We all know the tale of when Atlanta United kicked off in 2017, and the phenomenon that ensued over the next few years. The Five Stripes immediately struck gold with record-setting attendance, a brand that quickly got global attention, and an MLS Cup inside two years. Even through some admittedly tougher times at the club lately, that launch is still the standard every expansion club gets measured against, and AMBSE still has a handful of those initial executives on the payroll.
Josh Blank, AMBSE’s Vice President of Executive Strategy and (obviously) son of Arthur Blank, sat down for a roundtable with Atlanta-area soccer media today, and one of the more revealing things he said about the NWSL team launching in 2028 was that AMBSE doesn’t plan to run that exact playbook.
“Given as the organization has grown, the learning for that is I don’t know if we would be able to replicate it and then have the same amount of success both on and off the field,” Blank said. “So in this case, we are hiring a lot more NWSL specific individuals from the outset.”
The 2017 launch worked so well in part because Atlanta United leaned heavily on what Josh referred to as AMBSE’s “shared service ecosystem,” which would include things like stadium operations, marketing infrastructure taken from lessons learned with the Falcons, and a group of soccer-specific hires like Darren Eales, Carlos Bocanegra, and Paul McDonough. He pointed directly at that model and said it’s not exactly the same as the one being used this time around.
“There was definitely a lot of people from the stadium side or the Falcon side, who were also leaning in and then supporting those kind of core individuals for Atlanta,” he said of 2017.
The NWSL build is structured differently and is pulling lessons learned from Atlanta United’s launch. Mauricio Culebro is in as president for both Atlanta United and the NWSL team. Deandra Duggins, formerly of the Las Vegas Aces, was announced as Chief Business Officer. Josh mentioned a CFO announcement is likely later this week. The Chief Soccer Officer search is ongoing, with a goal of having that hire in place by sometime during or after the World Cup. From there, he said, “our goal is to hire a substantial amount for the team by the end of this year and then have significantly more brought on early 2027.”
If it wasn’t obvious before, AMBSE is treating the NWSL team less as an extension of Atlanta United and certainly as its own entity from the staffing level up. When asked directly whether there was something from the Atlanta United launch that AMBSE looks back on and wants to improve, Josh explained why he feels there are both positive and negative lessons to be learned. “Not necessarily that we could do better,” he said, before pivoting and diving into the structural reality of the entire company, specifically that the organization is bigger, and a 2017-style launch likely wouldn’t carry the same outcome in 2028.
However, he did bring up a real lesson, and it’s likely the one that matters most for fans who watched Atlanta United’s post-2019 trajectory. It’s about what comes after that honeymoon phase (acknowledging that Atlanta United’s honeymoon phase was significantly better than most sports franchises).
“Every organization naturally has to transition from, you’re an expansion team to being an established team and an established brand,” Blank said. “And how do you not forget who you are as you go through that phase? And I think that’ll be something that, as we’re building the launch of the NWSL team, of who are we and how do we never lose who we are in our fabric, both on and off the field and how do we maintain that?”
Essentially, the main lesson here is that having a plan in place for after the opening couple of years – whether those go well or not – is necessary to have a level of continuity that Atlanta United struggled with from 2020 onward.
Stepping back from long-term to the more direct future, the vision for how the NWSL team plays is, by Blank’s own admission, going to feel familiar.
“I remember, I think Darren [Eales] said in one of his first interviews that he would rather play a game 4-3 than win 1-0,” Blank said. “And I think that’s kind of the mantra that we’ll have with NWSL is that we want to create a product on the field that is exciting to fans and ultimately allows for players to express themselves.”
The team conducted surveys of NWSL founding members and the broader Mercedes-Benz Stadium database to inform how the club shows up. Josh described the principles as largely consistent with Atlanta United’s, which include listening to the actual soccer fan and not dictating the team’s identity to them, with one notable difference that’s specific to women’s soccer.
“I think that’s maybe one small difference between women’s soccer and men’s soccer is, women’s players tend to have a little bit higher propensity to feel more comfortable in front of the camera. That’s something that some of our studies have suggested. And so how do we lean into them wanting to build their brands more?”
Allowing potential players that creativity both on and off the field, along with a state-of-the-art training facility and obviously Mercedes-Benz Stadium, are all wonderful recruiting factors as the club slowly builds. NWSL Atlanta 2028 will be looking to lean on this heavily because that first batch of players will be entirely scouted, as the team won’t immediately have an academy up and running. Blank did verify, though, that they will be working with local women’s teams and the training ground will already be fitted with academy needs from the beginning (locker rooms, etc).
“Come play at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, one of, if not the, best sports stadiums in the entire world, come train at a $85 million training facility that will allow you to have the most success on the field, but then also help grow your brand off the field,” Blank said. “We’ll give you an opportunity to elevate your brand, but also elevate your play that you can compete for World Cups, national teams, whatever it may be.”
He also dropped a stat worth noting: 21 current NWSL players are from Georgia, which he said is the fourth-most of any state. That’s the local talent backdrop AMBSE wants to step into immediately.
“Naturally we want to build a roster, hopefully long term, but players who have a connection to Georgia,” Blank said.
Taking a step back, the NWSL launch sits inside a bigger AMBSE bubble with the World Cup that Josh articulated when I asked about Atlanta’s legacy after the 2026 tournament. He pointed back to the 1996 Olympics as a moment that put the city on the global map and said the goal now is to do that again, but more emphatically.
“Atlanta is now seen, and I think it’s become a well-known city in the United States, but really becoming a epicenter for business, for travel, for soccer, for sports and entertainment more broadly, globally,” Blank said. “When you think of the big cities in the United States, that becomes mentioned with the likes of a New York, in LA, in a Miami.”
The NWSL team is part of that entire bet along with the World Cup, so is the eventual women’s World Cup bid, and even non-soccer events like the Falcons playing in Madrid this year. Josh’s hope that Atlanta’s footprint grows on the global scale is directly tied to how successful these various events end up being, and AMBSE has been researching heavily on all fronts how to set each one up for a victory. That homework has even taken them across the Atlantic: “We did a trip last year to Manchester to go watch Manchester United versus Arsenal. We took our security team internally along with the [Georgia] World Congress Center’s security team too. And that was really just to understand what are best practices around the world in dealing in soccer environments, both from fan experience to security and understanding.”
Finally, as an aside, fans have been curious as to exactly who Josh Blank is after years of Arthur Blank being the figure who makes so many decisions, and it’s worth noting that Josh is, in fact, a soccer guy. He played soccer, he’s attended matches all over the world, and he’s been in the stands and bars celebrating or crying with us for big U.S. World Cup and Atlanta United moments. His girlfriend played the game at a very high level, and he represents AMBSE on the MLS Board of Governors.
NWSL Atlanta 2028 is a team that won’t launch inside of a soccer void. By 2028, Atlanta will have already hosted World Cup matches, U.S. Soccer’s national training center will have been open for a couple of years (more on that Thursday, so stay tuned to the site), and the city’s whole pitch as a global sports destination will have really been tested in front of a modern worldwide audience. The NWSL team is the next big move in that sequence after the World Cup, and based on how Josh talked about it, AMBSE is well aware of how much weight that launch is carrying. If they get it right, the 2028 team won’t just be a successful expansion club, but rather one of the (hopefully many) pieces that turns the World Cup window into the kind of legacy Josh and Arthur Blank want Atlanta remembered for.