Sports fans’ connection to their team of choice is usually strengthened by high points – wins, championships and the like. For Emily Kegg and thousands of other Columbus Crew fans, their connection was reinforced by a potential loss of their team itself. When the Crew’s then-ownership group and Major League Soccer threatened to relocate the team to Texas in 2017, Kegg and her family were eager to join the grassroots movement to Save the Crew. They made friends through the effort to keep the team in the city, bonding over a shared love of soccer.
In late 2018, when a new ownership group announced it intended to buy the team and keep it in Columbus, Kegg decided to stay involved. Now she’s the community director of the Nordecke, the supporters’ group of just under 600 members that coalesced during Save the Crew.
The Nordecke are a passionate bunch, and in April, they were given a new reason to cheer. The National Women’s Soccer League announced Columbus as the location of the league’s 18th team, to begin playing in 2028.
“We put all of our heart into our team,” Kegg told the Guardian. “We want to do that for the women’s team too.”
But the incoming team is evoking mixed feelings for many supporters. The weeks leading up to the allocation of the team were marked by controversial local politics, as city and county officials grappled with how to appease the billionaire ownership group, the league and the city’s residents. In a way, Columbus exemplifies the NWSL in 2026: rapidly expanding into big business, but taking some uncomfortable steps to get there.
In 2021, there were 10 teams in the NWSL. Come 2028, that number will be nearly doubled. The Columbus ownership group – led by billionaires Jimmy and Dee Haslam and former club doctor Pete Edwards (those three also own the Crew) and insurance giant Nationwide – paid a $205m expansion fee, the most in NWSL history and the second-highest for a North American women’s sports franchise, only after the $250m paid by each of the WNBA’s three most recent added teams. Franchises that joined the NWSL in 2022 paid just $2m each. The growing price tags mean the ownership class is becoming richer and richer.
“In this era, you’re always weighing your commitment to a sports team with the reality that they are the playthings of billionaires, who are the single greatest threat to democracy we currently have,” Crew supporter Morgan Hughes told the Guardian. “So [the incoming NWSL team is] exciting, and it’s also frustrating.”
Discussions between Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther, the prospective ownership group and the NWSL began in 2025. With the city’s spirited support of the Crew, its history hosting the US women’s national team and its robust youth soccer ecosystem, it was no surprise that when those conversations were first reported in February, fans were excited. Amy Cooper, who is working to open a women’s sports bar in the city called Raise the Bar, said the city is primed for a team and likened it to a “spark in a powder keg”.
In March, Ginther declared his intention to “bring the public and private sector together to put the community first”. Alongside the formal efforts, grassroots organizing swelled. Supporters took part in calls with organizations around the city, gathered signatures for an NWSL to CBUS petition and painted banners. But for many residents, the public-facing side of the effort to bring a team to the city was moving too fast.
“As with anything, when you’re bringing a new team or a new idea to a city, I think the speed at which the public conversation started happening about it felt fast, even for a fan,” Stacey Kyser, a Crew season-ticket holder, said. “There had been some whisperings about it, and then all of a sudden it was like, ‘We need to act now. This is coming to city council. This is happening.’”
Emerging details about the nuts and bolts of a potential franchise further complicated public sentiment.
On 24 March, the Columbus Dispatch reported that the ownership group, with the NWSL’s encouragement, was asking the city and county for a combined $50m to build a training facility and upgrade ScottsMiracle-Gro Field, the Crew’s home stadium, which the NWSL team would share. A Haslam Sports Group spokesperson told the paper that the NWSL was looking for an ownership group that could provide a public-private partnership.
The NWSL has had rocky experiences on that front. The ownership group of the Boston Legacy, who joined the league this season,entered a partnership with Boston Public Schools to renovate and share their home stadium, but that process has been contentious and is becoming more protracted and expensive for taxpayers by the day.
Jimmy Haslam has an estimated net worth of $10.3bn, most of which comes from the gasoline company that his father founded. The Haslams also own the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, where they have come under fire for their stewardship of the team, most notably for employing Deshaun Watson, who has been accused of sexual assault by more than 20 women.
The fans who spoke to the Guardian went in different directions on the need for public funding.
Alissa Friedman, an avid women’s soccer fan in Columbus, said, “It just felt like all this crony capitalism that has now infected this deal.” She published a letter in the Dispatch arguing that the Haslams “had the resources to make a fully private bid” and “should”.
Kyser sees the public funding as a long-term investment; an analysis commissioned by the investor group projected the team would bring in $118m for the state of Ohio in jobs, visitors, and taxes over 30 years.
The Crew is one of several Ohio pro teams to benefit from a public-private partnership – the deal that kept the team in town saw the city and Franklin county each pay about $50m to build a new stadium downtown and related infrastructure.
“I think the way that we spend public money to lure billionaires who are already here further into our communities is sickening,” Hughes said. But, since he helped lead the Save the Crew movement, he’d see himself as a hypocrite if he advocated against using funds on an NWSL team now. “As a state, as a city, as a region, we’ve spent our money for eons on men’s sports. It would be a grave injustice if the millisecond the women showed up, we decided that we don’t do it any more.”
The city council president met with the ownership group to work out a plan that would pay back the proposed $25m from the city. The solution: a 2% tax on tickets for all events at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field, including Crew games, to repay the investment. The surcharge would be used to fund various city health and human services programs. The investors would also commit an additional $12m toward community endeavors.
Soon after the tax plan was unveiled, an even thornier issue emerged around the plans to build the team’s training facility on a public park in the city’s underserved Southwest Side. The 28-acre McCoy Park had been marked by the city to be upgraded into “adaptive sports fields for residents with disabilities”, with a consultant already paid more than $900,000 to work with residents to develop plans.
Council members hadn’t known about the city’s plans for McCoy Park until it was brought up at a 6 April hearing – the first time residents had an official chance to weigh in on the effort to bring an NWSL team to the city.
“That’s probably the hardest part to stomach,” said Kegg, who found out about the plans for McCoy Park at the hearing. “… Taking away something like that from that community doesn’t feel good.”
The mayor, city council and the ownership group repeatedly emphasized that Columbus’s window to secure an NWSL team was narrowing; reconsidering the facility site, they said, would take too long. (The NWSL evaluates expansion bids on a rolling basis.)
On 9 April, Ginther announced he would ensure a replacement park for McCoy Park is created on the south-west side, but didn’t specify a new location. Eleven days later, the city council passed the financing plan and approved the McCoy Park deal, which included a last-minute amendment that committed the city to completing a replacement for the park by the end of 2027. The ownership group pledged $3m to the effort and said it would allow some community access to the future facilities at the current McCoy Park site.
The agreement passed on a tense split vote. “I’m angry that we’re even considering giving a public park to billionaires,” said council member Nancy Day-Achauer, one of the three votes against. “I have not waded through this much BS since I mucked out stalls in a cow barn.”
The next day, Franklin county approved its $25m share of the public funding. Just hours later, NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman appeared at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field with the Haslams and their co-investors to announce the awarding of the bid.
In a news conference after the announcement, Berman defended the use of public funding.“I actually can’t think of anything more important or better evidence that the community wants the NWSL in Columbus,” she said. “As we know for decades in men’s sports, there has been public support for infrastructure and for ensuring that sports teams are built into the foundation of the community, and we’re excited to have the opportunity to do that here in Columbus.”
Most of the Columbus fans the Guardian spoke to said they had no problem paying the 2% ticket fee. The replacement park, however, is still in the early stages of planning. Kegg said if the replacement park doesn’t materialize, “that’s something that [the Nordecke] should definitely make some noise about.”
If the city can follow through on its park promise, some fans see the deal as a win-win. Correy O’Neal was involved in the grassroots campaign to bring a team to the city. She lives with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and sympathizes with community members who saw the park plans changed without their input. But she also sees the NWSL deal as bringing an urgency to build an adaptive park that wasn’t there before.
“This isn’t a story about accessibility being taken away,” she said. “It’s a story about accessibility finally getting resourced, concrete dates set, and plans being turned to action. … I really feel that it’s worth celebrating.”
She also hopes that the team will also engage with the Columbus community beyond McCoy Park. “I really believe that if you push businesses and ask them to do the right thing, there’s a way to make that happen,” she said.
The Crew front office does have some community programs, but the Nordecke hasn’t always had success in convincing the club to support fans and underserved populations in Columbus. Despite the Nordecke’s urging, the Crew does not host a dedicated Pride Night, instead staging a “Soccer For All” theme. In light of that, and the Haslams’ donations to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians including JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, the supporters’ group released a statement in early April that, while in support of the efforts to bring an NWSL franchise to the city, urged the ownership group to recognize and embrace the league’s strong culture of LGBTQ+ support and inclusion.
As unhappy as some fans are about the thornier aspects of the deal that brought the NWSL to Columbus, those who spoke to the Guardian all plan to buy season tickets.
“I’m angry at the ownership group, but I want to go to the games. And so it’s just a little bit of a conflict internally,” Friedman said. “I think we’ll probably end up getting season tickets and realizing that that also benefits women’s soccer, benefits the players, and benefits us that we get to see professional women’s soccer here in Columbus. But it leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth in terms of the ownership group and who’s financially benefiting from it ultimately.”
Hughes said that he resents narratives about women’s sports that center daughters, but “I also desperately want [my daughter] to grow up in a city or region where she can dream about playing for her city. … For all the bad tastes that are in my mouth thanks to these billionaires, there’s a warming of my heart when I think about her having the ability to grow up having the same dreams I did.”
Some Crew fans who have watched their club and MLS become more commercialized over the years said they are ready to support NWSL fans navigating growing pains as more billionaires enter the league’s ownership. Hughes said the Crew fanbase has a lot of “muscle memory” from Save the Crew, and he is also excited to learn from NWSL fans, who, in other cities, have gone up against team and league front offices over player safety concerns or disparate cultural priorities.
Cooper thinks those tensions are why spaces like her planned women’s sports bar are invaluable. “You’ve got to keep it local and you’ve got to keep it real, because that stuff can get blown out of proportion really fast, especially when you start [getting] high-dollar,” she said. “It’s great – the growth is amazing, it’s so exciting. But we do have to realize that we really play a part in steering it as fans.”
