Over the past few years, I’ve asked NWSL owners at least a dozen times about what I perceived as a growing threat from Europe amid increased spending from teams like Barcelona and Arsenal. Nobody bit. Each time I got some version of the classic trope that rising tides lift all boats.
On Tuesday, that finally changed. When asked what worries her about the league’s future, San Diego Wave owner Lauren Leichtman replied bluntly.
“Competition from Europe,” she said.
Leichtman and her husband bought the Wave last year in a $113 million deal, at the time the highest price ever paid for control of a women’s soccer team. She’s part of a new crop of NWSL owners, ones who paid big money for their teams and have deep resources to push the league forward. They also have a bigger financial imperative to recoup their investments, and they’re confronting growing pains that have simmered quietly below the surface as the NWSL’s business has rapidly transformed.
Leichtman was speaking at Sportico’s fourth annual RISE: Women’s Sports event in Manhattan. It’s a gathering of industry power brokers, and each year the tenor has been different. In 2022, it felt like the industry was on the verge of something big. In the last few years, that big thing has been obvious—franchise values are soaring, new owners are rushing in, fans are watching more and media companies are reacting in kind.
The excitement remains, but there’s also now a hefty dose of reality. Business growth presents new labor challenges. Expansion, underway in both the NWSL and WNBA, can be particularly difficult. And as U.S. leagues prove the economic viability of professional women’s sports, deep-pocketed franchises and investors in Europe are taking note.
This is all very healthy. Sports can’t live forever on vibes, and when valuations jump from about $2 million to more than $100 million in a few years, as they have in the NWSL, it stands to reason that the requisite challenges would take a beat to catch up. Same goes for the WNBA, where the arrival of a batch of new stars like Caitlin Clark and a bunch of new revenue coincided with talks for a critical new labor deal.
For the NWSL, attendees at RISE were particularly interested in the growth of the U.K.’s Women’s Super League (WSL), which has some of England’s richest soccer teams suddenly investing in their women’s sides. Alyssa Thompson, the top pick in the NWSL’s 2023 draft, recently joined Chelsea from Angel City. Washington Spirit coach Jonatan Giráldez, who was lured to the NWSL from Barcelona last year, abruptly left the Washington Spirit in to take the same role with French powerhouse OL Lyonnes.
Making those shifts more worrisome for some around the NWSL are the owners involved. The Chelsea women’s team is backed by Alexis Ohanian, who was once Angel City’s lead investor and remains on the team’s cap table. Ohanian’s European club poached Thompson from his U.S. club. The Washington Spirit and OL Lyonnes are both owned by Michele Kang. Her French team hired Giráldez from her U.S. team.
Kang’s portfolio also includes the London City Lionesses, which have also recently signed talent from the NWSL. She defended her multi-team model to the BBC earlier this year.
“I know it has bad connotations on the men’s side with greed and all those things,” she said, “but in women’s football it’s a necessity until we have decent commercial resources available.”
Multi-team ownership is a perfect example of the kind of challenge that the NWSL had to grow into—it’s a product not only of the league’s own ambitions, but also of its proof of concept.
More established men’s leagues vary in how they handle similar conflicts. MLS isn’t strict—take, for example, Man City’s ownership of NYCFC—but it also doesn’t have a claim to being the world’s top league. MLS does not view selling its top players to Europe as a problem; in some cases, it welcomes these transfers as proof its clubs are successfully scouting and developing elite talent.
At the other end of the spectrum, the NBA is definitive—NBA owners are not allowed to own any other pro basketball teams besides G-League affiliates.
At this point, supremacy in women’s soccer is still up for grabs, and every star player transfer between elite leagues feels existentially important. For the NWSL and the WSL, the title of “world’s best league” is critical to maximizing long-term success.
The NWSL was not the only U.S. women’s sports venture thinking about the big picture at RISE. There were also discussions about the growing pains of a different league. The WNBA’s current labor accord expires on Oct. 31, roughly six weeks from now, and the league and union remain far apart on a number of the most basic issues. Like the NWSL, the WNBA has seen dramatic commercial growth in the last few years. Unlike the NWSL, which quietly agreed to a new player-friendly labor accord last year, the WNBA is on the cusp of a work stoppage.
No league wants to miss games, but the timing is particularly high stakes for the WNBA. Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers have brought their huge college followings to the pro game. League owners who have lost millions annually to support the league are finally now seeing requisite revenue. Speaking at RISE, Los Angeles Sparks president Christine Monjer said team revenue this year was up 70% year over year.
Earlier in the event, which was held at the WNBPA offices, union executive director Terri Carmichael Jackson talked about how critical this specific moment is for both the league and its players as their enterprise grows.
“The model that we are proposing is one that is not foreign to professional sports,” Jackson said. “It is foreign to women’s sports. But it is time for women’s sports to take that leap. That’s what we’re talking about in a transformational CBA.”
There are some similarities in the NWSL and WNBA’s biggest challenges. Both leagues have seen valuations jump 50x in the past few years, and both are reckoning with their own labor upheaval, one internal and the other forced by a foreign challenger. In both leagues, owners and players are trying to simultaneously reconcile three realities—the economics of the past, the economics of the present and the economics of the future. And for both that’s a little messy.
That’s not to say there isn’t optimism, and for good reason. These sports were under-monetized for years, and fans were underserved. Progress, if not directly linear, is fairly obvious.
On a recent episode of Sportico Sports Business Presented by Genius Sports, our monthly TV show with YES Network, I asked Gotham FC owner Carolyn Tisch Blodgett when she thought this rapid rise in valuations might start to level off. Shortly after she downplayed the threat from Europe, she spoke about her excitement for the future.
“There’s still so much room to grow,” she said. “If you think about the way that teams are valued today and then look at national revenue, local revenue like sponsorships, ticketing, and merchandise we are just scratching the surface… Yes, there’s been a significant rise, but I think there’s still a very long runway.”