The National Women's Soccer League awarded Columbus, Ohio, an expansion franchise to begin play in 2028, with Haslam Sports Group paying a league-record $205 million expansion fee. The figure represents a 73% increase over the $118 million Bay FC paid for its Boston franchise awarded in 2024, and a 312% premium over the $50 million Cincinnati and San Francisco paid in 2019.
Haslam Sports Group—owners of the Cleveland Browns and Columbus Crew MLS franchise—will operate the team from the 20,500-capacity Lower.com Field, a purpose-built soccer venue that opened in 2021. The ownership structure includes Dee and Jimmy Haslam alongside minority partners not yet disclosed. The NWSL now sits at 16 teams for the 2028 season, with Bay FC and Utah Royals already confirmed for 2026 starts. Commissioner Jessica Berman confirmed in March that the league would pause expansion after Columbus to assess competitive balance and broadcast infrastructure.
The $205 million price carries three signals. First, it establishes a floor for remaining expansion candidates—Denver, Charlotte, Nashville, and Phoenix groups who've submitted informal bids—at a moment when MLS expansion fees hover near $500 million but serve 30 teams with deeper bench revenue. Second, it reflects the Haslams' expectation that the NWSL's next broadcast deal, opening for negotiation in late 2026, will exceed the current $240 million four-year package with CBS, ESPN, and Prime Video by a meaningful multiple. The league's average attendance rose 13% season-over-year in 2025, to 11,400 per match, with marquee clubs like Portland and Kansas City exceeding 15,000. Third, the timing—18 months before Columbus kicks off—suggests the Haslams are banking on early-mover advantage in kit sponsorships and local broadcast carriage, both of which require lead time the later expansion groups won't have.
Columbus adds a sixth Midwest market to the NWSL, alongside Chicago, Kansas City, Minnesota, and Michigan. The city ranks 32nd in U.S. media market size but posted the highest per-capita MLS attendance in 2025, a proxy the league office has used to justify smaller-market expansion over coastal bids. The Haslams already control the Crew's jersey sponsorship (Nationwide, $6 million annually) and stadium naming rights (Lower.com, $9 million over ten years), deals that typically cascade to co-located teams under league rules permitting intra-family transfer at cost.
The franchise arrives as NWSL team valuations detach from revenue multiples and track closer to scarcity-driven asset bids. Angel City FC, founded in 2020 for $1, was valued at $180 million in a 2023 minority stake sale despite operating losses near $12 million annually. The league's aggregate enterprise value now exceeds $2 billion, assuming the $205 million Columbus fee applies uniformly to all 16 clubs, though secondary-market transactions remain sparse. Two family offices with proximity to the Haslam group confirmed to staff that the ownership structure includes an option to acquire an MLS Next Pro affiliate in 2029, pending league approval, suggesting vertical integration planning that mirrors European club models.
What to watch: The Haslams will name a president and general manager by September 2026, per standard NWSL operating agreements. Kit manufacturer deals typically close 18 months before inaugural kickoff, placing negotiations in the October 2026 window, when Nike, Adidas, and Puma will also be in renewal talks with Bay FC and Utah. The league's broadcast RFP is expected to circulate in early 2027, with Columbus as the newest data point in per-team value arguments.
The $205 million fee is the number the next five ownership groups will need to beat, or the reason they'll walk.
The takeaway
Columbus's **$205M** NWSL entry fee—up 73% from Boston—resets expansion pricing ahead of the league's 2027 broadcast negotiations.
nwslexpansionhaslam sports groupteam valuationcolumbusbroadcast rights
Brand your brand — for real
70,000 products · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · imprinted since 1997
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.