WPSL PRO to seek Division 2 sanctioning

Having spent its embryonic phases identifying as a league which was going to apply for Division 3 sanctioning, WPSL PRO announced this week that it was revising that aim and instead targeting Division 2. The move is anchored by an announcement that Cleveland Sports Group will be a founding member, months after they unsuccessfully bid for an expansion franchise in the NWSL.
From his office in Northern California, WPSL PRO project director Benno Nagel has a global perspective on the development of women’s football, and sees his new league as the answer to questions that have been posed for too long.

Our vision has always been to build a successful league and a viable league and a league that we feel can maximize the opportunity and fill that void the best. There’s two groups at the top and then three or four groups at the very bottom. And that division three, division two spots are both open really. If you look at the division two versus division three requirements for the Pro League Standards, they’re not much different and so we just felt that there’d be a better opportunity for us to provide a slightly higher level of operations to provide hopefully a higher level of play and just to enhance our reach when we look at commercial partners and sponsorship opportunities and just all the things that we want to do we felt that being a division two league to start was a better platform for that.

And Nagel even addressed promotion or relegation.  

I think right now, let’s get through the first two seasons, and I wouldn’t count fall of 2026. That’s a half season kickoff launch. I would expect to see if we can be successful at the first two years and add teams at the level to which we think that we can, then I would believe that by 2028 you’d start seeing some movement towards a Division 3 sanctioning application. Then new teams that would come into the pipeline would have that option of either starting division two or populating division three. We have no ambitions for a Division 1 league, Division 2 is the top of our pyramid. Division 4 (the amateur WPSL), where we already have a tremendous base of close to 150 teams and you could see how that future division three could slot in rather nicely and create a true connected ecosystem across all the levels. We do want to achieve some sort of a promotion/relegation structure between Division 2 and Division 3.

What Division 2 has that Division 3 doesn’t have, is a requirement that the majority of markets are in metro areas of 500,000.

So are they confident that they’ll meet that and won’t end up having to decline smaller markets because of the balance of the league?

If you think about Cleveland, if you think about Oklahoma City, where I’m at in the Bay Area, Dallas, Atlanta, we’re not concerned about that. We feel that there’s pathways for all the teams that we currently have to qualify for that.

The teams they “currently have” is an ever evolving list.

We’re still working through the structure of what will that launch look like. That may impact the number of teams that we want to have to start for the first full season. We’re hoping to have somewhere between 12 to 16 teams that will join, and that’s the spring of 2027. So from that, would all of those groups want to start in the fall of 2026? Maybe there’s only a few that do. Everybody has a different preference for how they go to market. We see a way with the critical mass of teams that we have. We know for a fact that we’ll be able to do something in the fall of 2026.

Stay tuned for part two of our interview, on the new league’s finances, next week.