The Game That Was Always There: Women's Soccer, the NWSL, and Why Sunday Night Just Changed Forever
Here is something I keep coming back to. A number that, once you see it, you cannot unsee.
One hundred and twenty-nine thousand, two hundred and two.
That is how many fans showed up to NWSL opening weekend this past Saturday and Sunday. Eight games. An average of over sixteen thousand per match. Seven of those eight games drew crowds north of ten thousand. This was the best-attended opening weekend in National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) history, and it was not particularly close.
Boston Legacy FC, a team that did not exist eighteen months ago, drew 30,207 for its very first game. Thirty thousand people showed up to watch a team play its inaugural match in a women’s professional soccer league in the United States. If that sentence does not make you stop and reconsider what you think you know about the sports landscape in this country, I am not sure what will.
But here is what makes this moment different from every other “women’s sports are growing” headline you have read. This time, the infrastructure is actually being built to match the demand. The media ecosystem is catching up. And one of the most important pieces of that ecosystem just went live.
We launched Sunday Night Soccer on Victory+.
Twenty-five exclusive Sunday night matchups throughout the 2026 NWSL season, available to every fan in the country, completely free. No subscription. No cable package. No paywall. You open the app, you watch soccer. That is it.
I want to explain why this matters. Not just the business case — though the business case is strong — but the larger story of how we got here, why this moment is different from the ones that came before, and what it means that for the first time in the history of women’s professional soccer in America, the sport has a dedicated primetime window on a platform built to make fans, not extract them.
The Arc of an Idea: Women’s Soccer in America
To understand where we are, you have to understand where we have been. And where we have been is, frankly, a masterclass in squandered momentum.
Start with Title IX. When the legislation passed in 1972, it mandated equal access to sports and educational programs for girls. The effect on women’s soccer was seismic. Before Title IX, there were thirteen women’s college soccer teams in the entire country. Thirteen. Today there are more than 1,500 across all divisions, with over 44,000 players competing at the collegiate level. That is not a growth curve. That is a category creation event.
The infrastructure that Title IX built — the scholarships, the coaching pipelines, the competitive ecosystems at every level from youth to university — gave the United States a structural advantage in women’s soccer that no other nation could match. And that advantage produced results. The U.S. Women’s National Team won the very first FIFA Women’s World Cup in 1991 in China, beating Norway in the final. Most people do not even know that happened. It was played in front of modest crowds with almost no television coverage.
Then came 1999.
July 10th. The Rose Bowl, Pasadena, California. Over 90,000 fans packed into the stadium for the Women’s World Cup Final between the United States and China. Forty million Americans watched on television. It remains the most-watched soccer game — men’s or women’s — in U.S. broadcast history. Brandi Chastain scored the winning penalty kick and ripped off her jersey in celebration, producing one of the most iconic photographs in the history of American sports.
(Quick aside: if you are under thirty, you probably know that image but might not fully grasp the cultural weight of the moment. This was not a niche sporting event that got lucky with a viral photo. This was a genuine national moment. The kind that creates before-and-after lines in how a country thinks about a sport, an idea, a possibility.)
The ‘99 World Cup should have been the beginning. Instead, it became the high-water mark of a wave that would crash twice before it learned how to sustain itself.
Two Leagues, Two Collapses
The Women’s United Soccer Association — WUSA — launched in 2001, riding the momentum of that World Cup victory. It was the first fully professional women’s soccer league in the world. The ambition was enormous. The timing felt perfect. The execution was catastrophic.
WUSA burned through its entire $40 million startup investment in three seasons. The money that was supposed to last five years was gone in three. No national television contract materialized for a fourth season. By some estimates, total losses exceeded $100 million. The league folded in September 2003.
Let that sink in. Two years after the most-watched soccer game in American history, the professional league that was supposed to capitalize on it was dead.
The post-mortem on WUSA is instructive. The league had launched at a cost structure that assumed rapid audience growth and lucrative broadcast deals. Neither materialized fast enough. Salaries were high, stadiums were expensive to fill, and the television landscape of the early 2000s — still dominated by cable and network gatekeepers — simply did not have a slot for women’s professional soccer. The World Cup had proven that Americans would watch women’s soccer en masse for a singular, high-stakes event. But no one had figured out how to translate that into weekly appointment viewing. The infrastructure to bridge that gap did not exist. Not yet.
The second attempt came in 2009. Women’s Professional Soccer — WPS — launched with the backing of several wealthy ownership groups and a slightly more conservative operating model. On paper, the lessons of WUSA had been internalized: lower costs, more cautious expansion, a focus on building sustainable franchises rather than chasing immediate scale. In practice, new problems emerged. The league was never able to find stable footing. Teams lost more money than projected. Ownership disputes turned into lawsuits that became public spectacles, draining organizational focus and credibility simultaneously. By the end of 2011, only five teams remained functional. In January 2012, the league ceased operations.
Two professional leagues. Two collapses. Fourteen years of trying, from 2001 to 2012, with nothing lasting to show for it.
The pattern seemed clear to the skeptics: women’s professional soccer in America was a noble idea that the market simply did not support. The demand was there for national team events — World Cups and Olympics — but not for week-to-week domestic league play. Women’s soccer, they argued, was a quadrennial phenomenon. You could sell the World Cup. You could not sell a Tuesday night in May.
The skeptics were wrong. But it would take another decade to prove it. And the proof would come not from replicating what had failed, but from rethinking the model entirely.
The Third Time
The National Women’s Soccer League launched in 2013 with a very different philosophy than its predecessors. Where WUSA had spent lavishly, the NWSL would operate lean. Where WPS had relied on wealthy individual owners without structural safeguards, the NWSL would secure federation subsidies — the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican soccer federations all agreed to pay the salaries of their respective national team players, dramatically reducing team operating costs.
Eight teams started in that first season. The budget was modest. The ambitions were deliberately contained. The league was not trying to be MLS or even close to it. It was trying to survive.
And survive it did. For the first several years, the NWSL existed in a kind of quiet stasis — present but not prominent, competitive but not culturally relevant beyond a dedicated (and frankly underserved) fanbase. Average attendance hovered in the mid-five-thousands. Television coverage was minimal. Most games were streamed on obscure platforms with production values that made public access television look lavish.
But something was happening beneath the surface. The quality of play was improving rapidly. International stars were increasingly choosing the NWSL as their league of choice. And a new generation of American players — many of them raised in the post-Title IX infrastructure boom — were entering the league with skill, athleticism, and marketability that demanded attention.
Then came the catalysts.
The USWNT’s back-to-back World Cup victories in 2015 and 2019 poured fuel on the fire. The 2015 tournament in Canada drew record American television audiences and introduced a new generation of stars. But it was 2019 that changed everything. That tournament, held in France, transformed players like Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, and Rose Lavelle from athletes into cultural figures. Rapinoe’s fearless public persona and golden boot. Morgan’s tea-sip celebration against England. Lavelle’s stunning solo goal in the final. These were not just sporting moments — they were cultural ones, shared across social media by people who had never watched a soccer game in their lives.
The equal pay fight that accompanied the 2019 cycle amplified the effect tenfold. The USWNT’s lawsuit against U.S. Soccer, alleging gender-based pay discrimination, turned the team into a political and social touchstone. The chants at stadiums — the crowd at the 2019 ticker-tape parade in New York City did not chant “USA” but rather a different two-word phrase directed at the federation — blurred the line between sports fandom and social movement. Whether you cared about the tactical nuances of women’s soccer or not, you had an opinion about the team.
This time, unlike after 1999, there was a league to absorb the momentum. And that made all the difference.
The Inflection Point
I think historians will look back at 2022-2024 as the period when everything changed for the NWSL. And by “everything,” I mean the ownership structure, the economics, the competitive landscape, and most critically, the relationship between the league and its audience.
New ownership groups started pouring in. These were not vanity projects or passion plays — they were sophisticated investors who saw the math. Angel City FC launched in 2022 with a celebrity-studded ownership group that included Natalie Portman, Serena Williams, and venture capital heavyweights. Bay FC debuted in 2024 in the San Francisco market. The Kansas City Current built CPKC Stadium, the first purpose-built stadium for a women’s professional sports team in the world, and promptly sold out every single home game. As of this month, they have had twenty-seven consecutive regular-season home sellouts. Twenty-seven.
But the biggest signal was the media deal.
In November 2023, the NWSL announced a four-year domestic media rights agreement with CBS Sports, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video, and Scripps Sports. The value: $240 million. That is $60 million per year. The league’s previous deal? Roughly $1.5 million annually.
Read that again. The NWSL went from $1.5 million to $60 million per year in media rights revenue. A 40x increase. There is no precedent for that kind of leap in professional sports media. None.
The deal put NWSL games on ABC, CBS, ESPN, ION, and Prime Video. For the first time, the league had a genuine national broadcast footprint. Fans no longer needed to hunt through three different apps to find their team’s game on any given weekend.
Almost.
The Accessibility Problem
Here is the thing about media rights deals. They are built for the leagues and the networks, not for the fans. A $240 million deal is transformative for the NWSL’s economics. It validates the product, funds minimum player salaries that have risen to $48,500 (and will hit $82,500 by 2030), and gives the league the financial stability to expand.
But media rights fragmentation — the same game on CBS one week, ESPN the next, Prime Video the week after — creates a discoverability problem. Especially for a sport that is still building its mainstream audience. The fan who watched the World Cup and thought “I should watch more women’s soccer” does not always know where to look. And the casual viewer, the one you need to convert from curious to committed, is not going to subscribe to four different services and memorize a broadcast schedule to find out.
This is the problem we kept thinking about.
I have written before about the fundamental economics of attention in sports media. The audience for live sports is not shrinking — it is migrating. Cable households in the United States have dropped from 85.4 million to under 50 million. But internet penetration is at 99 percent. Eight out of ten American homes have a connected TV device. The audience is there. The infrastructure is there. The question is whether the content is meeting them where they are.
For most of television history, the answer has been no. Sports media has been built around the scarcity model — make it hard to watch, charge a premium, extract maximum revenue from a captive audience. That model worked when cable was the only game in town. It does not work when your potential audience has infinite options and zero patience for friction.
Women’s soccer, in particular, cannot afford the scarcity model. This is a sport in its growth phase. It needs reach more than it needs extraction. It needs to be everywhere fans already are, not locked behind another login screen.
Think about it from the perspective of a potential new fan. She watched the USWNT in the 2023 World Cup. She remembers Sophia Smith’s name. She thinks women’s soccer is exciting. She would love to watch more. But she does not have cable. She has Netflix and maybe one other streaming service. She is not going to add ESPN+ or Paramount+ or Amazon Prime just to catch one NWSL game every couple of weeks. The friction is too high. The payoff is too uncertain. And so she does not watch. Not because she does not want to — but because the system is not built for her.
Now multiply that person by millions. That is the gap between potential audience and actual audience for women’s professional soccer in this country. And it is a gap that will not be closed by better marketing or more social media content or bigger-name players, as important as all of those things are. It will be closed by removing the barrier. Full stop.
Enter Sunday Night
This is why we built what we built.
Victory+ launched in September 2024 as a free, ad-supported streaming platform. No subscription required. No cable login. No paywall of any kind. You download the app — it is available on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung TV Plus — and you watch. That is the entire user experience.
The thesis was simple and, in my view, self-evident: if you remove every barrier between a fan and the game, you will build an audience faster than anyone thinks is possible. We tested this thesis first with hockey, carrying Dallas Stars games. The results were not marginal. We shattered records — over 342,000 viewers for a single Dallas Stars versus Colorado Avalanche matchup, validating the model at a scale that got the industry’s attention. Then came the Texas High School Football Championships last December. Over 2 million viewers tuned in on Victory+ during Championship Week. Two million. For high school football. On a free streaming platform that most people in the industry had never heard of six months earlier. The numbers validated the thesis every single time.
(I wrote about this last fall — we were told, repeatedly, that streaming free sports was a BAAAAD idea. That the economics did not work. That advertisers would not pay. What actually happened? Advertisers bid 1.5 times what we expected. The audience showed up. And it turned out that the conventional wisdom about sports needing to be behind a paywall was, like a lot of conventional wisdom, mostly wrong.)
And then came the NWSL.
In September 2025, the league announced an agreement with Victory+ to broadcast 57 matches across the 2026 and 2027 seasons. Fifty-seven games. That is more than a quarter of the entire regular season schedule. And the crown jewel of that package is Sunday Night Soccer — 25 exclusive primetime matchups, airing at 7 and 8 PM on Sunday evenings throughout the season.
Let me unpack why this specific construct matters.
Sunday night is the most valuable real estate in American television. It has been for decades. It is when the largest audiences assemble. It is when cultural habits form. NFL Sunday Night Football is not just a broadcast; it is a national ritual. By giving women’s soccer a dedicated, predictable, primetime Sunday window, we are not just airing games. We are building a habit. We are saying: every Sunday night, this is where women’s soccer lives. You do not need to check a schedule. You do not need to figure out which network has this week’s game. You show up on Sunday night, you get the best matchup the NWSL has to offer, and it is free.
That consistency matters more than people realize. Discovery is the number one problem in sports media today. There is no shortage of content. There is a massive shortage of reliable appointment viewing that new fans can lock into without effort. Sunday Night Soccer creates that.
More Than Live Games
But live games, as important as they are, are only part of what we are building.
In early March, we launched a dedicated NWSL Content Hub within the Victory+ app. The hub goes beyond traditional game coverage. It pairs live and on-demand games with creator-led programming — shoulder content that gives fans access to the players, teams, and personalities shaping the league on and off the pitch.
The centerpiece is a series of alternate broadcasts — alt-casts — hosted by two-time World Cup champion and Olympic gold medalist Kelley O’Hara and women’s sports personality Coach Jackie J. These are not just repackaged commentary tracks. They are designed to be a different way into the game. If the main broadcast is ESPN SportsCenter, the alt-cast is your group chat — informed, opinionated, funny, and deeply invested.
We also gave creators direct, real-time access to live game highlights. This means creators on the platform can react, analyze, and publish content as the action unfolds. This is not post-game analysis twelve hours after the whistle. This is meeting fans in the game’s highest-stakes moments — when engagement, conversation, and sharing peak. If you have ever been on social media during a big game, you know that the most valuable window is the ten seconds after something incredible happens. We built for that window.
The reason this matters is that women’s soccer fandom, more than perhaps any other sport in America right now, is community-driven. It lives in group chats and Twitter threads and TikTok compilations and podcast Discord servers. The traditional broadcast model — watch game, go home, read recap — does not capture the energy of this fanbase. We needed to build something that matched how fans actually experience the sport today.
Sixteen Teams and a Wide Open Race
The 2026 NWSL season is the most expansive in the league’s history. With the additions of Boston Legacy FC and Denver Summit FC, the league has grown to sixteen teams. Each team plays thirty regular-season games. A total of 220 matches will air on national platforms — 212 regular-season contests, all seven playoff matches, and the 2026 NWSL Challenge Cup.
(Another number that stops me: Denver Summit has already sold over 50,000 tickets for their home opener at Mile High Stadium. If those numbers hold, it will shatter the current NWSL single-match attendance record of 40,091, set by Bay FC at Oracle Park in San Francisco in August 2025. Fifty thousand people. For a women’s soccer team. In its first season.)
The competitive landscape is genuinely open. There is no dynasty. The Orlando Pride won the 2024 Shield and Championship as an expansion team. The Washington Spirit retained Trinity Rodman with a record-breaking contract, debuting the league’s new High Impact Player rule, which allows teams to sign one player outside the salary cap structure. Kansas City, with its new stadium and sustained excellence, is the closest thing the league has to a perennial contender. Angel City, Bay FC, Portland, and North Carolina all have legitimate title aspirations.
This is the kind of competitive balance that makes a league compelling week to week. You are not tuning in to find out if the Goliath wins again. You are tuning in because you genuinely do not know what is going to happen. That unpredictability, combined with the skill level of play, is what makes the NWSL such a compelling product right now.
And the new teams are not filler. Both Boston and Denver came in without the benefit of an expansion draft or a college draft — the league eliminated drafts ahead of the 2025 season as part of the current collective bargaining agreement. These teams had to build rosters through free agency, international signings, and trades. The result is squads that reflect deliberate, strategic vision rather than the luck of a draft lottery. Boston’s opening weekend crowd of 30,207 suggests the market agrees.
I want to dwell on what it means that two brand-new franchises can launch in 2026 and immediately draw these kinds of numbers. It means the demand is not concentrated in legacy markets. It is national. It is latent in cities that have never had a women’s professional sports team. It means that the ceiling for this league is not twelve teams or fourteen teams or even sixteen. It is however many American cities have enough fans who will show up when you give them something worth showing up for. My bet is that number is significantly higher than most people think.
And you can watch it all. For free. Every Sunday night.
The Bigger Picture
I want to zoom out for a moment, because I think what is happening with the NWSL and Victory+ is illustrative of something much larger than one league or one platform.
The economics of attention in media are undergoing a fundamental restructuring. We are moving from an era defined by scarcity — limited channels, limited timeslots, access controlled by gatekeepers — to an era defined by abundance and accessibility. In this new era, the winners will not be the platforms that extract the most from existing fans. They will be the ones that create the most new fans.
Women’s soccer is the perfect case study. For two decades, the sport had an audience problem that was actually a distribution problem. The demand was there — you could see it every four years when World Cup ratings spiked, when USWNT games drew millions, when the equal pay fight became front-page news. But the domestic league, where fandom is sustained between those marquee events, was stuck behind distribution barriers that prevented casual interest from converting into habitual viewership.
Every other attempt to grow the sport’s domestic audience has started from the supply side — build the league, sign the players, find the TV deal — and hoped the audience would follow. That approach works if you are launching into a market with an established consumption pattern. It does not work when you are trying to create one.
What we are doing with Sunday Night Soccer is inverting that model. We are starting from the audience side. We are asking: what does a new fan need? They need the game to be easy to find. They need it to be free. They need it to be on a schedule they can predict. They need it to come with context and community and the kind of surrounding content that turns a casual viewer into someone who has a favorite team.
And then we are building exactly that.
What the Numbers Already Tell Us
I mentioned the opening weekend attendance numbers earlier, but let me add some context. In 2023, the NWSL crossed the one-million total attendance mark for the first time in league history, finishing the season with 1,060,978 fans through the turnstiles. That was landmark enough. By 2025, single-match records were being set regularly, with Bay FC’s 40,091 at Oracle Park representing the peak.
This season is already ahead of that pace. If the first weekend is any indication — and I believe it is — the 2026 season will blow past every attendance record the league has ever set. Boston’s 30,207 debut was the largest crowd ever for an expansion team’s first game. The Washington Spirit’s sellout of 19,215 at Audi Field for the season opener set the tone. Angel City drew 16,813. Orlando drew 16,120. San Diego drew 14,078. Kansas City continued its sellout streak.
But here is what attendance numbers do not capture: the digital audience. The fans watching on their phones during lunch breaks. The viewers streaming on connected TVs. The fans who will discover the league because Victory+ served them a Sunday Night Soccer highlight at 10 PM on a Sunday in April and they thought, “Wait, that was incredible, when is the next one?”
That is the audience we are building for. Not just the 16,000 in the stands — though they are essential and extraordinary — but the millions who have not yet found their way in.
A Personal Note
I did not grow up watching women’s soccer. I did not grow up in America. My introduction to the sport was the men’s game — World Cup summers spent glued to a television in India, worshipping at the altar of Maradona and Zidane and Ronaldo (the original Ronaldo). My first day at a new middle school in 1990, I was the only kid who did not show up — because the World Cup final was on. That is the kind of fan I was, and still am. The sport gets into your bones.
But one of the things I have learned, building in sports media over the past several years, is that the barriers between fans and the sports they love are almost never about the sport itself. They are about access, distribution, habit, and community. The quality of the game is the necessary condition. But it is not sufficient. You also need the scaffolding — the distribution, the predictability, the ease of access — that turns quality into audience.
When you remove those barriers, the audience does not trickle in. It floods. I have seen it happen with hockey on our platform. I have seen it happen with Texas high school football. And I am watching it happen right now with the NWSL.
The women’s game in this country has endured more false starts and broken promises than any sport should have to. Two collapsed leagues. Decades of underfunding. A media ecosystem that consistently undervalued the product. Ownership scandals that threatened to tear the league apart just a few years ago. Players making less than thirty thousand dollars a year while generating sellout crowds. Stadiums shared with minor league baseball teams and college football programs. A persistent, infuriating disconnect between the passion fans had for the sport and the resources devoted to serving them.
Through all of it, the players kept playing, the fans kept showing up, and the quality of the game kept rising.
What is different now — what is genuinely, structurally different — is that the economics, the media infrastructure, and the audience behavior have all converged at the same moment. The NWSL has real ownership groups with real capital. It has a $240 million media deal. It has sixteen teams in major markets. It has attendance figures that rival or exceed many men’s professional sports leagues.
And now it has Sunday Night Soccer on Victory+. Free, for everyone, every week.
The Game Was Always There
I want to end where I started. With the numbers.
One hundred and twenty-nine thousand, two hundred and two fans at opening weekend. Thirty thousand for an expansion team’s debut. Over fifty thousand tickets sold for Denver’s home opener. A $240 million media deal representing a 40x increase. Sixteen teams. Thirty-game seasons. Record attendance. Record investment. Record ambition.
These are not leading indicators of growth. This is the growth. It is happening right now, in real time, in stadiums and on screens across the country.
The game was always there. The talent was always there. The passion was always there. What was missing was the infrastructure to connect it all — to take the energy that existed in pockets and make it available to everyone.
Sunday Night Soccer is a piece of that infrastructure. A significant piece. Twenty-five exclusive primetime matchups, free to every fan in the country, surrounded by creator-driven content and alternate broadcasts and the kind of community-building programming that turns viewers into fans and fans into evangelists.
We are not just airing games. We are building a habit. We are creating a primetime home for women’s soccer in America. And we are doing it the way I believe all sports media should be done in 2026: free, accessible, and built for the fan first.
The NWSL has spent thirteen years proving it can survive. It has spent the last three years proving it can thrive. The question now is not whether women’s professional soccer has a future in this country.
The question is how big that future can be.
I think the answer is: much bigger than anyone expects. And for the first time, the infrastructure exists to find out.
We are all fans. That is something I believe deeply. The impulse to watch a game, to care about a team, to feel the electricity of a crowd — that is universal. It transcends gender and geography and every other line we draw. The only question has ever been whether the doors are open wide enough for everyone to walk through.
On Sunday nights, the doors are wide open. Come in. It is free.
Narendra Nag is part of the team at Victory+, a free ad-supported streaming platform available on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung TV Plus, and mobile devices. Download the app and watch Sunday Night Soccer — no subscription required.