For the first time in NWSL history, the league will begin its 2027 season in February instead of the typical mid-March start time. The main reason for this change from the NWSL’s normal spring-to-fall schedule is the Women’s FIFA World Cup next summer, as the international tournament will halt the NWSL season from June 24 until July 25. The first match of the year will be the annual Challenge Cup competition on February 6.
The league is also looking to capitalize on the continuing growth of women’s soccer by hosting its opening regular season match on February 11 in Los Angeles to pair up with the NFL’s Super Bowl on the 14th in the same city.
The NWSL took notes this summer when the Men’s FIFA World Cup was hosted in North America. The league capitalized on the bubbling popularity of soccer by returning from its World Cup break during the knockout rounds, and there was a clear uptick in viewership, NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman told reporters on Wednesday.
“We’re really proud that Week 13, which was again our first week back, was the number one linear week of 2026,” Berman said. “Our thesis was that the halo of the World Cup would ignite the appetite of people to want to watch more soccer, and that turned out to be true.
“We know that major tournaments inspire millions of people to follow the sport, and our schedule allows us to be part of the lead-in and the lead-out of that big moment,” Berman added.
The league is hoping to see a similar success by starting the 2027 regular season the same week as Super Bowl LXI. While this may seem like a confusing decision for the NWSL to make, as most sports fans’ eyes will be on the Super Bowl and its week of festivities before the Big Game, the league thinks the timing will actually draw in more viewers to the opening match. It helps that ESPN will be broadcasting the NWSL game on the 11th, and ABC is hosting the Super Bowl.
Berman told reporters on Wednesday that ESPN and ABC plan to highlight the women’s soccer stories throughout Super Bowl week, which will likely give the league more recognition.
“We [are] intentionally, again seeing the success we’ve had about leaning into the halo of the Men’s World Cup, using that same thesis for next year,” Berman continued. “And so next year, for those who don’t know, it is an ABC Super Bowl, and because we share a broadcast partner, we will be working closely with ESPN to make sure that the NWSL is woven into the weekend stories, and we’re very excited about that.”
Listen now to The IX Sports Podcast and Women’s Sports Daily
We are excited to announce the launch of TWO new podcasts for all the women’s sports fans out there looking for a daily dose of women’s sports news and analysis. Stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to podcasts, and make sure to subscribe!
The league’s goal is to intertwine the excitement behind the Super Bowl and the NWSL season, starting in a giant year for women’s soccer, Carlin Hudson, who is the NWSL’s vice president of strategy, explained to ESPN this week.
“Given the realities of the match calendar in 2027, we tried to think through if we’re playing on Super Bowl weekend, how do we try to be a part of the conversation and not separate the sports world, but just aggregate it more around that area?” Hudson said.
There will undoubtedly be a major influx of women’s soccer fans next year because of the World Cup. So, is it worth starting the season a whole month-plus earlier than normal in an attempt to draw additional fans to the sport? The NWSL definitely thinks so.
Berman went on to explain that the schedule needed to be adjusted next season, regardless, because of the World Cup break. Each team needs to play 30 games in the season, and with the league continuing to grow its amount of teams, changes needed to be made. For context, when the 2023 Women’s World Cup was played, the league only had 12 teams and played 132 matches in a season. Now, the NWSL has 16 teams (growing to 18 in 2028) and hosts 240 games.
But the new schedule isn’t perfect by any means. The players will have their shortest offseason in history—the NWSL championship game will be played on Nov. 21, and then players will report to preseason between Jan. 2–7. This means the players will get six weeks of official offseason.
Berman admitted that the league ran a multitude of scenarios to see what would work best scheduling-wise, but the broadcast partnership with ESPN ultimately led to the NWSL picking an early February start.
“There’s only a certain number of weekends in the year, no matter how many times you turn it around and around and around, which we’ve done no less than one-thousand times, and so we have to start the season earlier,” Berman said.
“The fact that [ABC and ESPN] are a broadcast partner for the Super Bowl, made the decision easier for us. If that were not the case, there were some other options that we looked at. Of course, [like Hudson], who oversees strategy and runs our schedule, says, ‘Making the schedule is a zero-sum game.’ So there’s trade-offs, and this was the best decision given the opportunity we have with this broadcast partner.”
The rest of the 2027 schedule is expected to come out by the end of this year, Hudson shared. Something else the NWSL has to consider when making the schedule, though, is the MLS’s new schedule layout as the league will play fall-to-spring for the first time starting in 2027-28. Many NWSL teams share stadiums with MLS teams, so figuring out when to schedule games will be different for next season because of various obstacles. However, Berman believes the MLS’s new schedule will give the NWSL more opportunities to compete on dates that didn’t work before.
“Right now, being on a spring-to-fall footprint with MLS, we both have our playoffs at the same time, and what that means is that there are holds across lots of dates with uncertainty,” Berman said. “With us being on different calendars, that’s no longer going to be the case. We’re going to have visibility into weeks that might otherwise have been reserved but not confirmed, and that will be helpful.”
The location for the Challenge Cup has not been announced yet, but it will feature the league’s 2026 champion and Shield winner.
