Haslam Sports Group paid $205 million Tuesday for Columbus, the National Women's Soccer League's 18th franchise, a number that does three things simultaneously: it sets the highest women's sports expansion price on record, it locks Atlanta into a $165 million minimum payment due by September, and it proves the league's February decision to grant Atlanta rights before naming a price was commercially sound.
The Columbus deal closes five weeks after Boston and Denver began play as teams 15 and 16, and five months after Atlanta received conditional approval as team 17 without a disclosed fee. The sequencing was deliberate. Atlanta's franchise agreement included language tying its final payment to the next completed expansion sale, with a $165 million floor. Columbus delivered the floor and then some. The league now holds $370 million in expansion commitments inside a nine-month window, all of it from groups that cleared both the financial and operational diligence the previous ownership cycle could not.
The Haslams control the NFL's Cleveland Browns and a majority stake in the Milwaukee Bucks through Dee and Jimmy Haslam, who are worth an estimated $7.4 billion. Their Columbus bid included two other names that matter in women's sports capital formation: the Schultz Family Foundation, affiliated with Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, and Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams founder Jeni Britton. The Schultz connection is not decorative. His foundation has quietly funded multiple women's sports infrastructure plays over the past 18 months, including facility partnerships and youth pipeline investments that do not announce themselves as franchise groundwork until they are. Columbus now has that pipeline baked into its ownership structure before the team plays a match.
The $205 million number also resets the baseline for what the NWSL can ask when it inevitably expands to 20 teams. Commissioner Jessica Berman said Tuesday the league would pause at 18, but pause is not stop. Two more markets are already positioning—one Great Lakes, one Southwest—and the Haslam price gives the league a reference point that will not decline. The previous high was Atlanta's $165 million, which was itself a 230% increase over the $50 million Bay FC paid in 2023. Columbus moved the line again, by 24%, in under five months. The compounding is faster than the NBA's expansion cycle, where Seattle and Las Vegas are expected to pay $4.5 billion each but have been in negotiation for two years.
The timing also matters for media rights. The NWSL's current deal with CBS, ESPN, Amazon, and Scripps runs through 2027. Columbus kicks off in 2028, the same year the league will negotiate its next package with 18 teams in play and two more likely behind them. The delta between a 14-team league and a 20-team league in a media negotiation is not linear. It is the difference between a niche sport and a national footprint that forces RSNs and streaming platforms to bid against each other for secondary windows. The Haslam deal, and the Atlanta payment it triggered, effectively bought the league two years of compounding scale before the media negotiation begins.
Three things to watch: the Atlanta ownership group's final payment date, which has not been disclosed but is contractually tied to the Columbus close; the Columbus front office hires, which will signal whether the Haslams are running this as a Bucks-style analytics operation or a Browns-style traditional build; and whether the Schultz Foundation's involvement in Columbus leads to similar structures in the next two expansion bids, which would formalize a new class of institutional capital in women's sports that currently moves through family offices and does not announce itself.
The league now has $370 million in expansion fees committed before the end of 2025, which is more than the entire league was worth when Bay FC paid $50 million two years ago.
The takeaway
Columbus's $205M fee locked Atlanta into $165M, giving NWSL $370M in expansion revenue and a price floor for the next two franchises.
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