NWSL: Transforming Women's Soccer Business and Culture

The NWSL, led by Jessica Berman, aims to be the world's top sports league by reshaping and growing women's soccer.

### NWSL's Rapid Rise: Inside the Growth and Ambitions of America's Women's Soccer League
* ⚽  Jessica Berman, the NWSL commissioner, has overseen the league's **unprecedented growth**, with the San Diego Wave's recent sale for **$120 million** being **60 times the initial investment** just three years ago.
* 🔒  Berman's leadership has been crucial in reshaping the league, addressing past issues, and attracting new ownership, with **all but two teams changing hands since 2021**.
* 📺  The NWSL secured a groundbreaking media deal, increasing distribution by **40 times** and attracting major partners like **CBS Sports, ESPN, and Amazon Prime Video**.
* 🌍  The league aims to become a **global brand**, recognizing the increasing competition from other women's leagues worldwide and the importance of **attracting top international talent**.
* 🏟️  Teams like Angel City FC and Kansas City Current are investing in infrastructure, with the Current boasting the **first stadium built specifically for women's sports**.
* 🌟  Berman's vision goes beyond just sports, aiming to challenge societal norms and promote gender equity: "Our league is uniquely situated to really be the **tip of the spear** in helping people to **rethink investing in women for women**."

It's in my room.
Go, mom, go. Yeah, mom. Noah, turn in, score. Because you were basically
like, these guy's age. When you decided this is
what you wanted to do, right? Like, actually his age. That's crazy to imagine. Do you know exactly what you wanna do? Not exactly, no. I'm definitely the aberration. I don't think it's normal to
know exactly what you wanna do and not deviate from that. Right. That's weird, for sure. Since she was a teenager, Jessica Berman wanted one job: to be the commissioner of a sports league. A few years back, she achieved her goal, becoming the head of the
National Women's Soccer League. Opening day for the National Women's Soccer League, and it's a landmark day
for women in sports. Let's go! The NWSL is the fastest-growing professional sports league in the world, and over Jess Berman's
first two years at the helm,

there's never been a dull moment. They've done it! Gotham have done it! Who's the best league in the world? Is it the Premier League? Is it the NFL? That is our aspiration. Our aspiration is to be the best league in the world. The NWSL certainly has the receipts to prove their unrivaled growth. This year, the San Diego Wave was purchased for $120 million, a mind-boggling 60 times return on investment in a mere three years. That's all the more surprising given how close the NWSL was to failing right at the moment Jessica took the job. She came in when the league was on fire, honestly, and it could have gone either way. It could have burnt to the ground or you rise from the ashes, as it has. Jess has radically reshaped the league and handpicked others to join her to shore up the business case for women's football. Now with expectations at an all-time high,

the real work begins. Work to make a lasting
impact on the pitch, in the owner suites, the
league office, and beyond. What we're trying to build at the NWSL, I really do believe will change the world. This isn't a job, this is like a purpose. This is power players. If you wanna get a temperature
for the state of the NWSL, it's right here in LA. How's everyone doing? Woo, we're back, yeah, baby! It's opening day for Angel City FC, a team that's been a
media darling of the NWSL over the last few years, led by their star-studded
list of celebrity investors like Natalie Portman and Jennifer Garner and former US women's
national team players like Julie Foudy. We have said this for many years and yes, I'm a little frustrated
that it's taken this long, but for a long time we're like

no, no, no, this is where you wanna be. There's a return on this investment. It's not just a good thing, it's a really good business thing. This is the third try at a professional women's soccer league in the US. Kicking off its 12th season, the NWSL has already existed twice as long as the previous other leagues combined. It's gonna take like three days and a lot of wine actually to talk about why this league is surviving and the others didn't. But I think you look at Angel City bought for, you know, under 3 million and recently valued at 180 million and people say that's too low. Angel City is the latest of the NWSL franchises to explore a potential sale. Team ownership in the NWSL has dramatically shifted in recent years. In fact, all but two of the teams are either new to the league via expansion or have changed hands since 2021.

And finding ambitious new
ownership for the long haul has been a main building
block of Jessica's strategy. This is a league that's
been around for a few years. How do you find the right sort of stewards, and how do you adapt the
league to them, and vice versa? I'll actually quote someone who I think is universally
recognized as an icon and a legend in our industry, Rick Welts, who came from the NBA, built and ran the Golden State Warriors, is someone that I think
most of us in the industry look to for advice and guidance. And he told me over breakfast, which is something that
I think about often, that what we have achieved in the NWSL from an investor
perspective over two years is the equivalent of what
it took other leagues like the NBA 25 to 30 years to achieve. And I was like, no wonder
I feel so both invigorated and exhausted at the same time. Yeah.

We have, in such a short period of time, brought together the most incredible investors. People who see the long-term vision, who are well capitalized, but not only well capitalized, people who are willing to invest that capital. In sports, it's the team owners that both take on the most financial risk and, conversely, stand to benefit from the biggest rewards. To overly simplify the calculus, an owner wants to take in more money through ticket sales, sponsorship, and merchandise rights, as well as lucrative media deals. Then they spend on fielding a team. When there's large revenue coming in, it's easy to invest more in the team itself. But for the NWSL, there currently isn't huge revenue for teams. So Jessica and the league have tried to find stewards who are willing to take the bet on investing now with the promise of long-term profits and asset appreciation. As you know, the revenues are still relatively small, so how do you square and how do you ensure

in a very optimistic
and enthusiastic market that it doesn't get too
far ahead of itself? We're very comfortable
with the sort of firmness of the valuations that
we're seeing of our clubs, and a real testament to
the kinds of investors we're bringing in, which are not necessarily
sports teams investors. They are people who
see the long-term value of investing in this asset class, knowing that on a relative
basis, it has outperformed almost every asset
class that exists today. One reason for that growth is how the league is set up. Unlike its American cousin, the WNBA, under control of the men's NBA, the NWSL is fully in its own control, separated from the American MLS. Even the NWSL's international competitor, the Women's Super League or WSL, has teams that are owned and run as part of their men's league counterparts in the English Premier League. Where decision making in
other leagues and teams

is often led by the men's side. The NWSL is able to make decisions and innovate around what works for them. The league has embraced new types of thinking so much that it was ranked by Fast Company as the fifth most innovative company in the world, four spots higher than ChatGPT maker OpenAI. We're really proud of that because we think in a challenger property, emerging property type of mindset where we're competing for dollars, we're competing for mind share, we're competing for those eyeballs on screen in our new media deals, that we have to be willing to take risk and to push the envelope. I do want to take a beat on the media piece 'cause obviously that was historic and massive, 40x, is that right? 40 times. What you had gotten before? We are going to be partnering with CBS Sports, ESPN, Amazon Prime video, and Scripps on Ion to bring forward the opportunity to have four times the distribution.

in national broadcast windows. You know, now with at least a part of a season to look at that, how is that going, and from the metrics and the KPIs that you set, like where are you trending there? I have regular check-ins with each of CBS, ESPN, Amazon, and Scripps. They couldn't be happier with how we're doing from a viewership perspective. Most of our sponsors are spending money with our media partners, which is super important. That is literally the revenue engine that drives and justifies how much they're investing in us. That asset growth has caught the attention of investment firm Sixth Street and its founder Alan Waxman. The team, AFC, is located just down the road from San Francisco and entered the league in 2023 with $125 million investment to launch the club and build team facilities, bringing together Wall Street players with player owners at its core. Aly Wagner, Leslie Osborne, Danielle Slaton

and perhaps the most iconic
of them all, Brandi Chastain. She was the woman, of course, who scored the deciding penalty kick in the 1999 Women's World Cup. [Announcer] Go! This is us, this is AFC here now in this building. What does it mean? This is what we did it for. Leave it better than we ever had it. I know.
What about you? I mean, I don't know, I just,
all I have to say is I love that we got to do this together. We've just relied on each other through the good, bad, and ugly, and today is the beautiful, right? And we get to be here today. So love you guys.
Love you. Oh my God, we did this, we did this. [Anchor] So begins AFC's
storybook first season. We're underway at BMO Stadium,
Angel City and the Bay. I think what we've done
is we've established

this precedent that
women's sports has a place in the landscape of sports in America, but also that football rules the globe, and that that's our destiny. We plan on being a global brand that is recognized everywhere you go. I think what's interesting about women's football in particular is just the growth that
we've seen globally in these other national teams and in their investment
in the women's game, and that is a massive shift. The world is caught up. A lot of these countries
didn't even have teams, you know, if you go back,
you know, 15, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. And it feels like those who have had teams are getting better, and the United States right
now is sort of teetering. The reality is that will impact the NWSL. We need their success to help drive engagement in
the United States, to help drive the narrative that we
are the best in the world. Being seen as the best in the world

is massively important to the NWSL. Before, players like
Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, and Megan Rapinoe regularly competed and won at the highest
levels of global competition, and upon returning home,
they'd bring new fans to their club teams in the NWSL. Now, with increased global talent, not only will the NWSL have to work harder to attract international players, but it's facing competition with the WSL and its connection with some of the biggest brands in football. But the current headwinds Jessica and the NWSL are facing
seem minor in comparison to what she faced when she
first joined the league. Oh, this one, okay. I actually saved this on
my phone when I started, which is a screenshot
of Megan Rapinoe's post, Let It Burn. That's how she felt, and frankly, a lot of players felt about the state of the league. [Anchor] The National
Women's Soccer League faces a reckoning over charges

that it ignored abuse of its players. [Announcer]: You can see
players from both teams arm in arm linked. They're all moving to the center
circle together right now. I hope we're in a real moment of reckoning where we can turn this into real change and hopefully save the league, 'cause as it stands right now, that's not really the league
any of us wanna be a part of. When you showed up, it was not guaranteed that this league would even exist by this point where
we're sitting here today. I think now we're moved a little bit. As you look back on that, what are the key decisions
that you can appreciate now that you and the rest of the
team and the governors made? Our goal is to make the NWSL a place where players are proud to play. Everything else I strongly
believed would fall into place if we could get that right. The way we approach that investigation, which was to lock arms with
the union, to face it down.

to not be afraid of the truth. The report painted a scathing picture of systemic abuse, lack of
investment in facilities, and a culture of fear. It also said US soccer executives and WSL owners and coaches at all levels had turned a blind eye to
allegations made by players. In the aftermath, the league implemented minimum requirements for facilities, increased the employees
of the NWSL by nearly 300%, and most importantly,
ownership changes were made, and an opportunity emerged for Jessica to work on addressing culture. You go back to some of
the sayings from leaders that culture eats strategy for breakfast, and the most important
thing for the organization, I think, is to come together and align around our culture,
our values, and work at it. So that's what they did. Jess was able to get the players to buy back into the league, including the incredible comeback of Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim. The two had left pro soccer for years amidst the sexual abuse scandal.

but then made their triumphant return in 2023 with Gotham FC. Gotham FC would go on to win the 2023 NWSL championship later that year. The team around that same time also welcomed a new investor, one with a deep understanding of pro sports ownership. Oh, hello. Fancy meeting you here. Good to see you. Great to see you as well. Good to see you. Do you definitely feel the legacy of the NFL here? Carolyn Tisch Blodgett and her family lay claim to multi-generational ownership of the New York football Giants, one of the preeminent and American sports franchises and one of the original NFL teams. Now as governor of Gotham FC, Carolyn is running her own team and she's one of the key individuals that Jessica's brought on board to represent a new class of ownership, one who's had a taste of success building long-term businesses. As we're thinking about the business we're building at Gotham

and the business we're
building at the league. We are every day thinking about like, what did the Giants do right? So when you think about the NWSL, I mean Jessica Berman, the commissioner, talks about the ambition of the league in the context of the NFL. On the face of it, you're like, Okay, like, I mean, NFL is
literally the top of the heap when it comes to professional leagues. I mean, do you think that
ambition is warranted? Is that how you think about it? That is how we think about it. I mean there's a reason that, you know, I think one of the things that Jessica has done so well in her
short time as commissioner is bring in like-minded
owners and investors that share that same ambition. Carolyn grew up around the NFL. She was less than 10 years
old when her grandfather bought half of the Giants
from the Mara family in 1991.

John Mara and her uncle Steve Tisch now run the team in one of the most successful partnerships in pro sports. And Carolyn's actively involved in that club, advising primarily on issues like marketing and fan engagement. A graduate of Yale, she honed her marketing chops at one of the once highest flying consumer brands, Peloton. During the home fitness startup's ascent, she worked on shaping that brand. You really do represent this like new category, this new class of owners, as you say, who has experience elsewhere. Yeah, so most days actually got, building Gotham feels much more akin to building Peloton than it does building the Giants since this is pretty established already. When I look back at what was so successful about building the Peloton brand, several different areas. One is around building the instructors into stars. And so now, you know, we kind of take for granted that Robin Arzon is a household name.

Ally Love is sitting on the Today Show set. But that wasn't what we walked into, you know, when I joined Peloton in 2016. I think about that a lot with Gotham is how do we make Lynn Williams, Crystal Dunn, Rose Lavelle into household names, and that is very much a part of our thesis at Gotham. Our ability to do that. Being in New York allows Gotham access to major media brands and spheres of influence. [Anchor] The reigning national lead champions, Gotham FC, have signed new stars to their team for the 2024 season: two-time Olympian, World Cup champion, and three-time NWSL champion, Crystal Dunn. While teams like Gotham and Angel City have opportunities to leverage their home cities to bring in star players, the Kansas City Current is attracting talent through real estate. The Current boasts the first and only stadium built for women's sports, adding further infrastructure.

for a massive bet on the future of the league. I believe that the future of this league, to be able to reach the potential that we all know is possible, we need to control our facilities, and that is not solvable in the short term. We need to create strategies and tactics to build coalitions in local markets to be able to figure out how we do that. And I think each market is going to look a little bit different. I've never actually seen a cyber truck. I was just gonna say this is a player parking lot, if you couldn't tell. I mean, ambition costs money is one way to think about it. How do you think about the sort of levers that you need to pull on the revenue side essentially to fund the ambition? Yeah, it's a good question. I think the players also recognize we're on a long journey and like we need to crawl before we walk before we run. And so while it would be great to wake up one day

and have a facility that looks like this. There are a lot of things we can do before we get there that will improve the player experience. And that means the best coaches, that means the best staff, it also means the best facilities. We're really thinking about it as a venture investment where it could go to zero. We feel pretty confident it's not going to, but it could also do this. And we're really thinking about this as hockey stick growth potential. And so that takes a group of like-minded investors to say, what do we need to do today to set us up for that hockey stick growth? That outsized growth requires a quantum leap in audience and attention to the league. Finding a global audience may be a solution, but attracting international eyeballs is ultimately dependent on the NWSL recruiting the best players in the world to play in the United States. Definitely, when I took this job, this one in particular was like

never use the word field. Never use the word practice.
Never use the word fans. Never say jersey or sweater for hockey. Right, right. It's a kit.
It's a kit. So they saved me a lot of
embarrassment, I would say. Football culture has historically not penetrated the US sports fan's consciousness. The rare exception has
been in women's sports, and that's mostly because of
the US women's national team's decades-long dominance. Kind of an interesting moment for the US Women's national team. Huge disappointment. I don't think anybody would
argue about that last summer. What did you take away from
that disappointing performance in terms of what it means for your league? The key learning from our
perspective from last summer is that while historically, it was, I think believed that the source of talent
in women's soccer is the US, perhaps a couple of other
countries, episodically, that is no longer the case.

There's talent everywhere. From my perspective, that creates a huge opportunity. It's one of the reasons that we, coming out of the World Cup, made a whole bunch of changes immediately. And some of the changes that we made with respect to our rules and our salary cap allowed for us to bring in almost 25 of the top international players into our league for this season. And we're seeing those players not only do well, but crush it and create stardom that has really catapulted attendance and viewership and all kinds of great storytelling that will allow for us to capitalize on that growth. It's actually good for the US women's national team who are playing here to be competing day in, day out against top talent. This sets up another potential massive shift for women's football, one where the NWSL, once buoyed by the national team, can flip the script and both train and promote the future faces of the sport.

Our vision is to be a global brand. Our vision is to stand
shoulder to shoulders with the top men's brands
across the world in any sport. One of the best ways to do
that, the best entry points, is to bring some of those players over from those countries into your squad and create that touch point and create that affinity
for those markets. I think that's a win-win, and there's no one better that can monetize that than US markets. Yay! For Aly, Carolyn, and their fellow club owners, success is dependent on
growing the next generation of women's football talent. For Jessica Berman,
maintaining that culture of innovation and investment
on the business side will be critical in forging a connection between those players and a
new generation of global fans. We call it zoomies. I think she recognizes that this is not just
another job on a resume. This is a moment to truly
change the trajectory of sports and to change the trajectory
of how we think about

men and women in society. And that feels like such a, you know, grandiose thing to say, but I think Jessica
recognizes this moment. It was actually my son Andrew,
who's a huge soccer fan, and he was showing me that the men's teams were starting to promote
the women's teams in Europe, but he was like, I don't know
how it's going to resonate when they just throw an F on the name. Hmm. Like if you are someone, he said, if you're someone who cares about women, and investing in women, don't they deserve their own brand? He was starting to identify just like the basic societal inequities in how the rest of the
world thinks about women, and that really allowed for me to believe and know that our league
is uniquely situated to really be the tip of
the spear in helping people to rethink investing in women for women.

Women's Soccer Wants to Be More Like the NFL | Power Players

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Bloomberg Originals

Jessica Berman achieved her goal of becoming the commissioner of the National Women's Soccer League, leading its unprecedented growth and success.

Under her leadership, the NWSL has seen a remarkable increase in team values and a shift in ownership, demonstrating its financial viability.

The league, with a star-studded list of investors and a focus on long-term impact, is on a mission to become the best in the world.

The NWSL's Unique Approach to Attracting Investors

The NWSL has rapidly attracted investors, achieving in two years what other leagues took much longer to accomplish, thanks to its long-term vision and innovative thinking.

The league's strategy involves finding stewards willing to invest in the promise of future profits, despite the current small revenue, and its separation from men's leagues allows for independent decision-making and innovation.

The NWSL's impressive media deals with CBS Sports, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video, and Scripps on Ion will now provide four times the distribution, marking a historic achievement for the league.

The Success and Impact of AFC in Women's Football

AFC's strong viewership and sponsor support have impressed media partners.

The team's rapid growth and investment have attracted attention from an investment firm.

The NWSL is facing challenges from increased global competition, impacting its ability to attract players and fans.

Transformation of the NWSL and the Role of Jessica Berman

The NWSL faced systemic abuse and lack of investment in facilities, leading to a culture of fear, but underwent significant changes, including increased staff and new ownership.

Jessica Berman's efforts led to players recommitting to the league, with the triumphant return of Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim.

Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, with a background in the NFL, joined as a key figure in the league's new ownership, bringing a strong business perspective and ambition for success.

Carolyn Kindle Betz's Impact on Gotham FC and the NWSL

Carolyn Kindle Betz, a co-owner of Gotham FC, draws from her experience at Peloton to build the club's brand and make players household names.

Gotham FC and other teams are leveraging their home cities and unique strategies to attract star players.

Betz sees the need for long-term investment and growth to elevate the NWSL's profile and attract a global audience.

The Impact of the US Women's National Soccer Team on Women's Football

The US women's national team has been a rare exception in penetrating US sports consciousness, particularly due to their dominance.

The team's disappointing performance has led to a significant shift in the source of talent in women's soccer, with the NWSL making major changes to bring in top international players.

The NWSL aims to become a global brand, capitalizing on bringing in players from other countries and focusing on growing the next generation of women's football talent.