The NWSL on Wednesday revealed the schedule footprint for its 2027 season, which will feature a seven-week summer break for the Women’s World Cup and a February start, the earliest in the league’s history.
The regular season will begin on 11 February with a match hosted by Angel City in Los Angeles, three days before Super Bowl LXI is played in the same city. The annual Challenge Cup, which pits the reigning champion against the Shield winner, will be played on 6 February at a location to be determined.
Each team will play a 30-game schedule. The break will cover the entirety of the World Cup, which runs from 24 June to 25 July in Brazil. The regular season concludes with a Decision Day on 31 October, with playoffs in the first two weekends of November and the championship on 20 November.
During the 2023 Women’s World Cup, the NWSL paused regular season play for five weeks but continued playing the Challenge Cup, at the time an in-season tournament. In the three years since, the league has expanded from 12 teams to 16 and increased its overall regular-season match calendar from 132 to 240.
The decision to open the regular season in Los Angeles during Super Bowl week was intentional, commissioner Jessica Berman said at a midseason press conference on Wednesday. The Super Bowl is being broadcast on ESPN, which is also an NWSL media partner, and Berman said the league will be working closely with ESPN to make sure that the NWSL is woven into the weekend’s coverage.
Such a move is part of the league’s ongoing effort to integrate into the broader American sports landscape. The NWSL has played tentpole games at baseball stadiums, including at the New York Mets’ Citi Field last month; its matches have been featured in ESPN doubleheaders alongside the WNBA this year; it staged an outreach campaign during the men’s World Cup and resumed play this season as the men’s tournament ended.
“Inevitably, we will have overlap with competing properties,” Berman told the Guardian. “So it’s finding the places where we feel like we can find synergy and lean in, but then also carving out the spaces and times that we feel like are ownable.”
Berman said she has heard from media executives who believe the NWSL could “own the summer”. The 2027 campaign will be one of the first tests of that theory.
In the wake of Major League Soccer’s decision to switch to a fall-to-spring schedule beginning in 2027, the NWSL’s board of governors planned to vote on the same change to align with much of the global soccer world. The players’ association voiced its opposition to a switch, citing weather and facility concerns, and in April the league said it had postponed the vote and would maintain its spring-to-fall schedule through 2030.
MLS is playing a 14-game sprint season from February to May before starting its new cadence in mid-to-late July. The change has “benefits and challenges” for the NWSL, Berman said, given many of the teams in the two leagues share venues. NWSL dates will overlap with the MLS sprint schedule and the start of the 2027-28 regular season, and few NWSL teams own their home venues to have priority in scheduling.
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The leagues won’t play their postseasons at the same times, which should stand to benefit future NWSL championship weekends. Carlin Hudson, the league’s vice-president of strategy, told the Guardian she doesn’t foresee the league changing from a neutral-site location in the short term – MLS stages its final at the home venue of the higher seed – and acknowledged that more markets could be in contention to stage the championship.
“The neutral site allows us to do things like the Skills Challenge the same week, and have a fanfest that’s really planned well in advance, so I don’t see us necessarily navigating away from that,” she said. “But there will certainly be an opportunity there for us to be more proactive in our championship scheduling.”
Berman also addressed the league’s short-lived partnership with free streamer Victory+, which came to an abrupt end last week.
The league terminated its partnership with Victory+ after the streamer missed payments, according to reports from Awful Announcing and Sports Business Journal. Victory+ was slated to air more than 50 matches this season and had accumulated a roster of former players and media personalities to appear on game broadcasts.
The games intended to air on Victory+ will air on NWSL+, the league’s free direct-to-consumer platform, for the rest of this season and next.
Victory+ was among the league’s five media partners for the 2026 and 2027 season. The NWSL began its current media deal in 2024 for a record $240m, but it has received criticism for its fragmentation, with games scattered across CBS, ABC/ESPN, Prime Video, Ion, Victory+ and NWSL+. The league will begin negotiations for a new deal after the 2027 World Cup.
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