It’s so fun watching a sports league shoot itself in the foot. Well, not fun, honestly. Just, like kind of funny but really both disappointing and embarrassing.
No, I’m surprisingly not talking about D.C. United’s ridiculous decision to host a home match in Baltimore because it would seat more D.C. United Lionel Messi fans and sell more tickets. That’s a post for another day. MK Dons-ass team.
Actually, this post is about the National Women’s Soccer League, the still-nascent, well, United States professional women’s soccer league. After several attempts to get a U.S. league off the ground, this one seems to have finally stuck. At least for now. There’s some competition coming recently from the USL, but it’s silly and almost certainly doomed for failure.
There’s a lot the league has done well to get to this point. Slow, organic, and sustainable growth. Looking honestly and openly at its past mistakes and failures and tried to rectify them. TV deals that look byzantine (honestly, what sports leagues’ TV deals don’t at this point), but offer fans pretty decent chances to watch matches, whether over streaming, over the air, or on cable. A fair and mostly sensible collective bargaining agreement.
However, that fair and mostly sensible collective bargaining agreement contains one of the bitter poison pills that may eventually doom this league. The most American of stipulations: the salary cap.
A salary cap sounds good. It promotes parity and prevents rich teams from spending their way to a championship. But it is also, at its heart, anti-worker, preventing players from being paid what they are worth on the market. It is also a constant downward pressure for the salaries of all the players on any team. As we all know from neoliberal economics, price controls (and salaries are prices) are anticompetitive and insert bad economics word thingy (fuck it, I’m keeping this).
The NWSL salary cap is also ridiculously low. For the 2026, it is just $3.3 million per team, and under the current collective bargaining agreement, won’t surpass $5 million per team until 2030. You can probably think of any number of mediocre sports players around the country and around the world paid more than this just themselves. And, yet, this is the entire price control for an entire roster: which is a minimum of 22 and maximum of 26.
It’s possible that this salary cap (although seriously, it needs to be increased like tenfold at least) would be fine, and, true, plenty of U.S. sports leagues do fine with a salary cap. (Well, except, notably, Major League Baseball. Remember that World Series that just happened? That’s the product of the free market, baby!) If there weren’t any real competition, where the best players could go instead to ply their trades and get paid better, what we would see is what is intended: parity in the league and smaller player paychecks.
But! Soccer is famously an international sport, and the women’s leagues around the world are waking up. Sure, for decades the United States has been a powerhouse of women’s soccer, and for good reason. It took several tries to get a sustainable league up and going, but for a long time the U.S. produced most of the best players and did the best on the world stage. It doesn’t hurt that England banned women’s soccer for decades, only legalizing it in 1971 and women’s soccer wasn’t formally taken over by the FA until 1993.
England, Spain, France have two things in common: great soccer and no salary cap for women’s teams. Unlike the Americans, who have a separate league for the women, in these countries (and many others) the women’s teams are subsidiaries of the long-standing men’s teams, and largely follow the same rules. This largely means no salary cap, but they do have to abide by their country’s (and their continental governance organization’s) profit and sustainability rules. Sure, these rules are (sometimes lol) strict and hard to follow, but basically the idea is you can’t spend more than you earn. But, again most importantly, no salary cap, and players get paid whatever is bid the most by what team values them the most.
And here we come to this week’s news (finally, right?). We do seem to have some kind of emergency rising up in the NWSL. Earlier this year, Naomi Girma, one of the best defenders in the world, left the NWSL to join Chelsea. Just a few months ago, another young star player, Alyssa Thompson, left her NWSL team Angel City to go to Europe (specifically again Chelsea). And now, maybe, another one.
Star Washington Spirit player Trinity Rodman, another one of the arguably best players in the world, sees her contract expiring this off season. She’s been open about wanting to play in Europe someday, but she’s also suggested that for now she’d like to stay with the Spirit, where she has so far played her entire professional career (and may win another national championship tomorrow). But thanks to that salary cap, the contract negotiations with the Spirit organization have largely gone nowhere. They can’t pay her what she is worth. Teams in Europe—lacking a salary cap—can.
And, in a particularly great piece of trolling, USL team DC Power have offered a contract that is well above what a NWSL team can pay, because USL doesn’t have a salary cap (or, notably, a collective bargaining agreement).
Can the NWSL survive if their best players eventually move to greener and better paying fields elsewhere? The NWSL has so far succeeded because it’s where you can see some of the best players in the world every week, no matter what teams are playing. It’s where Marta is still playing (somehow). It’s where Barbara Banda and Temwa Chawinga, perhaps the best strikers in the world, are playing.
To a large extent the NWSL is coasting because it’s where the attention has been for the past decade, but that can change, especially if the best players move to England, France, Spain, elsewhere. We may be at a serious impasse, where the European women’s leagues join their men’s counterparts as the elite leagues in the world, bypassing the U.S. and relegating the NWSL to MLS status.
There’s plenty of money to go around. Hell, you could just increase the cap to several more million dollars. The amount of money just being paid in expansion fees would make your eyes bleed. Where is this money going? Parity, I guess.
What does the current league leadership think about this? Well, it’s not promising. Commissioner Jessica Berman recently said, defending against the idea that the salary cap will lead to a talent exodus: “If you are a star and a top player, I am certain that there is no other country that you could be celebrated as a cultural icon the way you will be in this country.”
Sure, we won’t pay you enough, but we’ll make it up in exposure. Can you spend exposure? The ultimate non-fungible token.
Who knows what happens next. It almost certainly won’t be Rodman moving to DC Power, because that league is trash and she knows it. Maybe she’ll go to Europe, maybe she’ll stay home somehow. Maybe they’ll finally relent and increase or scrap the salary cap. Hard to believe that though, considering they seem to think it’s an asset and not an albatross. And if she leaves, will the other incredible superstars follow?
The U.S. will be hosting the Women’s World Cup in 2031 — will the NWSL still be among the elite women’s leagues in the world at that point?
