Rob Cohen’s bid to bring the 16th NWSL franchise to Denver was everything the league had imagined. The chairman and CEO of IMA Financial, who in 2001 founded the Metro Denver Sports Commission, not only offered a record $110 million expansion fee, but also pledged an infrastructure investment with little precedent in women’s professional sports.

Cohen proposed a 14,500-seat stadium within Denver’s city limits that would set the standard for purpose-built NWSL venues and anchor a mixed-use district designed to serve as a model across the league.

The club wouldn’t even need to be a tenant while that venue was built. Cohen committed to building a temporary stadium for the team’s first two seasons, adjacent to a new performance center and four training pitches developed from scratch.

Between the expansion fee and facility projects, excluding mixed use, Cohen is set to pour roughly $450 million into the club’s launch. The plan exemplifies NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman’s vision of deep-pocketed owners controlling their own facilities.

Cohen expects the club to reach operating break-even within roughly five years, with infrastructure costs and financing recouped within a decade through a combination of franchise appreciation and returns from the mixed-use development. The model relies heavily on venue control and the sponsorship inventory created by the club’s stadiums and training complex.

But ambitious plans take time to execute, and Denver hasn’t had much. The NWSL’s protracted process to choose an ownership group to launch alongside Boston Legacy FC for the 2026 season dragged into 2025. By the time the league finally awarded the franchise to Denver on Jan. 30, Cohen had less than 14 months before this Saturday’s inaugural match.

“It was ‘ready, set, go,’ and we basically had nothing in place,” Cohen said. “We didn’t have a bank account, we didn’t have a single staff member, we didn’t have any of that. So, to go from that to actually being on the field of play with a full roster … it’s been a whirlwind 14 months like none I’ve ever had in my life.”

After a full sprint by Cohen and his team, Summit FC’s inaugural season is poised to reflect both strong demand for women’s soccer in the market and the constraints of an accelerated launch.

Experienced hand

To help launch an NWSL team in a matter of months, Cohen looked to someone who had done it before. In July 2023, Jen Millet joined incoming expansion team Bay FC, which had an even shorter 11-month runway, as COO. That club launched in 2024 and has ranked in the top five in NWSL attendance in its first two seasons.

After a search process led by CAA, Cohen hired Millet, who attended high school in the Denver area, as president and the first employee of his then-unnamed franchise in April 2025. Millet was an SBJ Game Changers honoree in 2020, when she was senior vice president of marketing for the Golden State Warriors and Chase Center.

Since beginning in her role, Millet has identified three key differences between her experience at Bay FC and the task ahead in Denver.

First, Bay FC’s ownership group, led by Sixth Street, had ambitions to secure a purpose-built training facility and stadium, but didn’t attempt to do so prior to launch. The club signed a five-year lease to play as a tenant at PayPal Park and secured a short-term practice facility at San Jose State, taking facilities off the table as an immediate concern.

Making facilities a top priority from the jump made the Denver project a far heavier lift.

“We’re managing four facility projects right now, which adds a degree of difficulty,” Millet said. “At Bay, we had to navigate some of that, but we weren’t in build mode on multiple projects on multiple sites at the same time we were standing up the club. That piece has been really challenging.”

Second, Millet and the executive team at Bay FC had the luxury of tapping into the resources of a private equity firm with more than $125 billion under management and more than 700 employees. While the business side at Summit FC is now up to around 55 employees, Cohen and Millet have done much of the heavy lifting themselves.

“At Sixth Street, there were seven or eight people that could navigate certain things around real estate, or capital calls, or whatever was happening — there was an army you could tap into,” Millet explained. “Rob and I had a conversation last week where we said, ‘Wow, it’s just us trying to do all of this.’ So, I think it is a lot.”

The third difference, however, has made launching Summit FC considerably easier.

“Fans in the Bay area were really excited about Bay coming, and I would never diminish that,” Millet said. “But in Denver, from Day 1, the response to the club has been 10X that. It’s probably a factor of the market being a little bit smaller and easier to impact, but everybody has been locked in on this club in the market since announced. It has really helped us move through this expedited timeline with more ease.”

That excitement was reflected in season-ticket deposits, which quickly converted into sales. The team secured 8,500 season-ticket holders before capping sales to leave room for groups and single-game buyers at the 12,500-seat temporary stadium. Summit FC granted even more deposit holders who remain on the waitlist access to their membership program, Club 5280, which comes with merchandise discounts, special ticket offers and exclusive events.

The true scale of the enthusiasm will be on display at the team’s home opener at Empower Field at Mile High Stadium, home of the Denver Broncos. As of late February, the team had sold more than 45,000 tickets for the March 28 match, positioning it to break the NWSL attendance record of 40,091 set by Bay FC at Oracle Park last year.

Denver’s sporting build also differed from past NWSL expansions. Summit FC and Boston Legacy FC are the first teams in league history to launch without the benefit of an expansion draft or a college draft, leaving the club to construct its roster entirely through free agency and international signings.

Time crunch

Warm temperatures and minimal snowfall made for terrible skiing this past winter in Colorado, but provided Denver Summit FC with ideal construction conditions for key infrastructure ahead of its inaugural season.

The team broke ground last June on a 20,000-square-foot training center, temporary stadium and four shared-use fields on a 43-acre site owned by the city of Centennial. The project stems from a partnership with the Cherry Creek School District and the city that Cohen began developing with CAA Icon before securing the franchise.

Once Summit FC moves to its permanent stadium in Denver as early as 2028, the school district will become the primary tenant of the Centennial venue, while the club retains the right to use the facility for its academy and a potential second team.

“Once we learned that Cherry Creek School District was planning on building their own stadium anyway, we started having discussions with them and saying, ‘Hey, if we do this together, you can spend half the money you were going to spend, we can spend half the money we were going to spend, and we can create something that’s a legacy for the community down the road,’” Cohen said.

The club expects to move into the performance center in June, roughly a year after breaking ground. With a more generous launch runway, that pace might have positioned Summit FC to open its inaugural season fully settled into its new facility. Instead, the team will train at a local rugby stadium for the first few months of the season.

It also will play just three of its first 12 matches at home and won’t open its own stadium until July, after the league’s midseason World Cup break. Following the opener at Mile High, the club will stage two additional early-season home matches at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, home of MLS’s Colorado Rapids. Its first game at the 12,500-seat Centennial Stadium is scheduled for July 3.

“I don’t think any expansion team would say that’s a great way to start, and it is heavily loaded with some of the best teams in the NWSL,” Cohen said. “But it is what it is. You can’t complain about it. You just have to deal with it.”

While the team has yet to break ground on its permanent stadium, which will ultimately anchor a mixed-use development in Denver called Santa Fe Yards, Cohen is hopeful it will be ready for the start of the 2028 NWSL season. The political process was bumpier than anticipated, but the city council agreed to contribute $70 million to the project.

Beyond facilities, one aspect of the business in which Summit FC could have used more time is sponsorship sales. The club retained Legends to lead its commercial efforts and scored a major win with its sale of performance center naming rights to Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but Cohen said the deal is the richest naming-rights agreement for a women’s sports practice facility and exceeds comparable deals in MLS, as well as the average value of similar agreements in the NBA and NFL.

While the club also has announced deals with Canvas Credit Union, Xcel Energy and LaCroix, it has yet to sell some of its most valuable inventory, including front-of-kit placement and naming rights to Centennial Stadium. Sponsorship will be key to making the economics of the temporary stadium pencil out.

“A lot of those conversations on the sponsorship front, especially bigger assets, just take more time to develop,” Millet said. “You’ve got to be within a brand’s budgeting cycle. You’ve got to allow time for C-level approvals on those things. So, the turn on those doesn’t move as quickly through the business as it is to stand up something like ticketing.”

Millet expects the team to begin the season with six or seven corporate partners, and to add more throughout the season. Having a schedule backloaded with home matches at Centennial Stadium, where the team controls signage, will ensure late-joining sponsors don’t miss out on as much value early in the season.

With the NWSL expanding at a rapid clip and franchise valuations continuing to soar, the league under Berman’s leadership has prioritized ownership groups willing to invest in purpose-built infrastructure for its clubs. Summit FC is a prime example of that vision and evidence that big ideas require time to execute.

“My recommendation to the league is if you’re going to have a new expansion team and they have to build infrastructure as a part of their standing up of the team, it’s almost impossible to do what we’ve done in 14 months,” Cohen said. “We got it done, but I would encourage the league to allow the runway to be longer.”