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Last Friday night, Lionel Messi scored a 94th-minute free kick game-winner in his Major League Soccer debut. At nearly the exact same time, over six million people watched the U.S. women’s national team defeat Vietnam in its first group stage match of the 2023 World Cup.
Now, on Saturday, around 80,000 people will fill AT&T Stadium in Arlington to watch Barcelona and Real Madrid clash in soccer’s most storied rivalry. The El Clasico match is the latest in the Soccer Champions Tour, with fans already packing venues like California’s Rose Bowl and Houston’s NRG Stadium to see the best European clubs on American soil.
Soccer is having its moment in the U.S. and that’s not lost on global investment firm Sixth Street.
“This is the best runway for launching soccer in the United States that will ever happen in the next 500 years,” said Alan Waxman, co-founder and CEO of the company with over $65 billion in assets.
Sixth Street, which operates its largest, 170-person office in Dallas, is the firm behind the Soccer Champions Tour and the National Women’s Soccer League’s forthcoming expansion team Bay FC. The latter marked the single largest institutional investment into professional women’s sports ever, and Sixth Street plans to add a women’s Champions Tour next year.
It also has investments in Real Madrid and Barcelona, and a majority interest in Legends, a joint stadium operations venture started by the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees, makes much of that possible.
Waxman, a native Texan who grew up playing in youth soccer tournaments in Dallas, said Sixth Street isn’t heavily invested in soccer because he’s a fan. It’s because it’s good economics.
“The data is there,” Waxman said. “[The Soccer Champions Tour] was a very easy investment decision. ... And the NWSL, women’s soccer, was the best opportunity we’re seeing across sports.”
It wasn’t long ago that NWSL teams were valued in the low seven figures, “if you were lucky,” said Jeff Kassouf, founder of women’s soccer site Equalizer and a veteran in American soccer media. The Utah Royals, in their second incarnation, came with an expansion fee of between $2 million and $5 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
For Bay FC? Try $53 million.
That’s less than half of what Sixth Street, in partnership with former national team players Brandi Chastain, Leslie Osborne, Danielle Slaton and Aly Wagner, is investing in the team. The firm’s investment totals $125 million, with space in the budget for a new practice facility.
The nine-digit number sent shockwaves through the women’s soccer world when it was announced in April. When the Washington Spirit sold for $35 million in early 2022, that set the floor. Angel City FC raised around $100 million not long after, thanks to an ownership group with the likes of actress Natalie Portman and tennis legend Serena Williams. But an eight-figure expansion fee and then some for Bay FC was new territory.
That’s not how Waxman and Sixth Street see it, though.
“From an investment standpoint, basically, you can buy NWSL teams at a 65% discount to other sports leagues. But the NWSL is growing two to six times faster than all the other sports leagues,” Waxman said. “For us, that’s a great investment opportunity.”
The calculus for the value in women’s soccer is simple. Over a billion people watched the 2019 Women’s World Cup, and FIFA is projecting close to double that for this year’s tournament. American women are the best of the best, having half of all Women’s World Cups, and the national team’s stars like Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe have become household names.
The NWSL final in November 2022 saw record viewership of 915,000 people on CBS, a 71% increase over 2021. For comparison, the 2022 MLS final drew around two million, and the MLS has been around for 19 more years than the 10-year-old NWSL.
It’s part of an overall trend of more Americans following soccer, even if loyalties are divided. There are diehard women’s game fans, burgeoning followers of the MLS and European faithful who insist powerhouses like Barcelona and Real Madrid are the only ones to watch.
There is plenty of overlap between the groups, but the path forward for soccer in America isn’t necessarily linear. Sixth Street, though, is prepared to capitalize on a lot of it.
“The big picture is that the overall scale of that entire group at large is bigger. All of those subgroups are bigger,” Kassouf said. “It wasn’t that long ago that soccer was like, ‘Oh, soccer? That’s cute.’”
Kassouf and Waxman attribute that change to advances in technology that simply make soccer easier to follow.
“You could wake up and you’d find the one game from the Premier League that was on in the morning, right? There was no real way to watch the others or they were on tape delay,” Kassouf said. “The MLS was on this DirecTV package that was very unreliable. … I would watch LA Galaxy games. I’d be waiting for them to kick off at 10 or 11 at night, and sometimes they would just never show up.”
That’s no longer the case. The Premier League’s latest deal with NBC is worth $2.7 billion over six years. Its previous six-year deal was only $1 billion. Before that? Three years for $250 million.
Other European leagues are following suit. La Liga, where Barcelona and Real Madrid play, bought out its U.S. media rights contract with Qatar-based BeIN Sports to sign an eight-year, $1.4 billion deal with ESPN.
“The introduction of streaming … for people to actually find the games and then also follow their idols on social media, that just didn’t exist five years ago,” Waxman said. “It’s that whole convergence of sports and technology that’s unlocking the true value of a lot of these brands, which are global brands.”
That’s already paying off for Sixth Street in the Soccer Champions Tour. When Barcelona and Real Madrid take the pitch Saturday, they’ll be greeted by a near sell-out crowd at AT&T Stadium, said Chad Estis, executive vice president of Legends and of business operations for the Cowboys.
Soccer friendlies have a long and successful history in the U.S. and at AT&T Stadium. Still, at a moment when soccer has so much momentum in the States — the Men’s World Cup is coming to North America in 2026 and the Women’s Cup could be in 2027— hosting El Clasico in Arlington feels different.
“As far as these two brands and what El Clasico means and the matchup, and then the interest and demand for tickets, ticket prices, this is probably the biggest soccer event we’ve had at the stadium,” Estis said.
Though “not an apples-to-apples comparison,” Estis said, the average ticket price for Saturday is more than for a Cowboys game.
For Sixth Street, that’s validation for its soccer investments.
“We’re looking for the best investment ideas across sectors, across countries, across asset classes,” Waxman said.