NWSL: Explosive Growth, Rising Values & Expansion Plans Analyzed
“An extraordinary period of growth” was how Jessica Berman phrased it.
Reflecting on her four years as commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) in November, the American could be forgiven for marking her own homework with such glowing feedback.
In 2022, when Berman took the role, America’s top soccer league for women was still reeling from the fallout of a major sexual abuse scandal. Trust in its leadership was at an all-time low, and the relationship between the league and its players’ union was at rock bottom. But four years later, the picture is altogether different.
Today, as the league embarks on its 14th season, the NWSL’s business is booming by almost every measure. Match attendances, TV viewership and franchise valuations are all on the rise amid growing fan and investor interest. Commercial rights values have never been higher, while a historic Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) – renewed in 2024 until 2030 – has ensured better working conditions and fairer pay for players throughout the league.
“I’m proud of what we’ve built and even more excited about where we’re headed,” said Berman, whose new contract runs until 2028. “The best is yet to come.”
All eyes on expansion
Such is the league’s current growth trajectory, and such is the scale of its ambition, that Berman has said she believes the NWSL can expand to 32 teams in the coming years. From eight founding teams in 2012, the league has doubled in size to comprise 16 clubs, with new franchises in Boston and Denver joining the competition this year.
But aside from the number of teams in the league, perhaps the best measure of the NWSL’s commercial momentum is the price investors are willing to pay for a piece of the pie.
In November, Atlanta was awarded the league’s 17th franchise, with Arthur Blank’s AMB Sports & Entertainment paying a US$165 million expansion fee. By comparison, ownership groups in San Diego and Los Angeles paid just US$2 million apiece only five years ago.
Amid such heightened interest among investors, the NWSL has now moved to a rolling process for further expansion. That means that while there is no set timeframe for adding new teams, the league is essentially always open to talks with would-be owners.
Wherever it goes next, the league’s evident investment potential goes hand in hand with its skyrocketing value. Sportico’s latest NWSL valuations show the 14 teams that competed in 2025 are collectively worth US$2.6 billion. Angel City FC lead the way at US$335 million, while three further clubs are valued at more than US$200 million. The average franchise is now worth US$184 million, up an incredible 179 per cent since 2023.
Perhaps most importantly, the NWSL’s average revenue-to-value multiple stands at 9.8x by Sportico’s estimations, putting it firmly amongst the major men’s leagues in North America.
In fact, according to Sportico, five clubs more than doubled their value year-over-year in 2025, led by last year’s title winners Gotham FC, whose value surged 119 per cent to US$175 million. All told, the 14 teams generated an estimated US$262 million in revenue in 2025, with the Kansas City Current earning a league-high US$42.9 million. Average revenue now stands at US$19 million per club, up 22 per cent on 2024.
Denver Summit FC begin play this year and will be joined by fellow expansion franchise Boston Legacy FC
Viewership on the rise
Like its team investors, the NWSL’s commercial partners will be buoyed by the rapid rate of growth they are witnessing across the board.
Supported by its young, relatively affluent fanbase, the NWSL finished its 2025 regular season with an average attendance of 10,669 over the course of its 182-game schedule. That marked the third consecutive season averaging more than 10,000 fans per match, the longest such streak in league history, yet the figure was down five per cent on the record high of 2024, and roughly even with 2023.
According to figures published by Sports Business Journal, eight of the NWSL’s 14 teams saw year-over-year attendance declines in 2025, though four teams – Gotham FC, North Carolina Courage, Washington Spirit and Orlando Pride – set franchise attendance records.
On the media side, too, the figures paint a similarly rosy picture. According to the league, NWSL broadcasts delivered their fourth consecutive year of linear viewership growth in 2025, up 22 per cent year-over-year. Notably, growth among women aged between 18 and 34 stood at 30 per cent year-over-year.
Total viewership across Nielsen-rated platforms in 2025 reached 20.1 million, representing an 18 per cent increase from the 2024 season. On ESPN, the 2025 season delivered record-breaking growth, scoring a 61 per cent increase in average viewership for the regular season (228,000 viewers compared to 141,000 viewers the previous season), according to Nielsen.
Last year’s NWSL Championship match, which saw Gotham FC defeat the Spirit, peaked at 1.55 million viewers and reached an average of 1.18 million viewers in primetime on CBS, marking the league’s most-watched match in history.
Digital viewership throughout the season surged as well, with total live streams up 30 per cent year-over-year and a record 2.62 billion minutes watched across all platforms – the highest total in league history.
We see little wonder, then, that ESPN has moved to air live NWSL games in a primetime Sunday night slot on its main linear channel this coming summer. And with more teams producing more games and therefore more inventory, it is equally understandable that the NWSL and its media rights advisors at IMG recently saw fit to add a fifth domestic broadcast package, bringing on board streaming service Victory+ as a national media partner while expanding existing deals with ESPN and CBS.
All told, the NWSL’s domestic media rights deals, which similarly include contracts with Amazon Prime Video and Scripps, are worth US$240 million in total. Signed in 2023, the US$60 million-a-year arrangements represented a huge increase from the US$1.5 million a season it was receiving previously.
Heading into its next round of domestic negotiations, and with the Fifa Women’s World Cup set to arrive on US soil in 2031, Berman and her team will be confident of raising the bar once again.
There is, however, a clear opportunity for the NWSL when it comes to growing its media footprint. Ampere Analysis estimates that the competition generates most of its revenue from its domestic market, with over 99 per cent of its media rights value coming from deals with broadcasters in North America. League executives will therefore be working hard to export more deals to overseas networks.
A deepening sponsorship ecosystem
With fandom spreading and young, diverse audiences gravitating towards the NWSL brand of soccer, major corporations are lining up to invest in what is now a compelling, culturally relevant growth story.
The NWSL was estimated to have generated US$39.5 million from league-wide sponsorships in 2025, according to GlobalData. New deals with the likes of AT&T, Canon, CVS Health and Elf Cosmetics have helped boost the league’s coffers ahead of the 2026 campaign, taking the total number of league-wide partners to 15.
GlobalData estimates that team sponsorship in the league was worth US$66.46 million in 2025, although SponsorUnited pegged the total at US$75 million for 2024, with more than 400 brands investing in the league. While the NWSL’s sponsorship revenue was found to have increased by 16 per cent since 2022, SponsorUnited found that 46 per cent of the league’s total income was attributed to just three clubs in Angel City, the Current and San Diego Wave.
In fact, Angel City outperformed 15 Major League Soccer (MLS) clubs and 25 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams in sponsorship revenue. The club was heralded for its ability to convert fandom into value, generating US$29 per social follower, which is higher than more storied teams like MLB’s New York Yankees (US$8) and the Los Angeles Dodgers (US$13).
Angel City are a unique case study but it is telling that NWSL expansion teams can find commercial success quickly – and in many cases before they’ve even kicked a ball.
The new team in Denver, which fended off competition from Cincinnati and Cleveland for the right to host the NWSL’s 16th team, sold more than 10,000 season ticket deposits in just two months – a league record. And in February, the Atlanta expansion franchise secured insurance company Aflac as its first front-of-shirt sponsor in a deal reportedly worth US$28 million over seven years.
The club hailed the agreement as the largest deal of its kind in women’s sports history, surpassing the Portland Thorns’ front-of-shirt pact with Amazon-owned home security company Ring.
Rewarding marketable talent
If the NWSL’s current business model and expansionist mindset are proving successful in growing its key revenue streams, then there is no doubt much of the credit must travel to its player roster.
The league’s compelling mix of top internationals, household names with sizeable followings, and rising stars only adds to its commercial appeal – and now steps are being taken to tangibly recognise the extent to which NWSL athletes are contributing to unprecedented business growth. The current CBA, for example, includes revenue sharing for the first time, while the league hopes its newly introduced High-Impact Player (HIP) rule will help its teams attract and retain the sport’s biggest stars for years to come.
Coming into effect from July 2026, the new rule will allow each NWSL club to exceed the league’s salary cap by up to US$1 million for players who meet one of several commercial or sporting criteria. Earlier this year, Trinity Rodman, the face of the Washington Spirit franchise, was rewarded with a record contract worth more than US$2 million annually – although the rule itself has been challenged by the NWSL Players Association (NWSLPA) on the grounds that its “unilateral implementation” breaches the terms of the CBA.
Whatever comes to pass, the NWSL is clearly aiming to balance long-term financial sustainability with the need to fend off immediate and growing competition from the top leagues and clubs in Europe. Salary caps are designed to guard against overspending and ensure competitive balance, but the league knows it must bake some flexibility into its model if it is to compete on the global stage.
If that means directly rewarding those who drive most commercial value, then the HIP rule could prove an effective mechanism for retaining some of the most marketable talent in women’s soccer.