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This summer, the NWSL moved its matches off of Dallas Stars-backed streamer Victory+, eventually putting many of them on The Roku Sports Channel.
By early September, Victory+ had collapsed, dropping out of deals across high school and professional sports.
Speaking at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit on Tuesday, NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman said the Victory+ outcome was “definitely not ideal,” but credited her league for acting quickly; The Athletic reported this summer that the deal fell through due to nonpayments.
“I think if you’re a business that defines yourself as innovative and forward-thinking, you’re going to find yourself in situations that don’t always go the way you want them to do, and that’s in service of growth,” Berman said. “And for a league that’s growing at the rate we are, we lean in favor of that.”
Berman said the NWSL typically operates more through a “lens of opportunity” than one of downside, which allows the league to make “more risk-tolerant decisions” such as putting matches on Victory+.
“It happens to be one that didn’t work out the way we wanted them to, but there are other examples where we’re able to make decisions that are more innovative and disruptive that do provide great outcomes for the business,” Berman said.
The NWSL initially moved the matches intended for Victory+ to their own NWSL+ platform, then announced many of those matches would end up on Roku. Berman said Tuesday that “upwards of hundreds of thousands of people” had already been visiting Roku’s third-party NWSL hub every month.
Berman said that shopping the rights to the former Victory+ matches “was a competitive process” and the league is “really happy with how it ended up.”
“Candidly it gave us an opportunity to shop those rights, even though it was only for one-and-a-quarter years,” Berman said, “and really sort of assess the appetite for interest in our league moving forward.”
Looking to the next deal
Berman spoke broadly about the NWSL’s next set of media rights negotiations. The league’s current deals with CBS, ESPN, Prime Video, Scripps Ion, and Roku all end after the 2027 season. She said all of the current partners are excited to continue with the NWSL.
But Berman also noted that spreading matches across many platforms is difficult for fans. She said fragmentation in the media ecosystem is “not a problem we created, but certainly it’s a dynamic we’re participating in.”
Berman declined to share the exact length of a deal the NWSL is seeking, but did say that the 2031 Women’s World Cup will be part of the next deal.
The NWSL’s collective bargaining agreement with its players association ends in 2030. WNBA players earlier this year signed a historic new CBA that capitalizes on the league’s $3.1 billion media deal. Berman called the WNBA’s deal a “litmus test for the value of women’s sports rights.”
“The momentum and the tailwinds around women’s sports are really undeniable,” Berman said. “When the WNBA wins, we win, too.”
