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NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman (center) with Boston mayor Michelle Wu (left) and Boston controlling owner Jennifer Epstein (right) at the team's unveiling in September 2023 (Photo by Billie Weiss/Elevate Communications)
It has been nearly two full years since the National Women’s Soccer League’s Board of Governors approved Boston as a 2026 expansion team, granting the team the longest runway to launch in league history.
That advantage has been completely squandered.
Today, with the calendar days from turning to 2025, Boston’s stadium plan — touted as a revolutionary public-private partnership — remains in legitimate doubt as it faces a lawsuit and rising costs. The idea that the renovated venue will be ready in 15 months feels increasingly ludicrous; construction is yet to begin. The team appears to even be restarting the branding process after “BOS Nation FC” and the “Too Many Balls” campaign was universally panned.
Also today, a final decision still looms for team No. 16, which is supposed to join Boston by kicking off in the 2026 season. A decision on team No. 16 is days — if not hours — away, although that has been the rolling feeling for over a month now. Sources around the league initially expected a decision before Thanksgiving, which tracked with NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman’s previous public comments.
Cincinnati, Cleveland and Denver are the final three cities in contention for that other expansion team. Of the four — including Boston — only Cincinnati has its proposed full-time venue already built and operating.
The increasing uncertainty around Boston’s readiness for 2026, and the need for more time to build venues in two of the three other markets begs the question: What’s the rush? Delaying the launch of the league’s next two teams feels highly unlikely, according to several sources with knowledge of the process. It also looks more like the right call with each passing day.
Yes, there is money on the line. Boston paid $53 million to join the league, and the next team could pay roughly double that to get in, sources around the league have opined. But there are long-term, existential factors at play.
Venues are one of the league’s most pressing issues. They affect revenue and scheduling, and can cause ugly headaches (like the recent relocation of a game due to an unplayable field in San Diego). Berman spoke recently of “the need” for a new stadium in Chicago “to keep up with the rest of the league.” A week later, she said “there’s probably nothing more important than our teams controlling their own destiny both from a stadium and training facility perspectives.”
Expansion decisions have put those priorities to the test.
Groups in Cleveland and Denver have proposed building stadiums that would make the NWSL team the primary tenant, mimicking the successful model of the Kansas City Current, who opened CPKC Stadium this year and hosted last month’s NWSL Championship. Berman delivered her remarks from the club lounge of that stadium, calling it a “very high priority” to make sure CPKC is not an anomaly.
Expansion, among other things, is supposed to be part of the solution to this issue. Stadium construction, however, requires significant work and time, a lesson being learned the hard way by prospective team No. 15.
When Boston was approved to join the NWSL in January 2023, the league was only supposed to be selecting one team (which became Bay FC) to join the league in 2024, but the promise of $53 million from an all-women majority ownership group working directly with the city was an opportunity not to be missed. Berman lauded the public-private partnership with the City of Boston, and the direct support of Boston mayor Michelle Wu, as a potentially revolutionary model and “a success story for us to point to.” So, Boston got the green light, eventually being formally announced in September 2023 after the team’s ownership group submitted the only response to the city’s request for proposals to renovate White Stadium.
A year after formally announcing the team, Boston had one of the worst sports branding rollouts in recent memory. The team is openly reconsidering “BOS Nation FC,” although controlling owner Jennifer Epstein declined to confirm that there will be a name change when asked this week.
The scheduled “late fall” start of demolition and construction is only days away from missing its target, and the level of disrepair at White Stadium — long a concern about the ambitious project from sources around the league, and confirmed this week in comments made by Epstein — makes completion for opening day 2026 look like an impossible task. Construction costs could rise to double the original projections – with the city on the hook for $91 million, up from $50 million, as the Boston Globe first reported. A lease is still pending, and a lawsuit filed by locals to stop the project has a March 2025 trial date.
Now, the NWSL is staring down a similar stadium and timeline dilemma with team No. 16. Cleveland and Denver need to build their permanent homes, but each bidding group would need more than a year to have those prospective stadiums open. Cincinnati is a ready-made bid, in that physical infrastructure sense, but it remains unclear whether it is the NWSL’s preferred destination (talk to enough folks, and all three are the ‘favorite’).
Add it up, and the idea of NWSL expansion waiting until 2027 makes more sense by the day — and the logic doesn’t stop there.
Any expansion team also faces the daunting and unnecessary task of an expedited launch. That’s a problem of their own making for Boston, but an unnecessary burden for whichever team joins them. Yes, a one-year lead time has been done before — and Bay FC’s inaugural season in 2024 was generally successful with the same build-up — but the landscape has changed.
Drafts are gone, according to the NWSL’s new CBA, meaning the two teams expected to enter the league in 2026 won’t have the benefit of an expansion draft or a college draft to build their rosters. Recent expansion teams leveraged those assets to acquire a mix of established veterans and rising stars.
Another first division, the USL Super League, also launched in August. While its overall quality is nowhere near that of the NWSL at the moment, dozens of former NWSL role players have signed in the Super League to get more playing time and improve, which pulled depth away from the middle of NWSL rosters. Those are the types of players previous NWSL expansion teams would have built around. Now, many of those players aren’t even in the league.
The next two NWSL teams will have to sell players on a vision against the rest of the open market, and they would mostly have to do so without a stadium or training facility, which are increasingly advantages held by established teams. The deck is stacked against teams 15 and 16 to put a competitive product on the field in 2026.
Berman said ahead of the NWSL Championship that the league “[doesn’t] have any concerns” about team No. 16’s readiness for 2026.
“We are developing mechanisms to ensure that those teams can be competitive as we think about the value of expansion and the importance of setting those teams up for success both on and off the pitch,” she said. “We are committed to make sure that they can field a competitive team.”
Then there is the elephant in the room about the timing of 2026: the Men’s World Cup in the United States. It is an open secret that the NWSL, like every league in the U.S., will have to pause its season as the world’s biggest event consumes the United States in 2026 — not just in the 11 host cities for games, but the dozens of other base camps that will include several NWSL facilities.
Momentum won’t be on any new team’s side in 2026, from the rush to have a full team on the field for preseason in a year flat (yes, it has been done before, but it doesn’t have to be done that way), to a season that will require an extensive pause a few months after it starts.
Which brings everything back to the same question: Why must those teams launch in 2026?
Boston’s answer is more complicated. Court documents obtained by the Boston Globe confirmed that Boston Unity Soccer Partners, the team’s ownership group, “risk NWSL terminating its rights” as an expansion franchise if White Stadium is not “constructed and operational … at the start of 2026.”
The Equalizer asked the NWSL to confirm there is a clause to terminate Boston’s franchise rights should the stadium not be ready, and whether the league would delay the team’s entry beyond 2026. A league spokesperson answered in entirety:
“The NWSL is excited to be in Boston, and we continue to work with all parties to make that happen.”
It’s easy to forget that the NWSL has been in a similar position before, because it happened in a different era — before Berman’s tenure and before the NWSL was in the mainstream spotlight. The club now known as San Diego Wave FC was originally approved as a franchise in Sacramento, but the proposed stadium (and MLS team) there fell through, and former team owner Ron Burkle transferred his NWSL franchise rights to San Diego. The situation — approving a franchise before it has venue plans fully secured — is similar to that of Boston, but it played out privately in the NWSL boardroom.
Yes, more teams means higher attendance and, potentially, more revenue, all of which can then be leveraged with sponsors and media rights holders. (The current media rights deal expires at the end of 2027, which is a Women’s World Cup year.)
But it feels increasingly clear that the writing that has been on the wall for months should be read aloud to the room: Delaying the launch of Boston, and whichever team joins it, would benefit everyone. Boston clearly needs more time to get its house in order — if it can do so at all. Cincinnati, Cleveland and Denver would have more time to build facilities (a training ground for Cincinnati) and have them ready for launch, in addition to building out their front offices and infrastructure.
The NWSL would also benefit as a whole with more uninterrupted time to navigate a drastically new world of full free agency and no drafts. This season already brought a hard shift away from the league’s traditional parity to a group of four teams in a class of their own (and an entire three rounds of chalk playoff results).
Introducing two new teams to begin play a year from now, before the consequences of these new systems are truly known, could further dilute the parity that is so widely the considered the reason why the NWSL is the best league in the world.
Perception and reality might be at odds right now as the NWSL expansion saga drags on. Maybe Boston has more confidence in its legal stance and construction timeline privately, and simply won’t say as much publicly. Maybe prospective city No. 16 has laid enough groundwork to flip the switch live in January. Berman said as much about the latter in late November, citing the “robustness” of the league’s process.
The NWSL might also view delay to the promised timeline of expansion as a rare PR hit for a league that has attracted so much positive attention lately.
For those reasons, and the continued promise from sources behind the scenes that a decision is imminent, pushing back the launch of the league’s next two teams feels highly unlikely.
Such a thorough process, however, deserves an equally thoughtful launch. If the current state of Boston’s franchise informs anything at all, it is that there are major long-term risks to putting the cart before the horse.
