Kelly Chambers Cousins has been the GM / Senior Team Manager / Director of Player Development at Reading for years. She was the heart and soul of the team. Reading didn’t or couldn’t give the women enough resources/money to compete in the top half of the WSL. Kelly is the only reason they haven’t been relegated before this past season. She will be a great complement to head coach Amy Rodriguez.
Teams are starting to sell season ticket packages for next year! Great opportunity for fans to glean information about the competition structure for next year. Multiple teams are selling packages for 14 home games - presumably the 13 regular season games and *one* Challenge Cup game. Sounds like next year's CC will be a straight knockout (home and away) cup competition if there's only one guaranteed CC game per team. TBD if there will be a preliminary round of 12 and 2 teams with a bye or if there might be two guest teams added for a nice square 16 participants.
Or only one Challenge Cup game is included and there's guaranteed games that are an extra cost. MLS teams with two home Leagues Cup game did this (included the MLS opponent game and required separate purchase for the Liga MX opponent game).
Per Kassuof of the EQZ, a sale of the Chicago Red Stars is set and just needing finalization paperwork. New owners are a group of Chicago businesswomen led by Laura Ricketts, who owns the WNBA Chicago Sky and is a part-owner of the MLB Chicago Cubs. (I don't know much about her, but a reply to JK's Tweet said she is not politically aligned with the rest of her family, and that's apparently a good thing.) Still waiting on the sales of the Reign and Thorns.
Laura is an openly gay Democratic donor. The rest of the family is pretty conservative and includes a Republican Senator (formerly governor) and the former Finance Chair of the Republican National Committee. This and their backing of Trump were causes of much consternation when they were in the running to buy Chelsea. I think the important parts of this sale are that the new ownership group includes two current co-owners of famous and pretty well run sports teams (the Cubs and Penguins), a couple CEOs of Chicago based financial services firms, and two billionaire philanthropists. This should be a group with the will and know-how to spend money to help build the team into a winner and a bigger brand. And they apparently are already planning on spending $25 million on club operations after taking over.
Guess the Red Stars aren't being relocated anytime soon? Question then becomes where should they play?
NWSL was very clear from the get-go that relocation was an absolute last-ditch option. So no, no relocation, and that wasn't even much on the table anyway because talk of a local ownership group was in the discussion very rarely on. Bridgeview definitely isn't the best arrangement, but they might be in for a long haul as building a more appropriate stadium for the Red Stars in Chicago will probably be as long of a process as DCU had for Audi Field or as NYCFC is still mired in.
More from the EQZ: the Challenge Cup is being scrapped after this year TBD what the 14th game will be in most STH packages being advertised already. For one team, it'll likely be hosting the newly-announced one-off game between the Shield winner and the Playoff winner.
I am glad they are scrapping the Challenge Cup. Some of the teams take it more seriously than others and I think that is not good for the NWSL or the game of soccer.
But that's gonna happen for any competition that's not either the regular season or the playoffs... I don't think that's a reason to not do something. Like, this is a regular argument on the MLS side for the USOC or the CCL/CC or any other side competition they've participated in. Follow that line of thought and you don't have those side competitions at all, which also isn't good for the game.
Open Cup and Champions League pit MLS teams against non-MLS teams. Challenge Cup is just more NWSL games, but midweek instead of on the weekend.
The argument still exists for those tournaments... And, funnily enough, MLS teams usually don't care about the USOC *until* it's only MLS teams left, i.e. when the title is actually getting close and the lower-level sides have mostly-entirely been filtered out.
Unfortunately, it's sometimes the upper-level teams that get filtered out, by playing their C teams in USOC games.
Ahaha sorry for the confusion - I meant "lower level" as in the USL/NISA/etc. have filtered out and left just MLS sides remaining. (Hence the i.e. as reiteration of the point.) But you're not wrong! If upper-level MLS sides don't care soon enough in the USOC, they get bounced too. And I think that's kinda what cpt was getting at - if some teams take a side competition seriously and others (even if they're better) don't, then the final product can potentially feel a cheapened. I was just saying that the issue of some teams not caring about side competitions is always going to be an issue, and didn't necessarily be used as a judgement call to scrap the idea of side tournaments - better instead to give teams reason to care.
Berman in pre-CC-final interview: --expecting sellout for the NWSL championship in SD (32,000) --media deal expected by end of year --this week was the prelim deadline for the sales of POR and RGN; both have a list of bidders --next round of expansion (two teams) slated for 2026 (for start play); expected to incl. BOS but no hard confirmation
Some wild attendance trivia for this year: One other @NWSL number: 6 teams had season highs after regular season returned following World Cup. This year, WWC bounce was real. In 2019, somewhat. In 2015, much less so. Boston's first post-WWC game drew 2,525! Teams simply didn't have staffing to build on World Cup hype. pic.twitter.com/9n47jFxaEb— Paul Kennedy (@pkedit) September 9, 2023
Considering the World Cup was the least successful in history for the USA it may be more appropriate to attribute the post Cup bounce to the fact that six teams are within six points of the league lead, and a couple weeks ago a couple more teams were also in that range. I don’t think the league has ever been this competitive.
Competitive is definitely true for this year! I know I saw on the NWSL socials the other day that year is the first time that every team in the league has earned at least 20pts - unless CHI loses out, it'll be that every team earns at least 1PPG over the season. And unless POR wins out, it'll be the first time since the very first season that the champion earned less than 40pts - we've already guaranteed that no team totals 2PPG this season. Only the first season was close to this competitive. It was down to a NJ draw instead of a win on the last day that stopped all four playoff spots being tied on 38pts. 5th and 6th weren't that far behind either! It was just 7th and 8th we rather weak that year that makes this current season feel even more competitive.
Free Agent list for the coming offseason has officially dropped: https://www.nwslsoccer.com/news/2024-nwsl-free-agents And for reference: https://www.nwslsoccer.com/news/nwsl-free-agency-explained
Sportico has released the valuations of all NWSL teams. https://www.sportico.com/valuations/teams/2023/nwsl-team-values-angel-city-1234740928/ I don't have access to Sportico, but JWS posted a summary image on FB: As a reminder, just last year the Spirit got bought for $35m, and are now apparently worth $54m. Not sure if the data for this article was complied before or after the sale of Chicago, which was reported to be around $50m versus the posted valuation of $40m by Sportico
Megan Rapinoe's final regular-season home game set a @NWSL attendance record 👏 pic.twitter.com/SIOWfjNERQ— ESPN (@espn) October 7, 2023
New TV Deal to be announced. Actually, multiple deals to be announced, and not just TV. https://www.sportico.com/business/media/2023/nwsl-media-deals-espn-cbs-amazon-scripps-1234741394/ ESPN, CBS, Scripps, and Amazon will be signing a four year deal with NWSL to air games. Exact terms unknown, but according to the article, it will be more than 10x what ($1.5 million/year) they were getting from CBS. (that was a net loss because the league had to do all the technical broadcast stuff, something that was estimated as "Eight figures"). Hopefully the deal means an upgrade in coverage AND an upgrade in the coverage of the game itself.