The NWSL officially awarded an expansion club to Columbus, Ohio on Tuesday, bringing the league up to 18 teams when the new team begins play in 2028.
Columbus’ bid is fronted by Haslam Sports Group, whose portfolio includes majority stakes in MLS’ Columbus Crew and the NFL’s Cleveland Browns. The ownership group is rounded out by Pete and Christine Edwards, who also have a minority stake in the Crew, and NWSL sponsor Nationwide, the Columbus-based insurance company. The incoming ownership group paid an expansion fee of $205 million, sources tell CBS Sports, $40 million more than the fee AMB Sports and Entertainment paid for a team in Atlanta that will also begin play in 2028.
The incoming NWSL team will play at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field, the Crew’s stadium that opened in 2021, a venue that will make new additions to accommodate a women’s team that will train at their own facility. Both construction projects are expected to be completed by the time the team begins play.
The Haslam family initially expressed interest in joining the NWSL roughly four years ago but the final pieces began to come together in recent months ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.
“We initially started talking to the Haslam Sports Group about four years ago,” NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman told CBS Sports. “Shortly after I came in as commissioner, they expressed interest in the NWSL … The discussions really picked up momentum probably about, I would say, maybe six to nine months ago. They had been working in the background to put all the pieces in place.”
The chief requirement was around facilities, the final hurdle cleared on Monday when the Columbus City Council approved plans despite opposition about the loss of public space. The city council will allocate funds of up to $25 million, matched by Franklin County, for the new training facility at McCoy Park and updates to ScottsMiracle-Gro Field.
“We are building a state-of-the-art, 45,000 square foot training facility for the women,” Whitney Haslam Johsnon, managing partner of the Haslam Sports Group, said. “It’ll be about 15 minutes from the stadium. It’ll be complete and ready to go for the opening of the season and then we will definitely do some updates within ScottsMiracle-Gro Field. We’ll be adding a women’s locker room, which will be very similar to the men’s, have all the amenities needed for the women and obviously we’ll do updates to branding and signage to showcase our women’s team.”
The Haslams also intend to have a staff dedicated specifically to the NWSL team, which brought added value to their expansion bid.
“Each team needs its own individual staff and where we leverage the power of Haslam Sports Group is at the executive level,” Haslam Johnson said. “How do we all learn together and get better together but that each team needs its individual support system.”
Though the Crew are one of MLS’ original clubs, the incoming NWSL team in Columbus will be the first professional women’s soccer team in the state of Ohio. The new NWSL team will also be the most high-profile women’s sports team in the state, even if it has welcomed the U.S. women’s national team frequently in the past. The Haslams will be borrowing both from their experiences in soccer with the Crew as well as their knowledge of women’s sports through the WNBA after making an investment in the league in 2022.
This, though, will be the Haslams’ first expansion team and their immediate focus is making hires to ensure the team is ready for their 2028 start date.
“These are start-up businesses so we have a lot of work to do, really exciting work,” Haslam Johnson said. “I think there’s the obvious – we’ll have to work on executive-level business hires and sporting side hires so those will probably be the first things to think about. We have to develop a name, we have to develop a brand, everything you think about when starting a business. We will have our work cut out for us but all really exciting.”
The NWSL will have six teams that share ownership groups with MLS clubs with the incoming teams from Atlanta and Columbus, something Berman said is a strategic move to have a wide range of perspectives at leadership levels in the league.
“Particularly with the number of teams we’ve sold and the number of expansion teams we’ve granted, [we’ve been] really intentional about balancing independent ownership groups and shared ownership groups,” the commissioner said. “We think there’s tremendous value in that diversity of both perspectives and both experiences and we think that, in particular, having the benefit of being owners in Major League Soccer will add tremendous value to our board.”
The NWSL had always targeted the announcement of team 18 sometime in 2026 in the hopes of having the teams locked in before it returned to market to negotiate a new media rights deal, which expires at the conclusion of the 2027 season. The league, though, has no timeline in place for the entry of subsequent expansion teams and will maintain flexibility following their shift to a rolling process.
“The benefit of the decision we made to pivot to a rolling process is that we put ourselves in a position to both evaluate and their readiness to come into our league and at the same time, not be arbitrarily or artificially tied to any deadlines or any expectations about when we continue to expand,” Berman said. “We are very excited to continue to have interest from so many incredible and impressive ownership groups from different cities around the country that we know would love and support having an NWSL team. We will continue to evaluate all those considerations as we move forward. We do not have a set plan about when we expect to continue to expand.”
