Funding a professional women’s league – WPSL PRO interview part 2

The franchise entry fee for Division 2-hopefuls WPSL PRO is lower than anything else in the market. In part 2 of our interview with Project Director Benno Nagel, he explains the finances behind the league. (You can catch up with Part 1 here)

What was the last number for NWSL, like $115 million? I think if you throw that up for Division 1, and then for the Super League, I don’t know, but they’re selling it for a lot more than $1 million. So we just saw an opportunity to provide a chance for folks to buy into professional soccer. We’re not gonna sell it for a dollar but we felt that a million dollars was a good number and it’s actually a payment that’s structured over several years, so it’s not a million dollars you have to pay upfront. It’s not a bad thing that the NWSL is able to charge that much for their license, it’s actually an amazing thing. It’s a sign of the growth of the market. I would say the same for the Super League. It’s awesome that people are willing to pay that amount of money to play professional soccer.

That’s really amazing. At the same time, when you look at how much it costs to operate these teams, and you go back to the premise that we have of “how do we be an athlete first league? How are we a club community first league?” If you give us $5 million to join, I’d rather that $4 million go to your market and go to your community and go to your athletes and go to your staff and just go to your project to make sure that it’s gonna be sustainable. We don’t need $50 million to run the league. It’d be great to take $50 million and claim $40 million as profit and give it back to your investors and your shareholders, but would that service soccer or would that just service the owners of our league?

We really want to do this to serve soccer and we had to make a number that was gonna be realistic because we do need some resources to operate as a league and we’re very lucky that we’ve got investors at the league level that are gonna support the league operation.

Everything is geared towards how we make it affordable for clubs. So we felt that a million dollars was a healthy number. We’re gonna spread it over several years. Anything beyond that, we just felt that it was an overreach.

How do you put your money to work in your community? That’s really the most important thing for us, communities and players. You got all the money in the world or you got no money in the world, it’s almost equally difficult to go get a facility project.

I think if you look at a group like Carolina Core. Obviously look at a group like Cleveland, those can be the high benchmarks. Look at Sioux Falls. Look at markets like Oklahoma City and Dallas. Think about the Bay Area where I’m at. There’s a lot of groups and we don’t just want to be a league for the 500,000 plus markets, but how do we penetrate into Little Rock, AR, Wichita, KS, Omaha, NE. There’s just so many places that should have teams like this.

Will there be a maximum, a minimum, or an average salary set? I saw that MLS Next Pro doesn’t, but USL Championship,  in contrast,  at D2 for the men’s side does.

Yeah we’re gonna have minimum standards obviously, in terms of what people need to do to perform in their market and what that leads to in terms of like compensation but we’re not necessarily gonna have a cap on what people want to spend. If somebody wants to spend more on certain players or they want to spend more on their roster we’re all for it. Of course, those clubs will still have to present a financial plan but if somebody shows that they want to invest, there’s been enough impediments and barriers to investing in women’s soccer for decades. We don’t want to create more of ’em. We don’t wanna have people coming into the space and trying to do it for pennies on the dollar. We want to make sure that the athletes are fully professional, that there’s safe environments, that there’s environments that can have the resources from medical to housing, to travel, to all the stuff that we want to do to make sure it’s professionalized.

However, we don’t want to curtail anybody’s ambition, and we want to make sure that folks have a plan, right? We do want people to go out and think about, “Hey, how do I go get a household name?” Yeah. It’s not gonna help me with my community engagement. And what is that gonna cost? I think there’s a lot of different ways that we can structure some of these deals as well. And look, there’s even possibility that the league in some form, maybe not in the first year, but in some form, could actually have some ability to help supplement certain rosters or certain budgets for certain players.

If we feel that there’s a player that’s gonna really impact the league, whether that’s a big household name that’s going for their final final dance or it was time to spend 10 years in the league and they want to come over to play for us or a top prospect that’s gonna maybe become an asset and be a player, we can maybe support that.

And last but not least, there’s a profit sharing angle to the involvement of the athletes in this.

We’ll have more to share on that later, but yes, there is a construct where both the clubs and the athletes will have profit share.

And with that, we will move on to how the new league can empower athletes, in part 3 of this interview next week.