The NWSL has awarded an expansion team to Atlanta as its 17th franchise, sources confirmed to ESPN.
The team will be owned by Arthur Blank's AMB Sports and Entertainment, which also owns the NFL's Atlanta Falcons and MLS' Atlanta United FC. Both teams play at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, where the NWSL franchise is expected to begin play in 2028.
A spokesperson for AMB Sports and Entertainment provided the following statement to ESPN:
"We have had productive engagement with NWSL and others in its stakeholder group on the possibility of bringing an expansion franchise to Atlanta. We have nothing to announce currently as those conversations are ongoing."
An NWSL spokesperson declined to comment.
The Athletic, which was the first to report the news, said the expansion fee would be $165 million, up from the $110 million that Denver Summit FC paid less than a year ago. NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman confirmed in September what ESPN reported in July, that the league would shift to rolling expansion rather than formal bidding processes.
"Those conversations are ongoing," Berman said at the time. "Each of them has a different perspective on how much time they need to launch, the investments they need to make to be successful, including potentially around infrastructure, and we want to not force a square peg into a round hole."
The NWSL will expand to 16 teams next year with the introduction of Boston Legacy FC and Denver. Berman has said several times this year that the NWSL can eventually be as big as the 32-team NFL, at least conceptually.
Atlanta and Blank have been part of the NWSL expansion conversation intermittently for nearly a decade, with many sources describing the market as a when-not-if situation once Blank is ready to join the league.
The city was previously home to women's professional soccer when the Atlanta Beat played there in WUSA from 2001 to 2003 and in WPS in 2010 and 2011. The WPS version of the Beat built a stadium for the team in Kennesaw, Georgia, in collaboration with Kennesaw State University.
Atlanta is the seventh-largest TV media market, per Nielsen data.
Atlanta United has been a major success for MLS since launching in 2017. The team won a championship the following year and has led MLS in attendance every season since launching (except during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020), averaging over 40,000 fans per game.
Atlanta will also be the new home of U.S. Soccer's headquarters as of next year. Blank donated $50 million to that project.
ESPN's Jeff Carlisle contributed to this report.