Sports · Wednesday, 26 August 2026

01 · Briefing · what happened

Two teams, two leagues, one building - and a weight room they have to share

Sports 1 min 31 sources

A $150m training centre outside Portland is the first built for women rather than adapted from men. What makes it possible is that one owner holds both a football club and a basketball club, so neither has to carry the building alone.

$150m

cost of the centre

for two teams in two leagues [1][2]

100,000

square feet

in Hillsboro, 15 miles outside Portland [1][2]

5,000

sq ft of shared weight room

shared, while pitches and courts are doubled [1]

NWSL games on Roku in 2027

up from eight this season [4]

At a glance

RAJ Sports and Kaiser Permanente opened a 100,000 square-foot, $150m performance centre in Hillsboro, about 15 miles outside Portland. [1][2]
It serves two teams in two different leagues: the NWSL's Portland Thorns, three-time champions, and the WNBA's Portland Fire, an expansion side. [1][2]
Everything that would create a conflict is doubled - two full-sized soccer pitches, one grass and one turf, two full-sized basketball courts, two locker rooms, two lounges, two meeting rooms, two saunas. [1]
The expensive things are shared: the treatment area, the 5,000 square-foot weight room and the cafeteria. [1]
That sharing is deliberate rather than a saving. The executive who ran it wants a footballer and a basketball player to end up at the same breakfast table. [1]
It is the first facility of this size built around women's physiology rather than adapted from a men's building. [2]
The detail list is the argument: dedicated space for nutrition, medical care and family support including new mothers, and full-height toilet partitions. [2]
Nike announced a partnership with the same owner days earlier, aimed explicitly at performance standards designed for women rather than inherited from men. [3]
The same week, the NWSL replaced a dropped media partner with Roku - eight Sunday night matches free from 30 August, rising to 25 games in 2027. [4]
The league said the package drew a competitive process, which is the part that matters: the rights had bidders. [4]
Alexis Ohanian's volleyball venture separately took a home at the Clippers' $2bn Intuit Dome. [6]
The pattern under all of it is the same: women's leagues are being built on somebody else's fixed costs, and the question is whose.
The wider conversation caught up in the same week: a widely shared piece argued that people newly claiming to protect women's sport should start with resourcing, and the gap in resources is now a plot line in a television series. [5][7]
Documentaries and profiles marking Women's Equality Day pointed at the same thing from the audience side - the viewership exists and the buildings did not. [8][9]

Forces in play

Money arriving as buildings Building↑

$150m into a training centre, plus a Nike partnership and a new arena home for a volleyball league [1][3][6]

Shared fixed costs Easing

one owner, two leagues, one weight room - the arithmetic that makes a marginal team viable [1]

Media rights finding a floor Steady→

the NWSL's Sunday package drew a competitive process after its previous partner was dropped [4]

Standards inherited from men High

this is described as the first building of its size designed around women rather than adapted [2][3]

In play RAJ Sports — owns both the Thorns and the Fire, which is what makes one building work Kaiser Permanente — the health system that co-funded it, and put its name on it Populous — the architects, better known for stadiums built for men The shared cafeteria — the cheapest part of the building and the one they talk about most

How it unfolded

Last month the NWSL abruptly drops its Sunday night media partner [4]
Days ago Nike announces a women's performance partnership with the same owner [3]
22 Aug the Kaiser Permanente Performance Center opens [2]
30 Aug NWSL Sunday matches begin on the free Roku Sports Channel [4]

Where this points

The number to watch is whether a second owner copies the structure: a shared building only proves anything if somebody who does not own two teams finds a way to do the same thing.

Also today

9 more stories on this beat.

Tennis prize money passes $100m, and the players get a council

The US Open announced a $101m prize pool, up 19% on last year, with singles champions taking $5.5m and total compensation reaching a record $108m - a 44% rise since 2024. The four Grand Slams simultaneously created a player council, a key player demand. [10][11][12][13]

Why it matters — $101m is about 18% of the tournament's 2024 operating revenue of $559.7m. The players are asking for 22% by 2030, so the number that matters is the ratio, not the headline. [10]
A four-year ban for a test that never happened

Marketa Vondrousova, an Olympic silver medallist and former world number six, received the maximum four-year ban for refusing an out-of-competition doping test at her home at about 8pm on 3 December 2025. The tribunal found no compelling justification; she is appealing. [14]

Why it matters — Refusal carries the same maximum penalty as a positive test, because a system that let you decline would not be a system at all.
College eligibility swings back again

A 2-1 appeals-court panel stayed a nationwide injunction that would have granted thousands of athletes an extra season, so the class of 2022 has lost its eligibility again. The Big Ten will not allow players to return from the NFL, and the SEC commissioner filed against professionals returning to college. [16][17][18][19][20][21]

Why it matters — Three different bodies are writing incompatible rules about the same athletes, and the courts are now the only place they meet.
Burnout, said out loud

Amanda Anisimova, back at the US Open after stepping away from the tour, described recognising the warning signs far earlier now. [15]

Why it matters — The prize pool went up 44% in two years. The schedule that earns it did not get shorter.
The NHL wants two more cities

The league is looking at awarding a 33rd franchise to Austin or Houston by year-end, after agreeing a $2bn expansion fee, with an eye on its next television rights deal. [22]

Why it matters — Expansion is being timed to the rights negotiation, which tells you what the new team is actually for.
Another stadium, another council vote

A city council backed the Kansas City Royals' new stadium with a major funding boost. [23]

Why it matters — The same week a private owner spent $150m of its own money on a training centre, a public body voted to help fund a ballpark.
Streaming is buying football without buying football

Disney+ and Netflix are investing in football content - podcasts, documentaries, series - while leaving the live rights alone. [24]

Why it matters — Live rights are expensive and expire. A documentary library does not.
Russia, and what the IOC decision means downstream

The IOC's decision on Russian participation now lands on FIFA and UEFA, whose club and national teams have been barred since 2022. [25]

Why it matters — Sports federations mostly follow each other rather than deciding, so one body's ruling becomes everyone's policy.
Formula One's owners keep changing

The New York Jets' owner took a minority stake in Aston Martin's F1 team, while TWG Global insisted the Cadillac team is not for sale amid reports of restructuring. On track, Mercedes were granted engine upgrades as Norris closed to within 83 points. [26][27][28][29] Meanwhile the summer transfer window's twenty biggest deals were tallied, and one analysis argued the Premier League's shortage of global stars does not matter to its audience. [30][31]

Why it matters — Two of this season's three biggest stories are about who owns the cars rather than who drives them.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

Who carries the building decides who gets to exist

A small team's fate is settled less by how many people want to watch it than by whether somebody else is already paying for the expensive part.

How it works

A team needs a building to be a professional team
The building costs far more than one small team can carry
So the team stays semi-professional, or never exists
Unless somebody else is already paying for most of it
Then only the parts that must be separate get duplicated
And the marginal team becomes affordable

The twist

What decides whether a small league can exist is almost never demand - it is who carries the fixed costs. Duplicate only what conflicts, share everything else, and a building nobody could justify alone becomes a building two teams cannot do without.

Where you've seen this

The village shop

it survives by also being the post office and the cafe, because none of the three could pay the rent

Shared commercial kitchens

a food business becomes possible when the oven is somebody else's capital

Regional airports

one runway carries freight, passengers and flight training, and needs all three

University research kit

the machine nobody's department could buy gets bought by four of them and booked by the hour

The catch

Sharing has a real cost: the shared thing is controlled by whoever owns it, and a team that does not own its building can be told to leave it. Cheap fixed costs and dependence are the same arrangement seen from two ends.

And the whole of it

Nobody here set out to solve the economics of women's sport. An owner bought two teams because they were available, an architect drew what the brief asked for, a health system wanted its name on something good. Between them they produced the first building of its kind, and the reason it works is a piece of arithmetic none of them was trying to demonstrate.

03 · Lab · your turn

Build It For Two

Split a $150m budget between facilities that must be doubled and facilities two teams can share, and find that the answer is exactly the one Portland built.

04 · Truth · what's really going on

Stripped of the framing

The first training centre built for women exists because one owner happens to hold two teams in two different leagues. That is a solution to the economics of women's sport and also a demonstration of how narrow the path currently is: it needed common ownership to work.

Why it lands — A building is photographable and a balance sheet is not, so the story is told as generosity arriving in women's sport. The interesting part is the arithmetic - which is why the details that get quoted are the saunas and the snacks rather than the shared weight room.

Claimed

What people said. Not yet a fact.

RAJ Sports and Kaiser Permanente

This is the first performance centre built, designed and centred around women, aiming to shift the industry standard. [2]

Largely reported through the owners' own framing at their own summit. The physical details - the family-support space, the full-height partitions - are checkable; 'shift the industry standard' is an aspiration with one building behind it.
Nike

The partnership is about performance innovation designed for women rather than inherited from men. [3]

Announced at a summit Nike was presenting sponsor of, alongside the same partner. Two announcements from one room in one week is a campaign as well as a development.
The NWSL

Roku emerged from a competitive process, which speaks to the growing value of the league's media rights. [4]

Financial terms were not disclosed. A competitive process with an undisclosed price is a claim about interest, not about money.

Verified

What we could actually stand behind.

The centre is 100,000 square feet, cost more than $150m, and serves the Portland Thorns and Portland Fire. [1][2]

How we checked — Two independent outlets with matching figures, one of them having walked the building and described the rooms individually.
Competitive facilities are duplicated while the weight room, treatment area and cafeteria are shared. [1]

How we checked — First-hand reporting from inside the building, with the shared spaces named by the executive responsible as a deliberate choice rather than a saving.
The US Open's $101m prize pool is about 18% of its 2024 operating revenue of $559.7m. [10]

How we checked — Both figures published, and the players' own 22%-by-2030 target reported alongside - so the ratio can be checked rather than taken.

Nobody knows

Open questions — ours included.

Whether this model works without common ownership.

Every economic advantage described here follows from one company owning both teams. Nothing in the reporting shows two unrelated clubs doing the same thing, and that is the test. [1][2]
What the Roku deal is worth.

Terms were not disclosed. The NWSL dropped its previous partner abruptly last month, which is not the position of maximum leverage. [4]
Why Vondrousova refused the test.

The tribunal found her explanation offered no compelling justification and imposed the maximum. Her appeal is pending, and the public account remains a statement on Instagram. [14]
Who ultimately controls the building.

The teams train in it; the owner and the health system paid for it. Nothing published sets out what happens to a team's access if it is sold. [1][2]

Who gains

The owner of both teams — One building serves two franchises in two leagues, so the fixed cost that would sink either alone is carried once - an advantage no single-team owner can copy. [1]
Kaiser Permanente — Its name is on the first building of its kind in women's sport, for a share of $150m, in a market where that association is currently scarce. [2]
Nike — It announced its partnership at a summit it was presenting sponsor of, in the same week and with the same partner as the building. [3]

Who pays

Clubs without a wealthy sibling — The comparison now includes a $150m purpose-built centre, and most women's teams are still training in facilities designed for men's bodies. [2][3]
Athletes on the schedule that funds it — Tennis prize money is up 44% since 2024 while a returning player describes learning to catch burnout earlier. The calendar that generates the money has not shortened. [12][15]
The class of 2022 — An appeals court stayed the injunction and thousands of college athletes lost an extra season again, after being told twice that they had it. [16][17][21]

05 · Hope · carry this

The cheapest room in a $150m building is the one everybody talks about. They shared the cafeteria on purpose, so that a footballer and a basketball player would end up at the same breakfast table.