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Over the past five years, the NWSL story has been about expansion.After launching with eight teams in 2013, the league has added seven new markets and at least 10 ownership groups from 2020 to today, with bigger checks being cut after every transaction.
When Bay FC’s ownership paid a $53million expansion fee to join the league in 2024, it set a new bar. It was not only a record-breaking amount at the time but also significantly bigger than those for recent expansion teams like Angel City and San Diego Wave, who had paid roughly $2million to $5m just a few years earlier.
Denver doubled that figure in early 2025 when its ownership group agreed to pay $110million. We blinked, and Arthur Blank’s ownership group agreed to pay $165m for an Atlanta franchise that same year, to begin play in 2028. Then, in May, the Haslam Sports Group in Columbus raised the bar again, agreeing to a record $205m expansion fee.
Expansion fees are seeing hockey-stick growth and have become a benchmark of the NWSL’s success. However, the league now faces a consequence of that: what happens to clubs that can’t keep pace in this new billionaire era?
That question has become increasingly relevant in the case of Racing Louisville, where the ownership group is seeking outside investment. Racing’s chairman John Neace told The Athletic last week that the search for additional capital remains active. Whether that comes through a straightforward investment or an investor-operator with sports experience matters less to Neace than finding someone willing to put more resources into the club. Currently, he is the only NWSL owner who has not sold any stake in his club nor taken significant outside investment to help run it.
But what happens if no one comes knocking?
Neither Neace nor NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman has declared relocation impossible.
“We are not planning to move the team, but I think economic reality would be if you can’t make it work here… If you build a restaurant somewhere and nobody comes in to eat, you either close it down or you move the restaurant, right?” said Neace.
“It is always the preference of the league to maintain the continuity of the location of our teams,” Berman said. “But it is not a never.”
For a league whose central business question was once whether enough investors wanted to write big checks for women’s soccer, the NWSL is now confronting almost the opposite problem. The cost of competing is rising so quickly that some existing clubs risk being left behind.
The price of admission has changed. So has the price of staying competitive.
This may seem like a minor issue, but it is a real one.
According to Sportico’s 2026 valuations, the average NWSL franchise was worth about $184million, up 77 percent from 2024. Los Angeles-based Angel City topped the rankings at $335m, remarkable for a franchise whose ownership group paid roughly $2m in expansion fees to enter the league in 2022.
Neace is reported to have paid $1m the previous year for Racing, who are now valued at $127m, but in terms of revenue, the franchise sits in 11th place out of 16 with $10.4m compared to Angel City’s $36.7m.
That makes Racing an important case study in how the NWSL values its existing markets during a period of extraordinary growth.
Relocation is hardly unusual in American sports.
Baseball’s New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles respectively in the 1950s. In the NBA, the Minneapolis Lakers made a 1960 switch to LA.
The NFL’s Rams left Los Angeles for St. Louis in 1995, returned to the much larger LA market in 2016 and won the Super Bowl five years later. The Raiders moved from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982, went back to Oakland in 1995, then switched to Las Vegas — arguably one of the best sports markets in the country, and where a publicly-financed new stadium was waiting for them — in 2020.
Most recently, the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes (having gone there as the renamed Winnipeg Jets in the 1990s) packed up operations for Salt Lake City in 2024, after years of instability, and now skate on as the Utah Mammoth.
The appeal for relocation is obvious.
A prospective owner in a larger city can offer a bigger fanbase, more sponsorship potential and perhaps a stronger media market. On a spreadsheet, that can look more attractive than spending years (and piles of money) trying to grow attendance and revenue somewhere else.
But if you think relocation is a cheaper alternative to paying over $205million for an expansion fee to join the league, you are wrong.
If an ownership group wanted to acquire Racing and move the club to another desirable market today, it would not make sense for the price to be less than $205million, sources close to the league told The Athletic. Otherwise, the league risks undermining its own expansion economics.
A new ownership group would also be expected to make the infrastructure commitments the NWSL increasingly demands, including appropriate stadium and training facilities if they already do not have them.
Then there is the opportunity cost for the league.
Every desirable market used to relocate an existing club is one fewer the NWSL can potentially sell for a nine-figure expansion fee. If investors are willing to pay $205million for Columbus, why give another attractive city to an existing franchise unless relocation produces comparable value?
So the question is not simply whether Racing could be more successful somewhere else. It is whether moving the club creates more value for the league than keeping it in Louisville, bringing in new investment and preserving another city for future expansion.
If we look through the league’s short history, there are a handful of examples that prove relocation worked but it is also important to note that other factors contributed to these success stories.
Take FC Kansas City.
The team ceased operations after the 2017 season due to severe financial problems, with its player assets transferred to the newly-created Utah Royals. The original Royals then ceased operations after three years, with a new Kansas City ownership group acquiring the player-related assets and bringing NWSL soccer back to their city. Kansas City returned to the league as the Current in 2021, when Angie and Chris Long bought the franchise from the league. Utah eventually rose again too, as an expansion team, again named the Royals, in 2024.
Today, the Current are one of the NWSL’s biggest business success stories. The club is valued at $315million, generates the league’s highest revenue ($42.9m) and plays at CPKC Stadium, which opened in 2024 as the first soccer stadium in the world purpose-built for a women’s professional team — and has sold out every game since it opened.
Kansas City did not suddenly become a dramatically larger market for women’s soccer. The key to success was a combination of ownership, investment and infrastructure change. Then the economics followed.
For a league that is still building toward long-term stability, the priority is to make its existing markets work, not to abandon them at the first sign of difficulty.
That responsibility is even greater because the NWSL is structured as a single-entity system, with teams operated by investor-operators who hold interests in the league rather than owning completely independent franchises. That structure creates a fundamentally different set of responsibilities from the traditional club model used by North American leagues such as the NFL and MLS, where individual owners control their teams and also collectively own the league.
In a single-entity system, the success or failure of one market cannot simply be treated as someone else’s problem. The league and its ownership have a collective stake in the health of every market. If a team is struggling, the answer should be to identify the deficiency and address it, not to use the resulting symptoms as justification for abandoning that market.
That’s why the NWSL is saying relocation is the last resort and evaluating what it can do to keep Racing in Louisville.
Clubs founded when the NWSL operated on a far smaller financial scale are now competing against owners building training centers, developing stadiums, hiring larger staffs and spending aggressively on the businesses surrounding their teams.
Racing did not suddenly become poorer. The neighborhood became much richer.
The NWSL is no longer desperately searching for markets willing to take a chance on women’s professional soccer. Cities and investors are now competing to get in. Every expansion announcement validates the league and raises the value of being part of it, but it also raises the cost of competing for the clubs already inside.
If a market such as Louisville can work with better-capitalized ownership, the league has far more to gain by finding that investment than abandoning the market. It preserves an existing fanbase, strengthens a franchise already inside the league and leaves another desirable city available for a $200million-plus expansion opportunity.
For the first years of its existence, the NWSL’s challenge was finding investors willing to bet on its teams.
Its next one may be making sure those already in the league can keep up with the price of winning.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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