The NWSL starts the expansion race for its 16th team

The race for the National Women’s Soccer League’s next expansion slot will officially start right after Saturday’s championship game, commissioner Jessica Berman announced Friday.

“We will start following the championship, our team 16 expansion process,” Berman said in a news conference in San Diego, where Gotham FC will face Seattle’s OL Reign on Saturday night at Snapdragon Stadium (8 p.m., CBS3, Paramount+).

The league currently has 12 teams. Next year, it will grow to 14, with the new Bay FC in San Jose, Calif., and the return of the Utah Royals in Salt Lake City. The 15th franchise has been promised to a Boston group that aims to kick off in 2026.

“Our preliminary analysis of the landscape is that we have more than a dozen qualified investor groups from different markets around the U.S. who are extremely interested in the kind of investment that we know is required in order to operationalize a successful team,” Berman said.

She did not say what those cities are, and a league spokesperson declined comment afterward.

As happened with the previous expansion processes, the NWSL hired investment group Inner Circle to do some of the heavy lifting in vetting candidates. And as with the previous processes, candidates will be asked to write big checks, not just for expansion fees but for promised investment in practice facilities and other infrastructure.

» READ MORE: The NWSL signs new broadcast deals with CBS, ESPN, Amazon, and ION worth $60 million a year

But this time, there are different factors at play. First, there’s no immediate leading candidate, as there was with the Bay Area. Nor is there an opportunity to restore a market and brand like the Royals.

There’s also competition on another front. The USL plans to launch its Super League next year and plans for it to have Division I sanctioning from U.S. Soccer — the same top level as the NWSL.

What happens if there’s competition to get into a specific market first? Denver, for example, is in the midst of an organizing effort with a clear mission statement that it could bid for either league.

And in Philadelphia, a market a lot of people want the NWSL to be in (including the league’s many players from here), former U.S. national team star Heather Mitts has first-mover advantage with her bid for a Super League team.

» READ MORE: Heather Mitts is working to bring pro women’s soccer back to Philadelphia with the USL Super League

Would the NWSL factor a Super League team’s existence, or planned existence, into a NWSL expansion bid in the same market?

Berman was asked that question and didn’t exactly answer it.

“I think we’re approaching this the way you’d expect smart businesspeople to approach this, which is that we’re focused on our priorities and the things that are most important to our business,” she said. “Those include minimum standards and ensuring that the stadiums where we play are built for the future.”

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There might have been some politics between those words, a desire to not offend the USL or U.S. Soccer’s policymakers. But what Berman said next was closer to the heart of the matter: though the two leagues might both be called Division I, the NWSL plans to set its own high standards.

“We are already at more than 10,000 capacity average in terms of our paid attendance, and so we’re going to want to be in bigger stadiums,” Berman said, a reference to the league averaging 10,432 fans per regular-season game. That smashed the record of 7,894 set last year.

“All of our plans are really to elevate the minimum standards of investment that are required,” Berman said. “And so those are the parameters under which we’re thinking about all of our expansion efforts, and all the ways in which we think about entering local markets. You’d have to ask the USL about their plans and their strategy.”