surface in the next six months, as the ownership group files zoning applications or announces a Historic Crew Stadium lease extension.
The takeaway
The **$205M** Columbus fee doubles recent expansion pricing and suggests NWSL franchise values are tracking media-rights optimism faster than revenue currently supports.
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.