Jessica Berman, commissioner of the Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League, speaks throughout a panel on girls’s skilled soccer on the Hilton Anatole in Dallas on Feb. 10, 2024.
Omar Vega | Getty Photographs Sport | Getty Photographs
At 16 years previous, Jessica Berman was a type of uncommon youngsters who knew precisely what she wished to do in life: lead knowledgeable sports activities league.
Practically 30 years later, the New York Metropolis native has not solely achieved her dream — turning into the commissioner of the Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League in 2022 — however she’s serving to to pave the best way for a brand new technology of ladies in sports activities.
“Our league is at this extremely pivotal and transformative moment,” Berman informed CNBC. “This is a movement where the world is recognizing the value of women and the value of investing in women and girls.”
Berman, who was named to CNBC’s inaugural Changemakers list, started her profession as a labor and employment lawyer on the Proskauer Rose regulation agency following internships on the Nationwide Hockey League and in faculty sports activities. She helped to barter the top of the 2004-2005 NHL lockout with a brand new 10-year collective bargaining settlement between the league and its gamers.
She spent the following 13 years rising within the NHL ranks, holding positions starting from vp of neighborhood improvement to deputy counsel for the league, working alongside Commissioner Gary Bettman.
In 2019, Berman turned the primary feminine deputy commissioner of a males’s skilled sports activities league, becoming a member of the Nationwide Lacrosse League. Lower than three years later, she was tapped to run the NWSL and tasked with turning round a company in disaster.
Taking the sphere
Berman took the helm on the girls’s soccer league after allegations had been made from emotional abuse and sexual misconduct throughout a number of groups.
Simply months after Berman was named commissioner, findings had been launched from a yearlong independent investigation, led by former U.S. deputy lawyer normal Sally Yates, which discovered systemic abuse within the NWSL. The league had did not put into place fundamental measures for participant security, the report mentioned, and had fostered a “culture of abuse, silence and fear of retaliation.”
Berman issued an apology and dedicated to creating adjustments to create a secure and optimistic surroundings for gamers, employees and followers and to rebuild belief within the league.
Over the course of 2023, Berman labored to rework the tradition of the league and to supersize its enterprise at a time when girls’s sports activities are seeing unprecedented progress.
Berman helped to enhance gamers’ contracts with the league’s first-ever collective bargaining agreement, which included developments for compensation and dealing situations. She additionally introduced the first-ever million-dollar prize pool to U.S. girls’s soccer.
She cleaned up the league’s personnel, issuing lifetime bans on 4 former coaches over their roles within the misconduct detailed within the Yates report and fining the Chicago Crimson Stars and Portland Thorns groups $1.5 million and $1 million, respectively.
She’s additionally lured big-name traders, promoting them on her new imaginative and prescient for skilled girls’s soccer.
Hollywood A-lister Natalie Portman and all-star athletes Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka, Patrick Mahomes, Eli Manning, Kevin Durant and Carli Lloyd are simply among the names with fairness stakes in NWSL groups.
Sofia Huerta #11 of Seattle Reign takes on Delanie Sheehan #17 of NJ/NY Gotham FC in the course of the second half of the 2023 Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League Championship at Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego, Nov. 11, 2023.
Ben Nichols | ISI Pictures | Getty Photographs
Immediately, Berman mentioned, enterprise is booming and the league has by no means been stronger or extra financially sound.
NWSL in November introduced a landmark media rights deal with 4 main streaming and cable companions, price $240 million over 4 years, or 40 occasions the dimensions of the earlier deal. The settlement vastly will increase the league’s attain and distribution to new audiences.
“This is the beginning of our future,” Berman mentioned on the time. “These partnerships fundamentally change the game for our league and the players who take the pitch each week.”
On Monday, the NWSL introduced an enlargement of its partnership with Amazon, naming the corporate as its unique retail sponsor. As a part of that deal, the e-commerce large and streamer will characteristic an NWSL merchandise store, and the league will migrate its digital archives of historic behind-the-scenes footage and interviews to Amazon Net Providers cloud storage.
Amazon Prime will stream 27 matches this season, which kicks off Friday.
And followers have been packing the stands: The league introduced record-breaking attendance for the 2023 season, with greater than 1.49 million followers attending an NWSL match, a 32% enhance from the earlier 12 months.
Below Berman, the league has expanded to 14 groups from 12, with an additional two teams scheduled to take the sphere in 2026.
Just some years in the past, NWSL groups had been valued at about $2 million on common; at this time, the typical workforce is price $66 million, in keeping with Sportico. Main the pack is Los Angeles’ Angel Metropolis FC, now valued at $180 million, making it some of the precious girls’s groups on this planet, Sportico mentioned.
The basics
Berman mentioned the factor that makes her most proud is the validation she’s gotten from the individuals who have been working for many years to alter the narrative about girls’s sports activities.
“Seeing how current and recently retired players have really embraced what we’re building — those are the people who carry the authenticity of this game — has really fueled my energy and excitement about what we’re building in the future,” Berman mentioned.
Berman additionally acknowledges the “army of people” who’ve helped scale the league’s affect.
“There’s a lot of female empowerment that I feel on a daily basis being surrounded by such incredible leaders and athletes who have worked tirelessly to get to this point,” she mentioned.
She’s additionally significantly happy with giving her two younger boys a front-row seat to historical past.
“They’ve had to make a lot of sacrifices along the way of my career,” mentioned Berman, who incessantly travels as a part of her job. Berman mentioned her boys have develop into personally invested within the league after getting an up-close view of their mother’s work — each the successes and the challenges.
“It makes the whole thing feel so much more meaningful because I can actually see the benefit of what I do on a daily basis for work impacting them positively in their lives,” she mentioned.
Berman credit her success to exhausting work, ambition and being her “authentic self.” She mentioned whereas rising up, her psychologist mom instilled in her a way of self-awareness that is been key in her profession.
And regardless of the calls for of main knowledgeable sports activities league, Berman mentioned she makes positive to prioritize caring for herself — whether or not by way of time with family members or her three canine, or by way of train reminiscent of operating or yoga — which she mentioned makes her a greater commissioner.
“It gives me the energy to offer to everything else that I’m doing in my life,” Berman mentioned.
