Gotham FC, whose roster features stars such as Sam Kerr and Jaedyn Shaw, is adding seven new minority investors in a $100 million capital raise.
Gotham FC has become one of the National Women’s Soccer League’s premier clubs on the pitch, claiming two of the last three league titles and finishing first in the regular season this year, with the playoffs kicking off this weekend. Now, the team’s commercial growth is catching up with its winning pedigree.
Gotham is adding seven new minority investors in a $100 million capital raise to continue upgrading its talent and infrastructure as it builds a new practice facility in Whippany, New Jersey, and prepares for its 2028 move into New York’s Etihad Park, currently under construction in Queens. The investor group is led by the Moelis family and includes T. Rowe Price chief investment officer David Giroux and Anne Welsh McNulty, cofounder and managing partner of investment firm JBK Partners. Majority owner Carolyn Tisch Blodgett’s Next 3 Ventures and existing stakeholder Jen Mackesy also added substantial contributions.
The team is not disclosing the terms of the investment, but a person familiar with the deal says it values Gotham at $350 million, a record-setting figure for a professional women’s soccer team.
That valuation represents an 84% premium from Forbes’ $190 million estimate in April, when Gotham ranked eighth among the league’s 14 teams (excluding new expansion clubs in Boston and Denver). Gotham’s new price tag even exceeds Forbes’ league-leading $340 million valuation of Angel City FC from the start of the season.
Gotham’s estimated revenue for the 2025 season was a modest $11 million, well behind the $38 million of both Angel City and the Kansas City Current, who opened their own stadium in 2024. Professional sports teams are typically valued on a multiple of their revenues, and Gotham’s new deal is an outlier that league insiders expect to play a role in resetting the market for the rest of the league yet again, after valuations have grown exponentially in recent years.
“I’m the third generation that’s part of Giants ownership, and that is what I hope Gotham will become for our family. We’re investing in creating a sports team that should be owned for generations,” says Tisch Blodgett, whose family co-owns the New York Giants with the Mara family. “I want to look back and say we have built one of the most important brands in women’s sports. The revenue is going to follow. I feel extremely confident that it will, so it’s about building a really strong fan base and giving our fans a reason to care.”
Gotham has unique advantages as the only NWSL team in the New York area, but its status as one of the NWSL’s most recognized brands is relatively new. Known as Sky Blue FC until a rebrand in 2021, the club routinely finished near the bottom of the NWSL standings before Tisch Blodgett bought the team in 2023. It won its first championship that fall.
Since then, Gotham has signed marquee players such as U.S. women’s national team stars Rose Lavelle and Jaedyn Shaw and Australian striker Sam Kerr and has been a consistent contender. In addition to its 2023 and 2025 league championships, Gotham won the 2025 Concacaf W Champions Cup, and it is the only NWSL team so far to have secured a slot in the 2028 FIFA Women’s Club World Cup.
The club’s average attendance doubled from around 4,400 in 2022 to 8,900 in 2025 at Sports Illustrated Stadium in the Newark suburb of Harrison, New Jersey, also the home of Major League Soccer’s New York Red Bulls. This year, Gotham set a record for a women’s sporting event in New York by drawing 42,175 fans for the Queens Classic at Citi Field, where a sellout crowd braved a haze of wildfire smoke and a triple-digit heat index to watch Gotham beat the Washington Spirit, 1-0, on July 15.
“We were in the middle of our diligence process at that moment, and the energy in the stadium was amazing. It felt like that was the future,” says Maddy Moelis, a principal at 209 Capital and the daughter of real estate developer Ron Moelis and niece of investment bank founder Ken Moelis. “There’s this groundswell around soccer, and being the New York team that has exclusive access to the New York market and New York sports fans, I don’t know how you can go wrong.”
The reason for much of that enthusiasm is sitting on the other side of the Citi Field parking lot, where construction of Etihad Park is underway. The 25,000-seat stadium, owned by MLS’s New York City FC, is on schedule to open for the 2027-28 MLS season, and Gotham announced in July that it will play its home games there beginning in 2028, with the venue’s modern LED signage and digital videoboards expected to provide an immediate and significant boost to the team’s sponsorship revenue.
“In five years, I would be very surprised if Gotham is not the most highly valued franchise in women’s soccer,” T. Rowe Price’s Giroux says. “I have built a model that goes out to 2040, and I believe this will be a multibillion-dollar franchise in that time horizon.”
The NWSL as a whole is also enjoying a series of tailwinds that will continue to benefit Gotham and the league’s other franchises, with the cost of admission rising rapidly for investors. The Haslam family landed an expansion team in Columbus, Ohio, for $205 million in April, a few months after Arthur Blank spent $165 million to launch a team in Atlanta. Both will begin play in 2028.
Four years after Michele Kang spent a then-astronomical $35 million for the Washington Spirit in 2022, Gotham’s new price tag is adding a zero to that benchmark.
The new coalition of deep-pocketed owners has loosened the league’s salary cap rules to attract many of the world’s top players to the NWSL and keep them away from Europe. Investors are hopeful that some of the exposure those stars receive in next year’s Women’s World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will translate to their club teams, and the sport can look forward to a league-wide catalyst with NWSL’s media rights deals up for renewal at the end of next season. The league’s four-year deals with CBS, ESPN, Prime Video and Scripps Sports were reportedly worth an average of $60 million annually when they were signed in 2023, and despite a competitive environment jockeying with other major sports leagues for broadcast revenues, investors and bankers working with the league are optimistic about another substantial jump beginning in 2028.
“There is a much stronger correlation between a women’s sports fan and their intent to purchase from sponsors. They’re younger, they’re more diverse, they’re female,” Tisch Blodgett says. “You’re just starting to see more people understanding the value of that women’s sports fan, and I think our media partners are understanding that, too.”
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