Women’s soccer fans around Colorado are celebrating after the National Women’s Soccer League announced Thursday that Denver would be awarded the league’s 16th franchise and start play in 2026.
The ownership group is paying a record $110 million expansion fee to join the league, according to Sportico, compared with the $2 million entry fee that teams in Los Angeles, San Diego and Utah paid in 2020-22. The last two teams to join the league — Bay FC in San Jose, Calif., and Boston — paid $53 million in 2023.
“The viewership is up. The fandom is up. The sponsorships are up. The media rights are up,” Mellody Hobson, who is part of the ownership team, said Thursday during a news conference at the Number Thirty Eight brewery in the RiNo Arts District. “Everything that is happening in this area of women’s sports and that will happen right here in Denver, benefits community, benefits society and we are again so excited to be a part of it.”
Hobson, who will serve as the team’s alternate governor, is the co-CEO and president of Ariel Investments, the first Black-owned mutual fund company in the United States. She is also part of the Denver Broncos Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group.
Denver was selected as the league’s next expansion franchise, in part, due to the work of For Denver FC, a grassroots movement to bring professional women’s soccer to the Centennial State, league managers said Thursday. League commissioner Jessica Berman specifically shouted out to the thousands of women’s soccer fans who sent her postcards advocating for a Denver team.
(The ownership team said they’ve already received 2,000 season ticket deposits.)
“Girls grow up here, women train here and then they go off to play for other teams,” said Gov. Jared Polis, who also mentioned that his 10-year-old daughter plays soccer. “We want to make sure we give a place for our homegrown talent to excel at the professional level and of course attract people from across the country and across the world to play here in Denver.”
The team name, crest and colors were not announced Thursday, although NWSL T-shirts and scarves in Colorado license plate green were handed out to people gathered for the announcement.
Where the team will play is also unknown.
But the club’s controlling owner and governor, Rob Cohen, and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said during the conference that a new stadium and training facility designed for female athletes will be built with private funding.
A specific location was not mentioned. Johnston, however, said it will be within the city and county of Denver and “will be accessible to neighborhoods where folks can walk and bike.”
The team will need a temporary venue to play for its first few seasons as a stadium is built. While Coors Field was constructed. The Colorado Rockies played their first two seasons in the old Mile High Stadium. Cohen said that a plan for a temporary venue is being finalized and an announcement could come as early as February.
The Colorado Rapids, the Major League Soccer team that plays in Commerce City, is owned and operated by Kroenke Sports, which opened its soccer stadium, Dicks Sporting Goods Field, in 2007 and seats 18,000 fans.
Denver’s NWSL bid group was led by Cohen, the CEO of IMA Financial Group, who lives in Denver and is the team’s controlling owner because he is supplying most of the financing, the league said Thursday.
Hobson’s ownership stake comes from Project Level, a subsidiary fund of Ariel Investments announced Thursday, that invests specifically in women’s sports. The ownership group also includes Ben Hubbard, the CEO of Denver-based insurance company Parsyl, FirstTracks Sports Ventures, led by siblings Jon-Erik Borgen and Kaia Borgen Moritz, Neelima Joshi and Dhiren Jhaveri and Molly Coors.
The Borgen siblings, who have seven daughters between them, were raised in Denver and got involved with the ownership group when a feasibility study was launched in 2023.
“A couple of years ago, along with my brother who’s also part of the ownership group, we just looked at each other and said, why don’t we have women’s soccer here? We’ve always been soccer fans. My girls all play soccer, I played soccer and so that started the idea for us,” Borgen Mortiz said.
In November, Berman said Denver was one of three cities pursuing an expansion team (the others were Cleveland and Cincinnati).
The NWSL started play in 2013 to replace the Women’s Professional Soccer league, which ran from 2007 to 2012. The NWSL started with eight teams.
The regular season runs from March to November, and each team currently plays 26 games. For the 2024 season, eight teams made the playoffs.
Denver previously had a women’s professional basketball team. The Colorado Xplosion played in the American Basketball League from 1996 through 1998.