New San Francisco NWSL team reveals name

The San Francisco Bay Area will be the home of the newest NWSL team – the aptly named Bay Football Club.

And surely it will be no time before someone in the nascent organization's marketing department takes the opportunity to grab the shortened moniker, Bay FC, and inflect it as "bae" to give the team a shot of before anyone else sangfroid.

Well, they'd have to clear that with co-founder and retired USWNT legend Aly Wagner who hinted at the less-than-serious attitudes that have plagued the women's game for a long time during a press conference this past week.

"There have been a lot of mascots and silly names associated with our craft. That is not the path that we wanted to go down," she said, adding that she was feeling the same kind of "nervous excitement" she used to experience as a professional midfielder.

Bay FC is coming out of the gate with a classy and stylized look, opting for an old school Gothic font for the letter "B" in their logo and navy blue, red, and gray kits.

Wagner joins fellow USWNT retirees Brandi Chastain, Danielle Slaton, and Leslie Osborne with majority investor Sixth Street Partners, a global investment firm with sizable, acquired rights and stakes in teams like La Liga's FC Barcelona and the NBA's San Antonio Spurs, among others.

The new team will debut in the 2024 NWSL season alongside the returning Utah Royals who were re-founded this past March after ceasing operations back in 2020 and transferring player-related assets to the Kansas City Current.