WPSL PRO Interview Part 4: Enabling development
This is the final part of our interview with WPSL PRO Project Director Benno Nagel. The first three parts can be found here, here and here.
Where does WPSL PRO fit as a place for player development? Nagel is ebullient.
There's just so much territory that has not been occupied by these different leagues. The up and coming prospect is an easy story to conceptualize but think about the NWSL second chance player, or Luca Toni (who progressed from the lower league Serie C in Italy to a World Cup win in only 7 years)
Where would that player come from in America? If he was a woman in America, that would never happen. He would've become an accountant or a school teacher or whatever he would've gone on to do in his career professionally other than soccer. I don't know if it's gonna be 2027, but imagine in 2031 when the Women's World Cup is here in North America and there's an athlete that maybe makes the Women's World Cup team that started her professional journey in 2027 or 2028 with the WPSL PRO? There could be an athlete that could for whatever reason, not get signed by an NWSL club, not get signed by a Super League club, maybe wind up with the WPSL PRO Club on a good multi-year contract to start and they just crush it. Next thing they get transferred to an NWSL club or they get transferred to some higher level program and they continue to succeed and then they make it into the national team and play in the World Cup. And you could trace that player's moment of their breakthrough back to the WPSL PRO. That would be like insane, in a good way. That's what we feel the opportunity is, who would be the women's Luca Toni in American soccer right now? You wouldn't have 'em, they would be out of soccer. Or think about an NWSL athlete that had a horrific injury, or maybe stepped away from the game to start their family or had some other reason that they needed to take a one or two year hiatus and now they're looking to come back into play professionally. The WPSL PRO could be a spot for them to do that.
Over the next few weeks we will be bringing you profiles of some of the emerging markets in WPSL PRO, along with all the beginning of the Minnesota Super Cup, WPSL, UPSL and NPSL for this season. Anything else you want us to cover? Drop me a line at tim@lightsfootball.com or let us know on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Bluesky.
WPSL PRO Interview Part 3: Empowering athletes, engaging fans
This is part 3 of our interview with WPSL PRO Project Director Benno Nagel. Read part 1 here and part 2 here
With no designs on Division 1 and amateurs at Division 4 level, Nagel explained to us how the new league is looking to empower athletes to advance.
We feel there's a tremendous breeding ground for talent for the next one up, that type of mentality. If you look at the NWSL right now I think it's 56% of the current players in the NWSL played in the WPSL over the last five years. I think there's already a lot of precedent to show that we've got a tremendous engine of developing talent. They only spend a couple weeks out of the year with the WPSL teams, but we've provided an environment for those players to kind of round out their college development years with adding those summer competitions. In addition to these professional teams, the announcement that we had on Wednesday is not as much for the national soccer audience as it is about the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of female athletes, college athletes or high school athletes that would've seen that and would already know about the WPSL because they've played in it. They would be seeing the pathway in front of them and realizing like, "Hey, if I stick with this I have a chance to become a professional athlete."
I think that was probably the most important group that we were targeting for that announcement. Just to show those athletes that, Hey, we're fighting for you. We're trying to create a world for you to continue to develop in. Keep playing, keep training, keep making the commitment to what you're doing because we're gonna build a pathway forward.
So I hope that there was a lot of soccer fans that saw it, but I really hope that there was a lot of soccer athletes that saw it and I hope they can keep 'em dreaming for what we can what we can build and what they can achieve 'cause ultimately the athletes have to step up and hit that next level.
We're lucky that the WPSL has such a base of athletes already, to generate a couple hundred players that we would want to draw from to form the league. So I think we're in a pretty good spot, and I think a lot of credit, obviously to Sean (Jones, the WPSL President) and the folks that operate the WPSL and have for years and years. Even going back to Jerry Zanelli, the founder of the league. It's just a tremendous story.
With a blank slate, the new league has chosen the US tradition of a Spring to Fall schedule rather than the International calendar followed by (amongst others) USL Super League. Nagel's response is refreshingly candid.
For a lot of the country in those Winter months it's pretty harsh elements outside. And I just don't know if that's the right approach. I get it from the International calendar and what it does to unlock things within the summers.
Obviously people live in those elements, it's not like people aren't living in Minnesota in January. But we just feel that the Spring, Summer, Fall time period is gonna be a lot more conducive to families and sports fans that want to come out and spend two or three hours tailgating before the game and get to their seats early and just really enjoy the elements and the crowd and the stadium without having to wear 20 layers of clothing and go take a warm shower for an hour after they get home. We just really wanted to make sure that the fan experience was gonna be as uniform as possible across the league and not create any circumstance where folks are playing in weather conditions. They just aren't the best for pro sports.
For fans unable to make it to live games, the presence of Gravitas Ventures as an investor is seen as key.
We actually we feel pretty bullish about our networks in the media. If you look at Michael Murphy's professional background and his partner, Nolan's background with Gravitas Ventures. Their network's extensive, knowing all the various people. That's not gonna guarantee that we land some amazing deal with somebody to broadcast. But we do feel that we have some really strong starting points for relationships and we feel that we also have some pretty amazing stories that we can tell when you start thinking about these athletes and where they're coming from and just the desire that I think the sports fan and the soccer fan has to learn more about the athlete and learn more about their pathway and how they got to where they're going and I think the level of athlete that we'll be bringing in will also help us to tell those stories easier. Obviously we're gonna compensate all of our athletes and it's gonna be a fully professional environment but we're not gonna have a Lionel Messi playing in the league.
This isn't where we're gonna exploit the fact that they're lower level athletes trying to strive for a higher level but I think the ability to tell their story, I think that they will also welcome it because they want to amplify their profile and they want to show who they are. I think there's a lot of good synergy that will allow us to tell some really powerful stories authentically and again, really make this a league where it's athlete first.
If you think about that beyond just the game day broadcast, but the types of content that we can produce week in, week out, I think there's some really exciting stuff that we can do.
We're really excited to tell the story of these athletes. I think that's the biggest opportunity for us in the market is to really personalize the journey from a high school junior or senior through a top college player prospect and how do they get to the professional level? Who's gonna be the next superstar that we uncover? If you think to the MLS Next Pro as an example, you know who's gonna be the next Cavan Sullivan that comes through the WPSL PRO, and how will we tell that story?
I think that's interesting to think about, who are those players? Because we really do feel that there's a lot of those players in this country that just have not been discovered yet. Maybe not players at his level, he's a very special player as a young up and coming men's player, but we feel that there's a lot of undiscovered talent in this country, and I think that people are very interested to learn about who those athletes are, where do they come from there's just a lot that hasn't been touched upon with women's soccer, just because there hasn't been enough teams to tell those stories.
There hasn't been enough reach from the leagues to be able to get into those markets. I think that's why we're pretty well positioned to, to succeed with what we're doing.
We wrap up our interview next week, with a look at the development piece. Stay tuned.
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.
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.