_(53592158674).jpg)
On 23 November 2024, in a stadium that did not exist eighteen months earlier, the Orlando Pride beat Washington Spirit 1-0 to win their first NWSL Championship. Barbra Banda’s 37th-minute goal — collected from Angelina, turned past Esme Morgan, finished low past Aubrey Kingsbury — secured the title. Marta, who had joined Orlando in 2017 from Sweden via Brazil and a half-dozen lesser stops, lifted the trophy at thirty-eight years old. Her mother was in the stands. It was the first time her mother had seen her play in the NWSL.
The stadium was CPKC Stadium in Kansas City, opened in March 2024 as the first privately-financed venue purpose-built for a professional women’s soccer team anywhere in the world. The Kansas City Current, that season, became the first NWSL club to sell out every home match. The final itself sold out a stadium not built for the team that won it. The visual image — Marta on the trophy stand, in Kansas City, in a women’s-only stadium that did not exist when she signed for Orlando — is the one I want to start with, because it is more honest than any abstract argument about institutional growth. Three years earlier, this league was being investigated for systemic abuse and was, by any reasonable assessment, broken.
What happened between those two points is the most important story in women’s football this decade. The lazy version of it is NWSL has caught up with WSL. That version is wrong in both directions. The accurate version is harder, more interesting, and worth telling properly.
The 2021 Reset
The Sally Yates Report, commissioned by the United States Soccer Federation and released on 3 October 2022, found that abuse and misconduct — verbal, emotional, and sexual — had become systemic in the National Women’s Soccer League. The investigation focused on three coaches in particular — Paul Riley, Rory Dames, Christy Holly — and on the institutional failures of the clubs, the league office, and US Soccer that had allowed those coaches to move between teams, often laundered by press releases thanking them for their service. Portland Thorns, Racing Louisville, and Chicago Red Stars were specifically cited for impeding the investigation.
This is the foundation. Anything written about NWSL’s growth that does not acknowledge the Yates Report is dishonest. The current architecture of the league exists because players — Becky Sauerbrunn, Mana Shim, Sinead Farrelly, and many others — refused to allow institutional cover-ups to continue. The 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement, the first in American women’s professional soccer history, was not gifted by enlightened ownership. It was extracted by the National Women’s Soccer League Players Association from a position of considerable leverage, in the immediate aftermath of an abuse crisis that had threatened the league’s viability.
The CBA’s first iteration raised the minimum salary from $22,000 in 2021 to $35,000 in 2022, with 4 percent year-on-year increases. It introduced free agency on a tiered schedule — six years of service in 2023, five in 2024, with restricted free agency from three years. It eliminated trades without player consent. It guaranteed contracts. It instituted basic safeguards on workload and player health that had not previously existed.
The 2024 CBA, agreed two years before the previous deal expired, went further than anyone in the players’ association had expected to win in this negotiating cycle. It abolished the entry draft entirely — making NWSL the first major American professional sports league to do so. It eliminated the expansion draft. It made every player a free agent at the end of their contract, regardless of years of service. The minimum salary jumped to $48,500 in 2025, with a path to $82,500 by 2030. The salary cap rose to $3.3 million per club in 2025, with annual increases to $5.1 million by 2030, and — for the first time in any women’s league I am aware of — a collectively bargained share of league revenue is tied to that cap.
The structural significance of the no-draft provision deserves more attention than it has received. The college draft was the mechanism by which American men’s leagues — NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS — assigned young workers to clubs without their consent, on rookie-scale wages set by the league. NWSL is the first to abolish it. Players entering the league now negotiate freely with any club. This is closer to the European football labour model than to the American sports model. The intellectual transfer here is from women’s football to women’s football, not from American men’s sport to American women’s sport.
The Economic Engine
In November 2023, NWSL signed a four-year media rights agreement with CBS Sports, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video, and Scripps Sports that runs through 2027. The combined value is roughly $240 million across the term — about $60 million per year. The previous deal had been worth approximately $1.5 million per year. That is a forty-fold increase. There is no equivalent expansion in the WSL or Liga F media rights cycles to compare it to.
The expansion economics are similarly extraordinary. Bay FC and Utah Royals joined in 2024. Boston Legacy FC and Denver Summit FC begin play in 2026, taking the league to sixteen clubs. Boston is playing initial seasons at Gillette Stadium before moving to a renovated White Stadium in Franklin Park. Denver is playing 2026 at Mile High and building a 14,500-seat venue to open in 2028 — only the second purpose-built women’s-only stadium in NWSL history. Reported expansion fees for the 2026 entrants exceeded $50 million each, against an expansion fee of $2 million as recently as 2020.
The CPKC Stadium opening on 16 March 2024 was the proof-of-concept. Kansas City beat Portland 5-4 in front of a sell-out crowd; Vanessa DiBernardo scored the first goal in the building’s history. The Current then sold out every subsequent home match that season. The stadium is privately financed at approximately $120 million, built by a joint venture that included a women-owned construction firm. It hosted the 2024 NWSL Championship final. The business model — a women’s soccer club that owns its own building and captures all of its matchday revenue — is, in 2026, unique. It is also being copied. Denver’s plans assume the same architecture.
I want to flag the Apple-style framing that some American business writing has imposed on this — NWSL as the Apple of women’s sport — because it is wrong in an instructive way. Apple is a closed ecosystem with vertically-integrated control. NWSL is, by the design of its 2024 CBA, the opposite: a competitive labour market with revenue sharing built into the bargained cap. The model that is actually working here is closer to what NBA labour arrangements would look like if NBA players had won every CBA they have negotiated since 1995. The American women’s soccer players’ union has, in twelve years of organising, won concessions that American men’s leagues have spent fifty years denying their unions.
The European Pull
In January 2024, Washington Spirit announced that Jonatan Giráldez — who would coach Barcelona Femení to a second consecutive Champions League title and a domestic quadruple before leaving in summer 2024 — would arrive in DC after the European season ended. Giráldez had won, in his time at Barcelona, two Liga F titles, a Copa de la Reina, two Supercopas, and the 2022-23 Champions League, with a fifty-match unbeaten run in Spanish league play. He was nominated for FIFA Women’s Coach of the Year in 2023 and the Ballon d’Or Coach award in 2024. He took a job in NWSL.
That is the development that should be impossible to dismiss. The best club coach in women’s football, mid-career, leaving the most decorated club in women’s football to coach in the American league. There is no historical precedent for this in either direction. European coaches who came to American women’s soccer used to be names like Tony DiCicco — distinguished, but late-career, and on the way out of the elite tier. Giráldez was, when he signed, the most successful active coach in the women’s game. He chose Washington Spirit.
The player movement is similarly directional. Marta is the obvious headline name, but the more telling cases are the European internationals who are signing for NWSL clubs at career-peak ages, not as veterans winding down. Khadija Shaw’s Manchester City stay has been complicated by reported NWSL interest. Hannah Hampton’s situation has been the subject of repeated transfer-window rumours, though no signing has been completed. Bay FC’s recruitment has been notably international. Lindsey Heaps — formerly Lindsey Horan, now married — joins Denver Summit FC in 2026 after her Lyon contract expires, returning to the league after a successful European spell that began with a loan and became a permanent move.
The Heaps trajectory is the one I find most analytically useful. She left Portland Thorns for Lyon in 2022, in part because Portland was in the midst of the Yates investigation and in part because Lyon was, at that point, demonstrably the better professional environment. She is returning in 2026 because the gap she left Portland to escape has closed, and in some respects reversed. Lyon are still institutionally elite. But the structural gap that made Lyon obviously the better professional setting in 2022 does not exist in 2026.
What NWSL Still Gets Wrong
I want to be specific about the limits, because there are several.
The schedule is misaligned with the European calendar. NWSL runs March to November, which means American clubs cannot compete for European players who are mid-season at the points NWSL is signing, and European clubs cannot easily release players to NWSL in the summer transfer window because their seasons are starting. This is fixable — moving to a fall-spring calendar has been discussed — but the heat constraints in southern American cities make it a non-trivial problem, and the league has so far chosen not to solve it.
The academy pipeline is thin by European standards. American women’s soccer is still funnelled through the college system, and although the new CBA’s elimination of the draft means colleges no longer dictate professional entry, the absence of professional youth academies attached to NWSL clubs is structural. Barcelona Femení and Lyon develop fifteen-year-olds in their own buildings. NWSL clubs, with the partial exception of one or two, do not. This is the most likely medium-term competitive constraint on the league’s quality ceiling.
The coaching diversity question is significant. The Yates Report identified institutional failures that allowed abusive coaches to move between teams. The post-2022 hiring patterns have improved on the worst of what was documented, but the demographic composition of NWSL coaching — overwhelmingly white, predominantly male — does not match the demographic composition of NWSL playing rosters. There are good coaches across the league. There are not yet enough Black women head coaches in a league where Black women players are central to almost every successful squad. This is a real gap, and the players’ association has been clear about it.
WSL versus NWSL versus Liga F
Honest comparison, league by league, in 2026:
Liga F has the best individual club in the world in Barcelona Femení. It does not have a competitive second tier behind Barcelona. Real Madrid Femenino are improving but not yet at Barcelona’s level. Below the top two, the league’s resourcing drops precipitously. Liga F’s structural issue is competitive imbalance — Barcelona have won the league every season since 2019-20. The best player development in the world happens at La Masia Femení; the best league football does not happen in Liga F.
WSL has the most tactically sophisticated middle tier of any women’s league, by a clear margin. Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City, and Manchester United are all running coherent senior tactical systems, with documented xG profiles that compare favourably to all but the very top of European men’s football. The WSL’s structural issue is the financial concentration at the top — the gap between Chelsea or Arsenal and the bottom three clubs is wider than the equivalent gap in NWSL. Wages at the top are competitive with NWSL; wages at the bottom are not.
NWSL has the deepest competitive league in women’s football. The 2025 NWSL Championship, won by Gotham FC over Washington Spirit on a Rose Lavelle goal in the 80th minute — the latest opening goal in any NWSL final — was the third different champion in three seasons. Kansas City Current took the 2025 Shield with a record 65 points and lost in the playoff quarter-finals. That kind of competitive density does not exist in WSL or Liga F. Eleven of the league’s fourteen 2025 clubs were within reasonable contention of the playoff places at the season’s three-quarter mark. Salary cap parity, the no-trades-without-consent provision, and the elimination of the draft have produced a labour market in which good players move toward the clubs offering the best professional environments, and clubs that do not provide those environments lose them.
Average salaries are comparable across the three leagues, with WSL slightly behind NWSL and Liga F a clear third for non-Barcelona players. The minimum is $48,500 in NWSL and approximately £27,000 at the lower end of WSL. NWSL’s revenue-sharing provision, in the medium term, is the structural advantage. The collectively bargained revenue share means the salary cap rises automatically with the league’s commercial performance. WSL has nothing equivalent. Liga F has nothing equivalent.
What the Men’s Game Can Learn
This is the section I expect to draw the most argument, so let me make the claim narrowly. The institutional architecture NWSL has built since 2022 — guaranteed contracts, no draft, free agency from year one, no trades without consent, revenue-shared salary cap — is more sustainable, more player-respecting, and more likely to produce stable medium-term competition than the institutional architecture of any major men’s league I am aware of. That is a claim about institutions, not football.
The men’s-game institution that comes closest is the Bundesliga’s 50+1 ownership rule, and it comes close in only one respect — both are designed to prevent institutional capture by ownership at the players’ or supporters’ expense. Beyond that one parallel, the architectures diverge. Premier League, La Liga, and Serie A operate without revenue sharing of consequence. MLS operates with a draft, allocation money, and a single-entity structure that NWSL has now explicitly moved away from. The architecture that is most likely to produce stable, competitive, player-respecting football for the next decade is, on the available evidence, NWSL’s.
I am willing to argue this with anyone who wants to compare the medium-term sustainability of the labour models. I am not willing to argue that the on-pitch quality of NWSL football matches Premier League or Bundesliga or La Liga in the men’s game. Those are different claims. The institutional one is the one I am making.
Closing
The Marta image — the trophy lift, in Kansas City, at thirty-eight, with her mother in the stands — is the one I started with, and it is the one I want to end on. She arrived in NWSL when the league was a kind of last-stop curiosity for European-tier players who could not get European-tier wages. She is leaving — she has not announced a retirement, but the calendar will eventually decide — having been part of a league that the Giráldezes and the Heapses of the world consider their best professional option. The institutional architecture that produced that change was built by players who had every reason, in 2021, to walk away from American women’s soccer entirely and did not. The Yates Report should have ended this league. It instead became the foundation of its rebuild.
The next decade’s questions are about whether the on-pitch ceiling can rise to match the institutional one. Academy investment, calendar reform, coaching diversity, the second-stadium project that Denver represents — all of these will determine whether NWSL becomes the best league in women’s football tactically and not only structurally. The structural argument is, by my reading, already won. The tactical one is in play.
For now: the best institutional architecture in women’s football is American. The best player development in women’s football is Catalan. The most tactically sophisticated middle tier in women’s football is English. None of those facts contradict each other. All three leagues are getting better. NWSL is getting better fastest, from the lowest base, with the most player-led foundation. That is the story. It deserves to be told properly, and not flattened into a horse race.