You know you’re hot when the fire department shows up.
In the summer of 2023, the original organizers of what would become the Denver Summit NWSL franchise had a hunch—more like metaphysical certitude, really—that a massive untapped market existed for professional women’s soccer in the Mile High City. They’d looked at the metro area’s youthful, diversifying demographics; its active, fast-growing population; its support for men’s pro teams; its local talent pipeline into the U.S. Women’s National Team; and its lack of any pro women’s franchises. A Denver NWSL team was a matter of when, not if, they thought.
But their first test of the concept was a watch party for the USWNT’s first World Cup match in New Zealand at the Number 38 sports bar in Denver’s River North district. People were encouraged to show up and demonstrate their support for a women’s expansion franchise under the auspices of the fledgling organizing group, For Denver FC.
“I was so nervous,” said Ben Hubbard, a Denver tech entrepreneur who, along with sports exec Tom Dunmore and former NWSL player-turned-broadcaster Jordan Angeli, founded For Denver. And then Hubbard saw the line stretching for blocks, full of women’s soccer supporters waiting to get in.
“We blew the doors off the place,” Hubbard said, recalling the event. “At one point the fire department came. Number 38 had never seen so many people.”
Hubbard had seen them, though, in his mind’s eye. “You could just look across the patio at all the people,” he said, “and it was all the numbers you saw on the spreadsheet and in the research.”
For Denver FC fans at a World Cup watch party
For Denver FC’s first World Cup watch party in 2023. Courtesy For Denver FC
What was abstract became real—and with the Summit, that’s a pattern. Saturday, the team will make its NWSL debut in San Jose against Bay FC, and in a little over two weeks, it will play its first home game at Empower Field at Mile High, home of the NFL’s Denver Broncos. The club will set not only an NWSL single-game attendance record but a U.S. women’s professional sports mark as well, having sold 50,000 tickets and counting.
In three years, the Summit have grown into a well-financed juggernaut before they’ve scored a single goal, their silver-spoon birth a testament to the gold-rush mentality enveloping the business of women’s sports.
The team has a cap table full of big names, including Broncos limited partner Mellody Hobson of Ariel Investment Trusts and Project Level; Molly Coors, a member of the beverage giant family; and legendary athletes Peyton Manning and Mikaela Shiffrin. Their front office is led by team president Jen Millet, whose resume includes high-profile jobs with the Golden State Warriors and Bay FC.
They have office space in Denver’s hip lower downtown neighborhood, and are constructing a state-of-the-art training center. They’ve signed USWNT captain and Colorado native Lindsey Heaps to their roster, and they inked an agreement with the City of Denver to build a 14,500-seat stadium on a prime piece of real estate enhanced by a $70 million government subsidy.
They also accumulated a giant stack of bills to pay—from a then-record $110 million league expansion fee to $25 million for a temporary stadium to a commitment to spend at least $200 million on the permanent venue. It’s a far cry from just six years ago, when an NWSL expansion team could be had for $2 million.
“It’s a big bet,” control owner Rob Cohen said. “I’m not running from that. We’re making the largest investment in women’s sports that’s ever been made. People are asking how it pencils out. But you know, that’s business and that’s sports. It’s risk.”
Early Returns
Risk is literally Cohen’s business. He runs an insurance and finance company, IMA Financial Group, with 3,000 employees and offices across the country. And while the result of his big bet won’t be known for years, he says the early returns are promising.
His first example is the naming rights deal for the team’s training facility going up in suburban Centennial, with the hospital and healthcare company CommonSpirit. “I can’t tell you the dollar amount, but what I can tell you is it’s the largest amount ever paid for an NWSL performance center,” he said. He added that the deal compares favorably with other leagues, as well, beating any amount paid for an MLS or WNBA performance center. “And it’s above the average in the NBA and above the average in the NFL.”
He also boasts of Denver being the fastest NWSL team to land 15,000 season-ticket deposits, and the fastest to sell out its inaugural season-ticket allotment. And, of course, there’s the record-setting home opener set for March 28. “We’re starting to show that if you make these investments,” he said, “you can get these kinds of returns.”
That entrepreneurial bent was a major impetus behind For Denver FC’s earliest efforts—along with a love of the game and gender-equity activism.
It started with Hubbard and Dunmore getting together in 2022. Dunmore, who had recently moved to the Denver area, was working with Major League Cricket and would go on to help Olympian Shaun White start the Snow League winter-sports circuit. The U.K. native had served as a marketing exec for the Indy 11 USL team and the Indianapolis 500. He’d even worked on a prospective NWSL expansion franchise bid in Indy.
Hubbard, after working in the Obama administration, moved to the Denver area to start Parsyl, an insurance underwriting company for supply chains. He’d go to Colorado Rapids MLS games with his daughter, who asked when she could go see the women’s pro team. There wasn’t one. Hubbard thought he’d take a shot.
“Ben and I were an interesting combination,” Dunmore said, “because he had good connections locally, and I had connections in the soccer business.”
The pair did homework on the market and the NWSL’s most recent expansion requirements, and they liked what they saw. “There was this incredible development pipeline of female players here, and a great cultural fit for a women’s team,” Dunmore said. “And there was no women’s pro team here of any kind. That just seemed wrong.”
Dunmore reached out to Angeli via Twitter in April of 2023 to gauge her interest in joining the effort. Coming up through Denver’s youth club soccer system, she played six injury-plagued years in the old WPS and NWSL, and she was well-known for her broadcast work on MLS and NWSL matches. “I was always thinking, ‘Why don’t we have a team?’” Angeli said. “But I didn’t know anybody who could foot the bill.”
After lunch at a ramen place near Hubbard’s Denver office, the trio committed to finding the money. Hubbard had already heard interest from one of his Parsyl clients, Jon-Erik Borgen, an entrepreneur and member of a prominent Vail family; the Borgens became founding investors in the Summit.
The efforts accelerated when Nicole Glaros joined the effort in the summer of 2023. Glaros had worked for more than a decade with Techstars, a Boulder-based VC firm, but had taken a career break to explore other options. A friend of hers told her to watch a documentary on the Angel City NWSL team. There was a scene with Abby Wambach, one of the greatest U.S. players ever, receiving an ESPN icon award alongside Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning. In the documentary, Wambach was asked about being feted on the same stage as the two men’s sports legends. “And she said she felt ‘rage,’” Glaros said, “because she couldn’t afford health insurance.”
That made Glaros angry, too. “I have a daughter, and I want to see it different. I want to see it change.”
She checked to see if anyone was working toward an expansion team and learned of the FDFC effort. “And then I met Ben, and I was like, he’s an entrepreneur—he actually knows how to manifest things. And Tom’s got the sport background, which was amazing. And then I met Jordan, who’s got the player orientation, and so I was like, ‘If you guys will have me, I’m in.’”
She quickly began rounding up investors willing to be part of an ownership group.
But the push for financial backers was just one of three major boxes on FDFC’s checklist, Dunmore says. The group also needed to demonstrate community support and figure out where and how to stand up major facilities demanded by the league—a training center and a stadium.
The community part emerged quickly. Dunmore, Hubbard and Angeli had enlisted Skylark, a marketing and creative agency run by Denver-area native Brendan Hannan, a former comms director for the Chicago Fire and VP of marketing for the LA Galaxy. “We ended up building out this idea of For Denver FC—For Denver, For Colorado—which is probably a little cheesy, but there’s a level of shine you want to bring to these things,” Hannan said.
With the help of marketing materials designed by a local company, Wunder Werkz, FDFC got on the radar not only of the DFD—Denver Fire Department—but the Denver soccer community. At several World Cup watch parties and on social media, they collected names of people who wanted to volunteer time and support for the effort, creating an ambassador program for a club that didn’t exist yet and engaging them in activities like writing postcards to local officials pushing for a team.
Postcard to Denver mayor supporting women's soccer
A postcard to Denver’s mayor from a For Denver FC supporter. Courtesy Ben Hubbard
Buzz to Biz
The community interest made an impression on potential investors—including Cohen. In addition to running his insurance business, Cohen was well-known in the region for founding the Denver Sports Commission in 2001, which over the years had brought events including the NCAA Women’s Final Four, the men’s Frozen Four, and the NHL, MLB, NBA and MLS all-star games.
He was also involved in an unsuccessful Colorado Winter Olympics bid that went to Salt Lake City, and in that summer of 2023, he was exploring a WNBA expansion team.
Cohen attended one of FDFC’s World Cup watch parties in 2023 with another current investor, whom he didn’t name, “kind of as undercover cops,” he says.
He came away impressed and was on the case. He shifted his attention from the WNBA to the NWSL, did his due diligence and in the late fall visited NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman.
“I told her I was considering doing this, and that if I did it, it would be the best bid that she would see,” he said. “And I was impressed with her vision and what she thought the league would do long-term.”
He committed fully to the For Denver effort—and the volunteer group happily handed him the keys to the bid process. “When you’re involved in a lot of bids,” Cohen said, “you start to see the difference between winning and losing. And you realize the [expansion] fee is only part of the criteria.”
The rest: “Who’s the ownership group? What’s the marketing opportunity? What’s the infrastructure plan?”
Infrastructure has been the stickiest issue in the team’s young life so far. The Summit found a willing partner in the city of Centennial for its training facility and for the temporary stadium, the parts of which were shipped from China and are being assembled on the site.
And it found a prime site for the permanent stadium four miles south of Denver’s downtown, near an interstate exit, a light rail stop and a major boulevard.
That, along with the fan support and the ownership structure, was enough to win the NWSL expansion bid early last year.
But the Summit’s request for $70 million in city taxpayer funds to purchase and make improvements on the stadium site faced tough questions from City Council members. Colorado has been hit hard by federal cuts from the Trump administration, and Denver had just agreed to paying for $140 million in infrastructure upgrades on the site of a new Broncos stadium set to open in 2031.
Geoffrey Propheter, a public policy professor at the University of Colorado-Denver who studies stadium deals, cites risks with the Summit project.
One is the development adjacent to the stadium, which the Summit have said will include an entertainment district, commercial buildings and housing. In theory, tax revenues from those projects will help pay the city’s costs. “But that ancillary development is not promised,” Propheter said, calling it “vapor-tecture.”
Propheter argues that before signing off on a stadium, government entities should ensure that such ancillary development plans have gone through a permitting process, with money lined up. But they almost never do.
When asked about the non-stadium aspects of the project, Cohen acknowledged that no formal agreements are in place yet. “We are just beginning to discuss the development piece,” he said. “It will be done in a second phase as the site is tight and will require the use of that area to stage for the construction of the stadium. We are very committed to building the rest of the development and entertainment district.”
The metro area has been disappointed before by promises of soccer-related development. Stan Kroenke’s Colorado Rapids moved into Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in 2007 in neighboring Commerce City, touting plans for an adjacent entertainment, commercial and residential district. Two decades later, the land around the stadium remains mostly vacant. (The Rapids rank No. 28 on Sportico‘s most recent MLS team valuations.)
The Summit pushed the case that their Santa Fe yards project is better located than the Rapids’ home, and the City Council approved the Summit deal in December. “The city will get a return,” Cohen says. “Right now, 65% of our ticket owners are outside the city and county of Denver. So the city will benefit from that.”
And he sees the Summit fan base as distinct from the region’s men’s teams, meaning, he says, that the franchise won’t simply be cannibalizing other sports entertainment dollars.
Fans with For Denver FC scarf
Courtesy For Denver FC
A ‘Bananas’ Timeline
The person charged with serving that fan base is Jen Millet. The Summit president has Colorado ties, with family in the area and a diploma from Cherry Creek High School, 10 miles from the stadium site.
She left a good gig with Bay FC to take this position; before launching Bay FC, she walked away from a plum assignment with the Warriors. Both jobs prepped her for this role with the Summit. She worked for Golden State as it built the Chase Center, and Bay FC gave her the chance to start a franchise from scratch. “I understood from the business side all the things that need to happen, like, ‘Hey, we need office space. Hey, we need bank accounts. Hey, we need to set up payroll.’”
That’s in addition to thinking about things like parking at the new stadium—there won’t be a lot, with the club intent on encouraging use of light rail, ride-sharing and bike paths—and winning what she calls “an arms race” with other NWSL clubs in building a performance center. “The thing that comes up a lot is safety and security and privacy, and making sure the athletes can park in a safe space and have their own entrance into a facility,” Millet said.
She described the timetable as “bananas,” and she emphasized that sponsorship is the toughest part of the accelerated timeline. “Typically, these deals can take up to 18 months,” she said, “and we’re trying to do them in like eight to 10. We’ve made good progress, but there’s more to do; you’ll see us selling through the season with some assets.”
Still, these are good problems to have—ones nobody imagined three years ago, when Hubbard and Dunmore and Angeli were thinking up ways to generate buzz for the mere possibility of a team. Now, the trio is part of the cap table through a special purpose vehicle set up by Glaros and a former colleague of hers at Techstars, Stacy Carter.
Through that SPV, which Glaros and Carter are also part of, Hubbard holds a seat on the team board. Going in, none of them expected to be compensated for the dollars they donated and time they volunteered, but the SPV “was a creative way to honor us and the work we have done,” Angeli said.
While they went into the endeavor with no illusions, Dunmore said, “It always did feel to me that it was going to happen.”
Angeli echoed that confidence. Throughout the process, she says, “I would have these pictures in my head of what the first game was going to be like.”
More recently, the picture of that game, now just days away, is even clearer. “Oh,” Angeli said, “I’m gonna be a mess.”