Bay Area Expansion Team Draws Record Price for U.S. Women’s Soccer League
The race for the rights to indicate reside sports activities has lifted the values of groups and leagues, drawing the eye of the world’s largest funding companies. And these funds are flowing past the handful of males’s sports activities which have historically attracted essentially the most cash and media consideration and into ladies’s sports activities world wide, together with soccer, basketball, tennis and cricket.
On Tuesday, the National Women’s Soccer League mentioned it had bought the rights for a brand new workforce at a document value. The funding agency Sixth Street led an possession group that plans to spend $125 million on the Bay Area franchise, with roughly $53 million overlaying the growth charge, an enormous leap from the $5 million charge paid in 2021 for a workforce in Kansas City.
Another $30 million to $50 million will go towards constructing a coaching facility, mentioned Alan Waxman, the chief govt of Sixth Street and a co-chair of the brand new membership. The relaxation will assist operations and construct the workforce’s model.
Jessica Berman, the commissioner of the N.W.S.L., who joined the league in 2022, mentioned the competitors “has not historically been built like a business.” But now, “it’s really been able to scale and level up the professionalism, operational rigor and business strategy and tactics for growth,” she mentioned.
The Bay Area workforce shall be run by a board that features the previous United States nationwide workforce gamers Brandi Chastain, Leslie Osborne, Danielle Slaton and Aly Wagner, who shall be a co-chair. It is about to start play in 2024, the league’s twelfth season.
“All of a sudden, reality catches up with the data,” Mr. Waxman mentioned of the funding rationale.
More than 1.1 billion folks globally tuned in to the Women’s World Cup in 2019. In the United States, 915,000 watched the ultimate of the N.W.S.L. final 12 months, in contrast with about two million for the lads’s championship match in Major League Soccer.
In different leagues, the Women’s Tennis Association raised $150 million final month from the non-public fairness agency CVC Capital to fund a brand new subsidiary to handle sponsorships and broadcasting rights. The Women’s National Basketball Association raised $75 million from traders final 12 months to place towards advertising and marketing and recruitment. And in India, traders in January spent a mixed $570 million in an public sale for 5 groups in a brand new ladies’s cricket league.
Still, the all-important media rights for ladies’s sports activities lag far behind these for males’s leagues. Apple just lately signed a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal to broadcast most M.L.S. video games. The N.W.S.L.’s present take care of CBS, which was signed in 2020, was price $4.5 million over three years.
Investors in ladies’s soccer, like Sixth Street, are betting on an enormous leap in value for these rights once they quickly come up for renewal, alongside elevated spending on sponsorship and stadium purchases.
Against the backdrop of a sexual abuse scandal that led to the firing of at the very least 4 N.W.S.L. coaches, and motivated by a profitable growth into Los Angeles, Ms. Chastain, Ms. Osborne, Ms. Slaton and Ms. Wagner got down to drum up funding for a brand new workforce. Ms. Wagner related with Mr. Waxman by his spouse; Sixth Street has additionally invested within the Spanish soccer giants Real Madrid and Barcelona, in addition to the N.B.A.’s San Antonio Spurs.
Other traders within the Bay Area workforce embrace Sheryl Sandberg, the previous chief working officer of Meta, who will be part of the workforce’s board and “partner with the club to create leadership programs that empower women and girls,” she mentioned in an announcement.
