Columbus is about to join the elite circle of cities with professional women's soccer, but the path to landing a National Women's Soccer League franchise has exposed the messy underbelly of modern sports expansion: billionaires demanding public money, neighborhoods losing promised amenities, and fans wrestling with their own complicity.
The announcement came in April. The NWSL awarded its 18th team to Columbus, set to begin play in 2028. The ownership group, led by billionaires Jimmy and Dee Haslam and insurance giant Nationwide, paid a $205 million expansion fee, the highest in league history. For context, franchises that joined just two years earlier paid $2 million each. The price tag reflects how fast the league is scaling: from 10 teams in 2021 to nearly 20 by 2028.
Emily Kegg, who helped lead the grassroots campaign to save the Columbus Crew from relocation in 2017, was thrilled. She now runs the Nordecke, a supporters group born from that fight. "We put all of our heart into our team," she told the Guardian. "We want to do that for the women's team too."
Then came the fine print.
City officials and the ownership group asked Columbus and Franklin County for $50 million combined to build a training facility and upgrade the Crew's home stadium, which the new women's team would share. Jimmy Haslam, whose net worth sits around $10.3 billion, made the case for public investment as a long-term play. An analysis commissioned by the investor group projected the team would generate $118 million for Ohio over 30 years in jobs, visitors, and taxes.
Not everyone bought it. Alissa Friedman, an avid women's soccer fan, published a letter in the Columbus Dispatch arguing that the Haslams "had the resources to make a fully private bid" and "should." She called it "crony capitalism."
Morgan Hughes, who led the Save the Crew effort, found himself caught between conviction and contradiction. "In this era, you're always weighing your commitment to a sports team with the reality that they are the playthings of billionaires," he said. Yet he also recognized the hypocrisy of opposing public funding for women's soccer after accepting it for men's sports. "As a state, as a city, as a region, we've spent our money for eons on men's sports. It would be a grave injustice if the millisecond the women showed up, we decided that we don't do it any more."
City council president worked out a compromise: a 2% tax on all event tickets at the stadium to repay the $25 million from the city. The surcharge would fund health and human services programs. The investors committed an additional $12 million to community efforts.
Then things got worse.
The planned training facility would sit on McCoy Park, a 28-acre green space on Columbus's underserved Southwest Side that the city had already marked for transformation into adaptive sports fields for residents with disabilities. A consultant had been paid over $900,000 to develop plans with the community.
Residents didn't find out until April 6, during the first official public hearing on the NWSL bid. Kegg, the Nordecke director, learned about it the same way. "Taking away something like that from that community doesn't feel good," she said.
Mayor Andrew Ginther and the ownership group argued the window to secure an NWSL team was closing. Reconsidering the facility site, they warned, would waste time. The NWSL evaluates expansion bids on a rolling basis.
On April 9, Ginther announced a replacement park would be created on the Southwest Side, but offered no specifics. On April 20, city council passed the financing plan and approved the McCoy Park deal, adding a last-minute amendment requiring the city to complete a replacement park by the end of 2027. The ownership group pledged $3 million and promised some community access to the future facilities.
The vote was contentious. "I'm angry that we're even considering giving a public park to billionaires," said council member Nancy Day-Achauer, one of three voting against. "I have not waded through this much BS since I mucked out stalls in a cow barn."
The next day, Franklin County approved its $25 million. Hours later, NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman announced the award at Scott's Miracle-Gro Field alongside the Haslams and co-investors. She defended the public funding as evidence of community desire and drew a parallel to decades of public investment in men's sports.
Not all concerns center on money. The Nordecke released a statement in early April expressing support for the NWSL bid while urging the ownership group to embrace the league's strong LGBTQ+ culture and inclusion. The group noted the Crew doesn't hold a dedicated Pride Night and that the Haslams have donated to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians including JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Correy O'Neal, who lives with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and helped bring the team to the city, reframed the McCoy Park situation. "This isn't a story about accessibility being taken away," she said. "It's a story about accessibility finally getting resourced, concrete dates set, and plans being turned to action." She sees the deadline as forcing action that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
The replacement park remains in early planning stages. Kegg said the Nordecke will make noise if it doesn't materialize.
Meanwhile, fans who expressed the deepest frustration all said the same thing: they plan to buy season tickets anyway. Friedman summed up the internal conflict: "I'm angry at the ownership group, but I want to go to the games."
Author James Rodriguez: "Columbus got its women's team, but the price tag exposed what modern sports expansion really costs ordinary people, not billionaires."
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