11th November 2025
November 11 – Former co-founder of Home Depot Arthur Blank, the billionaire owner of Major League Soccer’s (MLS) Atlanta United and the National Football League’s (NFL) Atlanta Falcons, is set to bring a new professional women’s soccer franchise to the Georgia capital.
The move, which would make the club the National Women’s Soccer League’s (NWSL) 17th team, comes with a record-setting expansion fee of $165 million. It was only last year that the Denver Summit FC paid $110 million to enter the league.
For perspective, it wasn’t that long ago that NWSL clubs were handed out for less than $5 million, but in the last few years, that fee has rocketed.
“We have had productive engagement with NWSL and others in its stakeholder group on the possibility of bringing an expansion franchise to Atlanta,” a spokesperson for Blank’s group said.
Commissioner Jessica Berman has said expansion talks are becoming more fluid: “Each of them has a different perspective on how much time they need to launch, the investments they need to make to be successful, including potentially around infrastructure, and we want to not force a square peg into a round hole.”
Atlanta’s addition would follow new franchises in Boston and Denver, with Berman even suggesting that one day, the NWSL could rival the 32-team scale of the NFL.
Blank’s involvement in soccer runs deep through the region. Through his AMB Sports + Entertainment group, he’s built one of the most successful MLS clubs in Atlanta United and is investing heavily in U.S. Soccer’s new national training centre, also based in Georgia.