SBJ Unpacks: The NWSL ‘sprint to the summit’ in Denver

Tonight in Unpacks: The Denver Summit had 14 months to prepare for its first season. What owner Rob Cohen and his team accomplished in that short span serves as a model for the rest of the league, reports SBJ’s Alex Silverman in this week’s 2026 NWSL season preview in the magazine.

Also tonight:

• Why did states move for a mistrial in Live Nation-DOJ case?
• Wasserman changes name amid buyer search
• Prediction markets are everywhere, and they’re not taxed
• Op-ed: How the 2004 law no one saw coming is affecting NIL

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour opens the week by delving into the dispute around World Cup funding in Foxboro, Inter Miami-DC United becoming the third MLS game in this young season to draw over 70,000 fans, the Bills selling 53,000 seat licenses for Highmark Stadium and more.

Rob Cohen’s bid to bring the 16th NWSL franchise to Denver was everything the league had imagined. The chairman and CEO of IMA Financial, who in 2001 founded the Metro Denver Sports Commission, not only offered a record $110 million expansion fee, but also pledged an infrastructure investment with little precedent in women’s professional sports.

Cohen proposed a 14,500-seat stadium within Denver’s city limits that would set the standard for purpose-built NWSL venues and anchor a mixed-use district designed to serve as a model across the league.

The club wouldn’t even need to be a tenant while that venue was built. Cohen committed to building a temporary stadium for the team’s first two seasons, adjacent to a new performance center and four training pitches developed from scratch.

Between the expansion fee and facility projects, excluding mixed use, Cohen is set to pour roughly $450 million into the club’s launch. The plan exemplifies NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman’s vision of deep-pocketed owners controlling their own facilities.

Cohen expects the club to reach operating break-even within roughly five years, with infrastructure costs and financing recouped within a decade through a combination of franchise appreciation and returns from the mixed-use development. The model relies heavily on venue control and the sponsorship inventory created by the club’s stadiums and training complex.

But ambitious plans take time to execute, and Denver hasn’t had much. The NWSL’s protracted process to choose an ownership group to launch alongside Boston Legacy FC for the 2026 season dragged into 2025. By the time the league finally awarded the franchise to Denver on Jan. 30, Cohen had less than 14 months before this Saturday’s inaugural match.

“It was ‘ready, set, go,’ and we basically had nothing in place,” Cohen said. “We didn’t have a bank account, we didn’t have a single staff member, we didn’t have any of that. So, to go from that to actually being on the field of play with a full roster … it’s been a whirlwind 14 months like none I’ve ever had in my life.”

After a full sprint by Cohen and his team, Summit FC’s inaugural season is poised to reflect both strong demand for women’s soccer in the market and the constraints of an accelerated launch.

Experienced hand

To help launch an NWSL team in a matter of months, Cohen looked to someone who had done it before. In July 2023, Jen Millet joined incoming expansion team Bay FC, which had an even shorter 11-month runway, as COO. That club launched in 2024 and has ranked in the top five in NWSL attendance in its first two seasons.

After a search process led by CAA, Cohen hired Millet, who attended high school in the Denver area, as president and the first employee of his then-unnamed franchise in April 2025. Millet was an SBJ Game Changers honoree in 2020, when she was senior vice president of marketing for the Golden State Warriors and Chase Center.

Since beginning in her role, Millet has identified three key differences between her experience at Bay FC and the task ahead in Denver.

First, Bay FC’s ownership group, led by Sixth Street, had ambitions to secure a purpose-built training facility and stadium, but didn’t attempt to do so prior to launch. The club signed a five-year lease to play as a tenant at PayPal Park and secured a short-term practice facility at San Jose State, taking facilities off the table as an immediate concern.

Making facilities a top priority from the jump made the Denver project a far heavier lift.

“We’re managing four facility projects right now, which adds a degree of difficulty,” Millet said. “At Bay, we had to navigate some of that, but we weren’t in build mode on multiple projects on multiple sites at the same time we were standing up the club. That piece has been really challenging.”

Second, Millet and the executive team at Bay FC had the luxury of tapping into the resources of a private equity firm with more than $125 billion under management and more than 700 employees. While the business side at Summit FC is now up to around 55 employees, Cohen and Millet have done much of the heavy lifting themselves.

“At Sixth Street, there were seven or eight people that could navigate certain things around real estate, or capital calls, or whatever was happening — there was an army you could tap into,” Millet explained. “Rob and I had a conversation last week where we said, ‘Wow, it’s just us trying to do all of this.’ So, I think it is a lot.”

The third difference, however, has made launching Summit FC considerably easier.

“Fans in the Bay area were really excited about Bay coming, and I would never diminish that,” Millet said. “But in Denver, from Day 1, the response to the club has been 10X that. It’s probably a factor of the market being a little bit smaller and easier to impact, but everybody has been locked in on this club in the market since announced. It has really helped us move through this expedited timeline with more ease.”

That excitement was reflected in season-ticket deposits, which quickly converted into sales. The team secured 8,500 season-ticket holders before capping sales to leave room for groups and single-game buyers at the 12,500-seat temporary stadium. Summit FC granted even more deposit holders who remain on the waitlist access to their membership program, Club 5280, which comes with merchandise discounts, special ticket offers and exclusive events.

The true scale of the enthusiasm will be on display at the team’s home opener at Empower Field at Mile High Stadium, home of the Denver Broncos. As of late February, the team had sold more than 45,000 tickets for the March 28 match, positioning it to break the NWSL attendance record of 40,091 set by Bay FC at Oracle Park last year.

Denver’s sporting build also differed from past NWSL expansions. Summit FC and Boston Legacy FC are the first teams in league history to launch without the benefit of an expansion draft or a college draft, leaving the club to construct its roster entirely through free agency and international signings.

Time crunch

Warm temperatures and minimal snowfall made for terrible skiing this past winter in Colorado, but provided Denver Summit FC with ideal construction conditions for key infrastructure ahead of its inaugural season.

The team broke ground last June on the 20,000-square-foot CommonSpirit Performance Center, temporary stadium and four shared-use fields on a 43-acre site owned by the city of Centennial. The project stems from a partnership with the Cherry Creek School District and the city that Cohen began developing with CAA Icon before securing the franchise.

Once Summit FC moves to its permanent stadium in Denver as early as 2028, the school district will become the primary tenant of the Centennial venue, while the club retains the right to use the facility for its academy and a potential second team.

“Once we learned that Cherry Creek School District was planning on building their own stadium anyway, we started having discussions with them and saying, ‘Hey, if we do this together, you can spend half the money you were going to spend, we can spend half the money we were going to spend, and we can create something that’s a legacy for the community down the road,’” Cohen said.

The club expects to move into the CommonSpirit Performance Center in June, roughly a year after breaking ground. With a more generous launch runway, that pace might have positioned Summit FC to open its inaugural season fully settled into its new facility. Instead, the team will train at a local rugby stadium for the first few months of the season.

It also will play just three of its first 12 matches at home and won’t open its own stadium until July, after the league’s midseason World Cup break. Following the opener at Mile High, the club will stage two additional early-season home matches at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, home of MLS’s Colorado Rapids. Its first game at the 12,500-seat Centennial Stadium is scheduled for July 3.

“I don’t think any expansion team would say that’s a great way to start, and it is heavily loaded with some of the best teams in the NWSL,” Cohen said. “But it is what it is. You can’t complain about it. You just have to deal with it.”

While the team has yet to break ground on its permanent stadium, which will ultimately anchor a mixed-use development in Denver called Santa Fe Yards, Cohen is hopeful it will be ready for the start of the 2028 NWSL season. The political process was bumpier than anticipated, but the city council agreed to contribute $70 million to the project.

Beyond facilities, one aspect of the business in which Summit FC could have used more time is sponsorship sales. The club retained Legends to lead its commercial efforts and scored a major win with its sale of performance center naming rights to Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but Cohen said the deal is the richest naming-rights agreement for a women’s sports practice facility and exceeds comparable deals in MLS, as well as the average value of similar agreements in the NBA and NFL.

While the club also has announced deals with Canvas Credit Union, Xcel Energy and LaCroix, it has yet to sell some of its most valuable inventory, including front-of-kit placement and naming rights to Centennial Stadium. Sponsorship will be key to making the economics of the temporary stadium pencil out.

“A lot of those conversations on the sponsorship front, especially bigger assets, just take more time to develop,” Millet said. “You’ve got to be within a brand’s budgeting cycle. You’ve got to allow time for C-level approvals on those things. So, the turn on those doesn’t move as quickly through the business as it is to stand up something like ticketing.”

Millet expects the team to begin the season with six or seven corporate partners, and to add more throughout the season. Having a schedule backloaded with home matches at Centennial Stadium, where the team controls signage, will ensure late-joining sponsors don’t miss out on as much value early in the season.

With the NWSL expanding at a rapid clip and franchise valuations continuing to soar, the league under Berman’s leadership has prioritized ownership groups willing to invest in purpose-built infrastructure for its clubs. Summit FC is a prime example of that vision and evidence that big ideas require time to execute.

“My recommendation to the league is if you’re going to have a new expansion team and they have to build infrastructure as a part of their standing up of the team, it’s almost impossible to do what we’ve done in 14 months,” Cohen said. “We got it done, but I would encourage the league to allow the runway to be longer.”

Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia filed a motion for mistrial in the Live Nation DOJ case Monday morning, following the leaked news that the DOJ and the live entertainment powerhouse had reached a settlement in their antitrust case.

A Manhattan jury heard several days of testimony last week, all while the DOJ and Live Nation were zeroing in on a settlement that would end the U.S. government’s multiyear pursuit of an antitrust case that could conceivably have broken up Live Nation and Ticketmaster and hugely impacted the live music and sports industries.

Assessing the ripple effects of the proposed settlement on the live events ticketing business will have to wait.

The states moved for a mistrial because they felt the DOJ’s literal post-settlement disappearance from the courtroom -- DOJ attorneys had done all the plaintiffs’ speaking during the trial, so far -- would prejudice the current jury. The states’ filing said the settlement sent a message that the DOJ felt its case wasn’t strong enough to win at trial and that Live Nation’s alleged anticompetitive behavior had been solved, neither of which the states believe to be true.

“Put differently,” the filing read, “the United States is not handing off a baton to finish a race; it is leaving a project halfway through construction, while taking the lead crew members, supplies, and designs with it.”

The plaintiff states planning to continue their pursuit of Live Nation asked the court to temporarily suspend proceedings until 15 days after the resolution of Tunney Act proceedings -- which require federal courts to assess whether proposed remedies in antitrust cases serve the public good -- or, alternatively, if the settlement is rejected, for 60 days to prepare for a new trial.

Judge Arun Subramanian hasn’t ruled on either the DOJ-Live Nation settlement or the states’ mistrial motion. According to news reports, Subramanian was peeved that the settlement leaked to the media. Judges have full discretion to declare mistrials, which can often result from a mid-trial change of legal representation.

‘Hid the settlement’

Thirty-nine states and D.C. originally signed up for the case alongside the DOJ in May 2024, but only seven -- Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and South Dakota -- indicated so far that they plan to join the DOJ’s proposed settlement against Live Nation.

Another seven states -- Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin -- remained undecided as of Monday afternoon whether to join the assenting seven or dissenting 26.

The states seeking a mistrial also claimed in their filing that “the Defendants (and the United States) hid the settlement from the Plaintiff States.”

Despite nearly two years of involvement in the case, the states only learned of settlement negotiations between the DOJ and Live Nation in late January 2026. The states claim they informed Live Nation then that any settlement agreement needed to include them if it was to provide the company with universal relief from all claims against it.

The filing says the plaintiff states were kept in the dark until the near-final terms of the settlement were shared with them at 4pm ET on March 5, while an executive from Live Nation rival, AEG, was on the stand in the courtroom. The states were given roughly 24 hours to accept or reject the deal.

The DOJ and Live Nation then informed the court on the Sunday night before the second week of the trial that a settlement had been reached, and the federal government would not be proceeding with the trial.

Timeline

Key moments in the settlement negotiation:

• May 23, 2024: The Department of Justice and what’s eventually 39 states and the District of Columbia sue Live Nation for anticompetitive practices.
• Jan. 29, 2026: States involved in the case first learned of Live Nation and the DOJ’s settlement talks.
• Jan. 30: Counsel for California and New York notified Live Nation that they were aware of settlement talks and urged to be included.
• Feb. 1: Several states contacted DOJ to push for state inclusions.
• Feb. 17: Live Nation moved to split the trial, trying the states’ claims first before the DOJ’s. That motion was denied 10 days later.
• March 2: the Live Nation antitrust trial began in a Manhattan courtroom. The DOJ met with four plaintiff states’ counsel that same day to discuss potential settlement ideas and terms but didn’t indicate that a settlement was close.
• March 3: Live Nation presented five states with hard copy settlement terms.
• March 5: The DOJ provided revised term sheets to the states, giving a 24-hour decision window.
• March 8: DOJ and Live Nation informed the court of the finalized settlement terms and that the DOJ would be ending its pursuit of the plaintiff.
• March 9: News of a Live Nation-DOJ settlement breaks. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia file a motion for mistrial later the same day.

L.A.-based sports marketing and talent representation giant Wasserman is changing its name to The Team starting Monday. The branding shift comes as the agency’s founder & CEO Casey Wasserman is selling off an estimated 40% stake valued at approximately $2B. It was revealed in late January that he exchanged emails with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, in 2003.

Wasserman representatives declined to comment on the name change following multiple inquiries from Sports Business Journal.

“As of today, Wasserman is rebranding as THE·TEAM and you can now find us at the.team. For 24 years, this company has been shaped by our work, our people and our unifying belief in the power of Sports, Music and Entertainment. That philosophy remains the foundation of who we are - and where we are going. We go forward as we always have: Together," the company’s website says upon entering.

No structural changes are planned for now. However, existing investor Providence Equity Partners, seems like the most likely to buy the 40% stake. Firms such as Bruin Capital, Arctos and Publicis have emerged as potential interested names.

At least two dozen clients, including U.S. soccer star Abby Wambach, musical artists Chappell Roan, Weyes Blood, Orville Peck and others, have departed the agency since Wasserman’s exchange with Maxwell was discovered.

Despite announcing that he was stepping down from his post at the agency, Wasserman remains the chairperson of the LA28 Olympic organizing committee. Company president Mike Watts has been overseeing day-to-day operations of the agency as its interim CEO since mid-February.

DraftKings devoted much of its hourlong presentation to crafting a compelling argument that it quickly will rise to the top of the prediction market fray. It did not take questions from analysts.

Most of the headlines stemmed from DK’s announcement of a single, rebranded DraftKings Sports and Casino app that will house its sportsbook, predictions, casino and lottery products, moving the latter three to the app that already hosts its sportsbook. User experience will vary based on which of those are offered in each state.

DraftKings already was paying to advertise nationally, even though its product was only available in about 60% of U.S. households. Putting both predictions and traditional betting on the same app, with the same look and feel, allows DK to use the same campaign — and the same digital executions — to push consumers to both.

“Predictions make those [advertising and sponsorship] assets more valuable overnight, because we can now convert that demand in places where sportsbook isn’t live today,” said Jeanine Hightower-Sellitto, who joined DraftKings as SVP and GM/predictions in July. “One brand, one app, and one funnel ... that is a real structural advantage in [customer acquisition cost] efficiency and in speed to scale.”

Hightower-Sellitto said DK will grow its predictions capabilities rapidly this year, adding “combos” (predictions parlance for parlays), the launch of a market making unit that will provide liquidity on both sides of bets and the integration of Railbird, the CFTC-regulated exchange that DraftKings acquired last year. Those will be followed by the rollover to the redesigned “Super App.” It plans to later add in-house capabilities as an FCM (futures commissions merchant) and DCO (derivatives clearing organization), allowing it to capture more profit from each bet and to better control the customer experience.

“This is the same playbook we’ve run again and again,” Hightower-Sellitto said, “Launch, iterate fast and own the parts that really matter.

“Our goal is clear. By the start of the NFL season, we intend to deliver an industry-leading sports predictions experience and scale it profitably from there.”

A few more digits and tidbits that emerged from the presentation:

• The combination of DraftKings deal with ESPN and the NBA’s deals with Prime Video and NBC will have the brand present in about 70% of the league’s national telecasts this year, a massive leap from last year, which it was “barely present.”
• The mix of highly profitable parlays reached 32% last year, up from 28% last year. That continued a steady increase that began after 2021, when it was 20%. Net revenue margin has increased accordingly, reaching 7.1% last year, up from 6% in 2024 and 3.2% in 2021. Parlays represented 33% of bets by first-year customers, an indication that there’s no longer a learning or discovery curve.
• As promised, DraftKings dialed back promotions in states with higher tax rates. Promos were 2.9% of handle in the five states with tax rates of 30% or more, with the lowest held to 2%. It was as high as 4.2% in other states.
• DK has spent $6 billion on sales and marketing since 2018, It now reports brand awareness of 88%, one point higher than FanDuel but 19 points better than an unnamed No. 3. The company said it is the “preferred brand” of 38%, seven points higher than FanDuel. No. 3 was at 10%.
• The sportsbook averaged 517 “live betting options” per game last year, up from 124 in 2022.
• 11 million customers, $6 billion in revenue, $620 million in adjusted EBITDA and about 6,000 employees in 2025.

The Sports Agent Responsibility and Trust Act (SPARTA) is a 2004 law that many in college athletics overlooked until the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) came knocking earlier this year. On January 12, 2026, the FTC sent letters to 20 Division I athletics institutions seeking information related to required disclosures under SPARTA.

The FTC has stated plainly that “[t]he stakes are high for sports agents: up to $53,088 in civil penalties for each violation of SPARTA.” As of January, the College Sports Commission reported 4,202 athlete representatives registered through NIL Go. Although the number of agents under SPARTA’s broad definition likely far surpasses the 4,202 actively registered on NIL Go, even with only 4,000-plus sports agents to consider, the potential penalties here are easily in the millions. If an agent has 20 violations since July 1, 2021 (simply 20 times he or she did not make the disclosure referenced below), the agent could be facing up to $1,061,760 in penalties alone.

Wondering if you are considered an ‘agent’ under SPARTA?

The definition of an “athlete agent” under SPARTA is more than just those who hold themselves out as agents. Rather, this federal law defines an athlete agent as any “individual who enters into an agency contract with a student athlete, or directly or indirectly recruits or solicits a student athlete to enter into an agency contract, and does not include a spouse, parent, sibling, grandparent or guardian of such student athlete, any legal counsel for purposes other than that of representative agency, or an individual acting solely on behalf of a professional sports team or professional sports organization.”

It is important to note that student athletes are defined under SPARTA as “an individual who engages in, is eligible to engage in, or may be eligible in the future to engage in, any intercollegiate sport. An individual who is permanently ineligible to participate in a particular intercollegiate sport is not a student athlete for purposes of that sport” (emphasis added). SPARTA doesn’t just apply to activity with athletes who are currently eligible.

What constitutes a violation?

Sports agents looking to comply with SPARTA are required to provide specific disclosure language to the student athlete prior to entering into the agency contract with the athlete. Once the disclosure has been signed, the agent must notify the athletic director within 72 hours of entering into the contract or before the next athletic event the student athlete is eligible to participate in, whichever is earlier. SPARTA also prohibits agents from predating or postdating an agency contract.

Sports agents are further prohibited from directly or indirectly recruiting a student athlete through false or misleading information, making false promises or providing anything of value to the student athlete (or anyone associated with the student athlete) before entering into an agency contract.

Where do the universities fit into this?

The FTC’s inquiries are aimed at the universities, for now. Specifically, the universities were given 10 weeks to produce, for each Student Athlete that has entered into an Agency Contract since July 1, 2021, a copy of the Agency Contract and, as detailed further in the FTC’s request letter:

A. The Intercollegiate Sport in which the Student Athlete participates

B. The date of the Student Athlete’s Agency Contract

C. The date of the next athletic event—immediately following the date of the Student Athlete’s Agency Contract—when the Student Athlete was eligible to participate

D. The date when the Athlete Agent gave notice, in writing, to the Athletic Director or the person responsible for administering the athletic program at your educational institution that the Student Athlete had entered into an Agency Contract

E. The date when the Athlete Agent gave notice, verbally, to the Athletic Director or the person responsible for administering the athletic program at your educational institution that the Student Athlete had entered into an Agency Contract

F. The name of the Athlete Agent

G. The email address of the Athlete Agent

H. The telephone number of the Athlete Agent

I. Whether your educational institution has received a complaint or report concerning the Athlete Agent’s relationship with the Student Athlete (indicate: Yes or No)

The high volume of disclosure required here, along with a surge of NIL related lawsuits, the birth of the College Sports Commission and newly proposed and enacted NIL legislation all within the last year signals the shift in college athletics’ NIL landscape from the Wild West to the age of enforcement.

Jada Allender is a member of Snell & Wilmer’s Corporate and Securities Practice Group and co-chair of the firm’s Sports and Entertainment Industry Group. Kevin Kuhm is a corporate and securities associate with Snell & Wilmer.

• The NBA nixed the Hawks’ planned “Magic City Night” on March 16 after a swath of stakeholders — and even a current player — objected to an in-arena promotion being tied to an Atlanta-based strip club, reports SBJ’s Tom Friend.
• As the PGA Tour plays its marquee tournament, the Players Championship, this week at TPC Sawgrass, much of the discussion behind the scenes has been about what the tour will announce Wednesday as it relates to its Future Competitions Committee and potential schedule changes, reports SBJ’s Josh Carpenter.
• A three-judge appeals panel expressed skepticism toward the NFL’s arguments in the high-stakes “NFL Sunday Ticket” antitrust lawsuit Monday, but one law professor who watched the hearings thinks the league is poised to avoid its worst-case scenario, writes SBJ’s Ben Fischer.
• Oak View Group emerged victorious in an agency shootout and will be selling the new jersey patch sponsorship for the Angels, reports SBJ’s Terry Lefton.
• Ahead of the World Baseball Classic, the Marlins reached a one-year deal with the Dominican Republic Ministry of Tourism to be the title sponsor for the three-level hospitality space in left-centerfield at LoanDepot park, writes SBJ’s Mike Mazzeo.
• MLB and Adobe are expanding their sponsorship relationship with a multiyear extension, a move that comes with a heavy injection of the tech giant’s AI products, notes SBJ’s Ethan Joyce.
• The WNBPA and WNBA exchanged counterproposals within 24 hours of each other over the weekend, sudden urgency that may mean Tuesday’s artificial deadline to make a deal isn’t artificial after all, writes Friend.
• Fanatics Studios confirmed that it is relocating its upcoming Fanatics Flag Football Classic from Saudi Arabia to L.A. amid the ongoing war in the Middle East and is keeping its scheduled date of March 21, notes SBJ’s Rob Schaefer.
• The Southern Conference signed a six-year extension of its media deal with ESPN that runs through 2031-32, sources tell SBJ’s Ben Portnoy.