The National Women’s Soccer League kicked off its 2026 season in March with a striking scene: an announced crowd of 63,004 watching Denver Summit FC’s inaugural home game, more than 20,000 tickets beyond the league’s previous high. But while an attendance record in a rollicking NFL stadium offered a visceral sign of the NWSL’s momentum, this week provided a perhaps even more impactful demonstration.

On Tuesday, commissioner Jessica Berman announced that Columbus, Ohio, had been awarded the league’s latest expansion franchise, due to begin play in 2028 as the NWSL’s 18th team. A group led by Jimmy and Dee Haslam, the billionaire owners of MLS’s Columbus Crew and the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, is paying a $205 million fee to secure the spot, a person with knowledge of the deal tells Forbes—$40 million more than Arthur Blank, owner of MLS’s Atlanta United FC and the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, agreed to shell out for an Atlanta expansion club just five months ago.

The price is also nearly double Denver’s $110 million deal from January 2025, and almost quadruple the $53 million paid by Boston Legacy FC and the San Francisco area’s Bay FC in 2023. And it is more than 100 times the roughly $2 million expansion fees of 2021.

That sort of trajectory would have been unimaginable a few short years ago, when even the most successful teams would sell for less than $5 million, but all of the NWSL’s clubs have recently found themselves propelled skyward on a rapidly rising tide. Forbes now estimates that the league’s current teams (excluding Denver and Boston in their debut seasons) are worth $200 million on average, a 49% increase from last year. With particularly strong growth across the bottom half of the table, the median value is up even more—79%, exceeding $192 million—and the floor sits at $140 million, twice the figure from 2025.

At the top of the league, Angel City FC remains No. 1, worth $340 million, followed by the Kansas City Current at $325 million. Four other clubs—Bay FC, San Diego Wave FC, the Washington Spirit and the Portland Thorns—are worth more than $200 million as well.

For most of the teams lower in the ranking, the valuations have little to do with the current state of the franchises’ business and instead represent bets by eager investors that the league-wide upswell will someday justify the lofty price tags. For instance, Chicago Stars FC, valued at $144 million after a league-best 106% jump from 2025’s $70 million valuation, generated only $7 million in revenue during the 2025 regular season, according to Forbes estimates.

That number should take a significant step forward this year now that the team has left SeatGeek Stadium in Chicago’s southwestern suburbs for a better situation at Northwestern University’s Martin Stadium, more than an hour north. But the Stars’ long-term plans remain unsettled after they halted a push to play at a new Northwestern stadium next year in the face of resistance from Evanston residents.

Meanwhile, for all the buzz around the NWSL, the league saw its regular-season attendance dip 5% last year, to an average of 10,669 per game, from 2024’s 11,235. Explanations by soccer insiders vary, from unlucky weather to an overstuffed summer soccer calendar to macroeconomic trends that left fans with less disposable income to spend on tickets, but the most common hypothesis centers on the unavailability of big names like the Stars’ Mallory Swanson and the Thorns’ Sophia Wilson (who both gave birth in 2025) and Spirit forward Trinity Rodman (who had back and knee injuries) for all or most of the year.

Rodman and Wilson are back in action in 2026, and Swanson is expected to return later in the season, but the experience underlines the task ahead of newly installed NWSL chief marketing officer Rachel Epstein: cultivate a new generation of stars after the recent retirements of United States national team icons including Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe.

At the same time, no NWSL club is believed to have reached break-even yet, and with at least a couple of ownership groups projecting that they won’t cross over into the black until their top-line revenue gets into the $50 million range, profitability likely remains a long ways off for much of the league, even with several teams projecting year-over-year revenue growth of 20% or more for the next few seasons.

Of course, financial losses aren’t entirely uncommon even in more established men’s professional leagues—12 of MLB’s 30 teams, and 16 of 29 in MLS, had negative operating income in 2025, according to Forbes estimates—and the Current could get out of the red as soon as this year.

The NWSL has also recently notched some off-field victories, including an updated national broadcast schedule that features prime-time matchups on ESPN on Sundays and additional media partners in Victory+ and the Women’s Sports Network, along with new deals with CVS and Panini trading cards that follow league-level sponsorship revenue growth of almost 50% in 2025. And the NWSL is poised to maintain its position as the world’s most competitive women’s soccer league after implementing a “high impact player rule” to persuade stars like Rodman to stay in the U.S. with salaries that go beyond the salary cap.

Against that backdrop—and with Deloitte projecting global revenues in elite women’s sports to surpass $3 billion in 2026—the North Carolina Courage are believed to have an agreement to sell a significant minority stake to Avenue Sports Fund at a reported valuation of $155 million. On top of validating numbers across the rest of the league, the deal would bring another billionaire into the NWSL fold in Avenue chairman Marc Lasry, following recent transactions involving Gail Miller (Utah Royals), Bob Iger (Angel City) and Lauren Leichtman (San Diego), as well as powerhouse investment firms Carlyle (Seattle Reign FC) and Sixth Street (Bay FC).

“When I look back on my career in professional sports, the thing that has made the difference in all of the professional sports leagues’ success is having blue-chip ownership who not only have the resources but the desire and vision to invest in the product,” commissioner Jessica Berman recently told Forbes.

Putting the deeper pockets to good use, many teams have begun building new practice facilities, and Current owners Angie and Chris Long privately financed the $140 million construction of CPKC Stadium, which opened in 2024 and has turbocharged the team’s business. The Summit are also building a new home field, scheduled to open in 2028, and the Legacy are renovating Boston’s White Stadium for their sophomore season.

“Clubs are investing in the hard infrastructure that will change the economics of the game substantially for them for generations, not just for the next three years,” Legacy president Jennifer van Dijk says. “You see it most specifically in the business in terms of schedule preference—if I can play on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons and in the windows where I have the best chance at getting my stands full, that is a massive differentiator.

“The second place it shows up is that you’re actually participating in concessions revenue, parking revenue, some other operational revenue—any sort of venue sponsors, of course. When you’re a tenant, you don’t get any of that.”

The league could hit another inflection point in 2028 with the start of its next media rights package, which is expected to carry a dramatically higher price than the current deals’ reported average annual value of around $60 million. Adding to the optimism around that negotiation, regular-season TV viewership rose 22% in 2025, to 214,000 per game, and the CBS audience for the league championship game in November peaked at 1.55 million.

The bullishness is reflected in the revenue multiples underlying teams’ valuations. This year, Forbes generally pegs top NWSL clubs at between eight and ten times their revenue from the most recent completed season, and with help from the lower-ranked franchises, the league’s average value of $200 million is 11.1 times the trailing year’s average revenue—not quite at the level of the NBA (12.9 times trailing-year revenue) but outpacing the NFL (10.7x), the NHL (8.9x), MLS (8.9x) and MLB (7x). Only a year ago, the NWSL’s figure stood at 8.8x.

“Myself and a lot of my colleagues grew up in a world where being a pro athlete was not a viable career path as a woman,” van Dijk says. “And to see that change just within our career span, it’s really meaningful, but also it’s good business, which frankly is just as exciting.”

THE MOST VALUABLE NWSL TEAMS 2026

#1. $340 million

Angel City FC

One-Year Change: 21% | Revenue: $38 million | Owners: Willow Bay and Bob Iger

#2. $325 million

Kansas City Current

One-Year Change: 18% | Revenue: $38 million | Owners: Angie and Chris Long

#3. $230 million

Bay FC

One-Year Change: 35% | Revenue: $23 million | Owner: Sixth Street

#4. $225 million

San Diego Wave FC

One-Year Change: 36% | Revenue: $24 million | Owner: Lauren Leichtman

#5. $215 million

Washington Spirit

One-Year Change: 65% | Revenue: $18 million | Owner: Michele Kang

#6. $205 million

Portland Thorns

One-Year Change: 71% | Revenue: $24 million | Owners: Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal

#7. $195 million

Seattle Reign FC

One-Year Change: 86% | Revenue: $18 million | Owners: Carlyle, Adrian Hanauer

#8. $190 million

Gotham FC

One-Year Change: 73% | Revenue: $11 million | Owner: Carolyn Tisch Blodgett

#9. $155 million

North Carolina Courage

One-Year Change: 72% | Revenue: $12 million | Owner: Steve Malik

#10. $150 million

Orlando Pride

One-Year Change: 63% | Revenue: $11 million | Owner: Mark Wilf

#11. $146 million

Houston Dash

One-Year Change: 70% | Revenue: $10 million | Owner: Ted Segal

#12. $144 million

Chicago Stars FC

One-Year Change: 106% | Revenue: $7 million | Owner: Laura Ricketts

#13. $142 million

Utah Royals

One-Year Change: 49% | Revenue: $9 million | Owner: Gail Miller

#14. $140 million

Racing Louisville FC

One-Year Change: 59% | Revenue: $10 million | Owner: John Neace

METHODOLOGY

To rank the most valuable National Women’s Soccer League franchises, Forbes examined recent transaction data and spoke to more than two dozen industry insiders, including team and league executives, team owners and investors, investment bankers, advisors and consultants.

Revenue figures are estimated for the 2025 season and are rounded to the nearest $1 million. Playoff and non-league games were excluded from the revenue calculations, as were player transfers.

Team values include the economics of the team’s stadium but not the value of the stadium real estate itself. The valuations similarly take into account ancillary revenue streams that are captured in the team’s financial statements, such as income from sponsor signage or events at the team’s practice facility, without directly measuring the value of those other assets. The listed team owners are the principal owners; other investors are omitted.

Boston Legacy FC and Denver Summit FC, expansion clubs that began play this year, were excluded from the ranking. The future expansion teams in Atlanta and Columbus, scheduled to begin play in 2028, were also excluded.

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