The National Women's Soccer League awarded its 18th franchise to Columbus on Tuesday, with the Haslam Sports Group and local investors paying $205 million to enter play in 2028. The fee is $90 million above the $115 million Boston and Denver each paid in 2024, and marks the first time a women's professional sports expansion has cleared $200 million in North America.
The Columbus group is led by Dee and Jimmy Haslam, who control the NFL's Cleveland Browns and a 25% stake in the Milwaukee Bucks. The franchise will share Lower.com Field with the MLS Columbus Crew, which the Haslams purchased alongside the Edwards and Fischer families in 2019 for $230 million after a protracted relocation fight. The NWSL team inherits a downtown stadium opened in 2021 with 20,371 capacity, 30 suites, and a kit sponsorship infrastructure already built for soccer. No temporary venue. No public subsidy ask. The team starts with cash flow from day one if attendance tracks league averages above 9,000.
The fee structure tells you what NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman is pricing into expansion now. Boston and Denver paid $115 million in early 2024 before either had a venue locked. Columbus is paying 78% more with a controlled building, an MLS sponsor stable that includes Acura and Nationwide, and a metro population of 2.1 million that already supports an MLB, NHL, and two Division I programs. The league is no longer selling hope. It is selling operating margin for ownership groups that can skip the three-year venue hunt and sponsor education cycle. Cincinnati paid $50 million to join MLS in 2016. Columbus is paying $205 million for the women's league twelve years later because the returns are legible.
Two second-order effects matter for existing clubs. First, the expansion fee resets the private valuation floor. Angel City was last privately valued near $180 million in a late 2023 round. Washington Spirit sold for $35 million in 2022. The $205 million Columbus paid is an entry fee, not an equity stub, which implies the asset itself is worth materially more on stabilized revenue. Clubs with downtown venues and local sponsor traction can now point to Columbus as the comp when a family office asks about exit scenarios. Second, the 2028 launch gives the league four years to negotiate its next media deal before adding supply. The current Apple TV contract runs through 2027 and pays clubs roughly $400,000 annually. If the league signs a linear component or meaningfully higher streaming guarantee before Columbus kicks off, the expansion team enters with higher per-club media revenue than the $115 million Denver and Boston paid to access.
Haslam Sports Group has made one significant women's sports bet prior: a minority stake in the WNBA's Cleveland Charge, which it exited in 2023. The Columbus NWSL move is structurally different. The Haslams control the venue, the naming rights, the concessions, and the local MLS partnership that has already signed nine-figure sponsor agreements with Columbus-headquartered firms. The NWSL team plugs into an existing commercial engine rather than building one. The Crew averaged 20,674 fans in 2024, sixth in MLS. The women's team can market to that season-ticket base, split front-office overhead, and avoid the facilities capex spiral that has killed three prior women's leagues.
Watch three timelines. First, Columbus must name a general manager and head coach by late 2025 if it wants to participate in the 2026 NWSL Draft with protected expansion picks. The league has not yet published roster construction rules for the 18th team, but the 2024 expansion sides each selected 12 players via draft and trade before free agency. Second, the Crew's kit deal with Acura expires in 2026, and Columbus will structure the renewal to include women's team inventory, likely adding $2-3 million annually in split revenue. Third, Cincinnati is quietly exploring an NWSL bid with a 2029 or 2030 window, per two sponsor-side sources, which would give the league 19 teams and a clean travel pod structure across Eastern and Central time zones.
The $205 million fee is the number. The 2028 start date is the tell. Columbus is paying for four years of MLS infrastructure maturation, four years of media deal clarity, and the certainty that the league survives long enough to make the check worthwhile.
The takeaway
Columbus paid $205M for operating leverage—stadium control, MLS sponsor base, metro depth—not speculative upside, resetting NWSL club valuations before first kick.
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.