The National Women's Soccer League awarded its 18th franchise to Columbus on Monday, with Haslam Sports Group paying a $205 million expansion fee for a team that begins play in 2028. The number is the second-order story. The first-order story is what happens in Atlanta.
Columbus locked in the top-tier expansion price five months after Atlanta secured its own franchise at $165 million—a deal structured with performance triggers tied to future valuations. The Haslam transaction, paid in full at $205 million, guarantees Atlanta's deal pays out completely, according to people familiar with both agreements. That delivers the league $370 million in expansion revenue across two markets before either team takes the field. Boston and Denver, who began play five weeks ago as teams 15 and 16, each paid $53 million in 2024. The floor moved 287% in under two years.
Haslam Sports Group owns the NFL's Cleveland Browns and a stake in the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks. The Columbus franchise marks their first women's sports property, though their Cleveland market already supports an NWSL team in the rebranded Cleveland FC. The group is placing a bet on the Ohio capital's sports infrastructure—Crew Stadium, a 20,000-seat soccer-specific venue—and Columbus's household income profile, which skews 12% above the national median in zip codes within 15 minutes of downtown. The team will compete with Ohio State athletics for sponsor share, but the Buckeyes' donor base and the NWSL's corporate partnership roster overlap minimally. Nike, Ally Financial, and Visa all signed league-level deals in the past 18 months.
The valuation reset affects more than sellers. Existing owners acquired stakes when the average franchise was valued near $40 million as recently as 2022. Gotham FC sold for $75 million in early 2023; Portland Thorns commanded $90 million months later. At $205 million, the Columbus entry price implies existing teams now carry enterprise values above $180 million, even before accounting for media-rights appreciation from the league's $240 million four-year deal with CBS, ESPN, and Prime Video that began in 2024. That creates mark-to-market gains for ownership groups who entered at older valuations, and it shifts the math for family offices evaluating minority stakes. A 10% position in an existing franchise, previously a $7 million to $9 million check, now prices closer to $18 million to $20 million on secondary transactions observed in March.
The Haslam deal also clarifies the league's expansion endgame. Commissioner Jessica Berman has said the NWSL will pause at 18 teams through 2028, but the Columbus number establishes the market-clearing price for scarcity. Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Las Vegas have all been named as markets running diligence on future bids, and the $205 million fee sets their baseline. If the league opens a 19th or 20th slot after 2028, the floor moves again—likely to $225 million or higher, based on prior valuation velocity and the league's compound annual growth rate of 34% in sponsorship revenue since 2021.
Columbus begins assembling front-office staff this summer, with GM and head-coach searches expected before September. The franchise will announce stadium naming rights and jersey sponsors by year-end, targeting brands already active in Ohio State or Columbus Crew partnerships. Kit supplier negotiations are underway with Nike and Adidas, and the league's collective-bargaining agreement expires in 2027—one year before Columbus's debut—which sets a deadline for players' association talks on roster rules and salary structures.
The takeaway
Columbus's $205M fee locked Atlanta's $165M payout, pushed franchise floors past $180M, and set a scarcity premium for any post-2028 expansion slot.
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.