NWSL reportedly increasing to San Francisco, Boston and Utah; set report $50M franchise price
The Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League is planting roots in new cities at a report worth.
Three new groups are anticipated to launch in Utah, the San Francisco Bay Space, and Boston – with the final two teams anticipated to pay a report $50 million in growth charges in keeping with Jessica Toonkel and Rachel Bachman of the Wall Street Journal.
The worth of growth displays the expansion of the league, the place franchise charges for Los Angeles and San Diego have been reportedly between $2 million-$5 million in 2020.
Based on WSJ, San Francisco and Utah’s groups are set to kick off in 2024. Boston gained’t launch till later. Their additions will carry the league to a complete of 15 groups.
The Bay Space staff will likely be funded by an investor group that features a private-equity agency in addition to former U.S. girls’s staff gamers Brandi Chastain, Aly Wagner, Leslie Osborne and Danielle Slaton.
The Boston group is supported by a girls’s funding group that features the daughter of Celtics co-owner Robert Epstein. The staff will carry girls’s skilled soccer again to Boston after the Breakers folded in 2018.
Utah’s, like Boston, beforehand hosted a now-defunct girls’s soccer staff. The Utah Royals have been a part of the NWSL in 2018-2020. The staff transferred to Kansas Metropolis in December 2020 after gamers reported the staff’s proprietor on the time to be used of racist language. NWSL leaders agreed the Utah franchise might be revived at a later date for a set price.
Extra wins for the NWSL
The information comes after the 2022 NWSL championship between the Portland Thorns and Kansas Metropolis Present in November boasted a 71% enhance over 2021’s quantity viewership. With 915,000 viewers, it was the most-viewed match in NWSL history.
The league can be seeing elevated contracts for athletes. In Feb. 2022, the Washington Spirit have been in a position to sign Trinity Rodman to a four-year deal worth reportedly more than $1.1 million. She was 19 on the time and have become the highest-paid NWSL participant in league historical past.
Extra not too long ago, Los Angeles’ Angel Metropolis made history at the league’s 2023 draft in January by taking 18-year-old Alyssa Thompson No. 1 overall. The choose made Thompson the primary highschool participant to be drafted at that place. Angel Metropolis spared no expense to land Thompson and acquired the first overall pick from NJ/NY Gotham FC in a deal that noticed it commerce its pure No. 5 choose and a second-round choose in 2024, plus $200,000 in allocation cash, to Portland Thorns FC for Yazmeen Ryan, then ship Ryan and $250,000 to Gotham.
All of this comes after the league signed it’s first collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in 2020. The league’s monetary development will doubtless be mirrored within the subsequent CBA, which will likely be agreed upon after the 2026 season.