Jessica Berman looked around her suite with delight. The setting—the NWSL championship in November—was one that would have been difficult to imagine when she became commissioner of the league in the spring of 2022. Start with the basics: This was a prime-time game on national television. If that feels like the norm for any major professional championship, that was very much not the case until recently for the NWSL, which spent years slating its final match for the middle of the afternoon to squeeze onto broadcast schedules. For a prime-time championship to finally be an established league norm was a major step.
Then consider the location. The championship was held in Kansas City at CPKC Stadium, a brand-new, state-of-the-art, 11,500-seat venue that is something incredibly rare in professional sports: It was planned, financed and built specifically for a women’s team. (The new home field of the Current, it sold out every game this season.) The stadium represents a new kind of vision (and a new kind of investment) for the league.
