The National Women's Soccer League announced on Wednesday the schedule framework for its 2027 season, which will include a seven-week hiatus for the Women's World Cup and the earliest start date in league history.
The regular season is set to begin on 11 February with a game hosted by Angel City in Los Angeles, coming just three days before Super Bowl LXI takes place in the same city. Ahead of that, the Challenge Cup — the annual matchup between the defending NWSL champion and the Shield winner — will be held on 6 February at a venue still to be confirmed.
Each of the league's clubs will play a 30-match slate during the campaign. Play will pause entirely for the Women's World Cup, which is scheduled to run from 24 June to 25 July in Brazil. Once the season resumes, it will wrap up with Decision Day on 31 October, followed by playoffs across the first two weekends of November and a championship match set for 20 November.
This marks a shift from 2023, when the league suspended regular-season action for five weeks during the World Cup but kept the Challenge Cup — then an in-season event — running. Since that tournament, the NWSL has grown substantially, expanding from 12 to 16 teams and nearly doubling its match count from 132 to 240 games per season.
Commissioner Jessica Berman explained that scheduling the season opener in Los Angeles during Super Bowl week was a deliberate choice, given the NWSL's media partnership with ESPN, which also broadcasts the Super Bowl. She said the league intends to collaborate with the network to ensure the NWSL gets visibility during that high-profile sports weekend.
The move fits into a broader strategy by the league to embed itself within the American sports calendar. The NWSL has already hosted marquee matches at MLB ballparks — including one at Citi Field last month — while its games have appeared in ESPN doubleheaders alongside WNBA action this year. The league also ran a promotional push during the men's World Cup and picked its season back up as that tournament concluded.
"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 added that some media executives have suggested the league has the potential to "own the summer," and the 2027 season could serve as an early test of that idea.
The scheduling announcement comes after Major League Soccer confirmed it will shift to a fall-to-spring calendar starting in 2027, aligning with much of global soccer. The NWSL's board had considered a similar switch, but the players' association pushed back, raising concerns about weather and facility availability. As a result, the league postponed that vote in April and confirmed it would keep its current spring-to-fall format through at least 2030.
Berman acknowledged that MLS's changes present both opportunities and complications for the NWSL, particularly since several teams in both leagues share stadiums. There will be some overlap between the NWSL calendar and MLS's abbreviated February-to-May sprint season, as well as the start of MLS's new 2027-28 campaign. Because most NWSL clubs don't control their own venues, scheduling flexibility remains limited.
However, the two leagues' postseasons won't clash, a scenario that could work in the NWSL's favor for future championship weekends. Carlin Hudson, the league's vice-president of strategy, said she doesn't expect the NWSL to abandon its neutral-site championship model in the near term, though more cities could eventually be considered as hosts. "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," Hudson 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 recently ended arrangement with streaming service Victory+, which was terminated last week after the platform reportedly missed payments. Matches originally planned for Victory+ will now be shown on the league's own NWSL+ platform for the remainder of this season and throughout 2026 and 2027. The league's media rights remain split across several partners, including CBS, ABC/ESPN, Prime Video and Ion, a setup that has drawn criticism for fragmenting viewership. The NWSL's current media agreement, worth a record $240 million, began in 2024, with new negotiations expected to start after the 2027 World Cup.
Based on reporting from The Guardian.