NWSL commissioner: Courage, rivals must invest in infrastructure to keep up with league’s growth

The National Women’s Soccer League is growing — its number of clubs, its franchise values, the transfer fees being paid for its players to change teams and its exposure on television.

NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman told WRAL in an exclusive interview that the key to the league’s explosive growth is investment. The league, which was founded in 2012, has attracted wealthy individuals, celebrities and sports stars to ownership groups in recent years.

“It turns out if you build it, they will come,” Berman said.

“The longer answer, and the more important answer, is that this sport has been, especially for women, the best in the world in the U.S. for a decade. This could have happened a long time ago, long before I was here, but I’m fortunate to have a group of investors who believe in our long-term vision to be the best league in the world, and a group of media partners and sponsors who believe in this investment as a driver for their business goals.”

Berman sat down with WRAL as part of an annual visit to Raleigh to meet with key stakeholders around the North Carolina Courage.

The Courage host Angel City FC at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday at First Horizon Stadium in Cary. North Carolina is seeking to end a six-match winless skid and keep its playoff hopes alive. The Courage sit 11th, just four points out of the final playoff spot with seven games remaining. North Carolina recently transferred 20-year-old midfielder Jaedyn Shaw to Gotham FC for a NWSL-record $1.25 million transfer fee.

New clubs in Boston and Denver will start play next season in new stadiums. Kansas City, the league’s top team this season, opened its own dedicated stadium in 2024. Berman said other teams are trying to replicate that.

“The number one most important building block is infrastructure,” Berman said. “So you look at your training facility and you look at your stadium and you ask yourself: Is that going to set you up for success?”

The Courage’s 150-acre facility in Cary opened in 2002 and was expanded in 2011. It holds not only the main soccer-specific First Horizon Stadium at WakeMed Soccer Park (capacity 10,000), but also two lighted full-size practice fields and four other practice fields.

The stadium is also home to North Carolina FC and has hosted the NCAA College Cup, ACC and high school championships and The Soccer Tournament, a 7-on-7 event. 

The facility’s location off East Chatham Street can create a bottleneck for fans leaving the location. The team’s principal owner Steve Malik was part of a group that pursued a 20,000-seat stadium as part of Raleigh’s Downtown South development earlier this decade. Those plans were put on hold in 2021.

“The Courage have grown with the rise of women’s sports and our region and require additional capacity and fan amenities to keep as a community asset to keep pace with other NWSL markets,” Malik told WRAL in a text message Friday afternoon.

When asked about helping the Courage push for a potential new stadium, Berman, who became commissioner in 2022 after a league-wide scandal over mistreatment of players, said that’s among her key responsibilities.

“It’s one of the single most important things that I could spend my time on, which is to support our club owners’ efforts, particularly when there is a desire to do the work and to figure out how to really get the club to the next level,” she said.

Franchises in men’s sports have long sought to leverage the popularity of their teams to extract concessions from local officials. Sometimes that means new stadiums or additional public funding. The Carolina Hurricanes got the rights to develop 80 acres around Raleigh’s Lenovo Center as part of an agreement that saw them sign a long-term lease to remain at the facility. 

“These are things that [have existed] in men’s sports for 50 years. It’s only new to women’s sports,” Berman said. 

“So you ask yourself, like, why is it now that only in the last three years has women’s professional soccer been put on the map? It’s because we are now applying some of the best practices that exist in men’s sports, which are not novel and are pretty simple, but hard to do, and we have a lot of lost ground to make up. I think there’s a sense of urgency around our league and around our boardroom to make sure that we make the investments to be the best league in the world.”

Unlike the NFL, MLB, NBA or NHL, which are unquestionably the best leagues in the world, the NWSL faces a challenge from its European counterparts. It is in a never-ending fight for talent, one reason the league no longer has a draft. Teams must compete for players in a global market.

“Our goal to be the best league in the world requires that we provide the best environments,” Berman said.

The talent is flowing both ways. For every Alyssa Thompson, who left Angel City for Chelsea for around $1.45 million, Berman will point to Mia Fishel (on a record $2.5-million deal) and Jacquie Ovalle (for a world record $1.5 million transfer fee) as players who chose to return or come to the NWSL.

“If you look across the world, our league is, by far, the most competitive league in the world,” Berman said. “I think that if that is something that a player values, meaning they want to play in games where they’re going to compete against competition where the game is close and you don’t know who is going to win before the game starts, there is no other league that a player would be attracted to.” 

The Courage acquired defender Natalie Jacobs from Houston on Friday for defender Malia Berkley and $75,000 in 2026 intraleague transfer funds. Jacobs is under contract through 2028. 

The deal came one day after the franchise announced its transfer of Shaw. It is the sixth deal of more than $1 million in all of women’s soccer, according to the club, including recent deals for Thompson and Ovalle.