photo by Emily Anderson
Leading up to the NWSL Championship game last November, league leadership chose to set the table for the ensuing, and now very much here, offseason fight. Their plan was to tout parity and competition as the infinity stone that gives the league its power. Commissioner Jessica Berman used airtime to single out Gotham’s seeding as proof that every team has a chance to win a championship in any given year.
However, anyone who was truly paying attention knows Gotham’s surge was more about health and a pricey midseason rebuild, and that the Spirit were in their second consecutive championship game because they, too, spent money on players. This deeper, more meaningful context was discarded in favor of promoting a particular brand of parity—a clunky retconning that reveals their plan for the future of the league.
It’s not a very interesting or clever plan. In fact, it’s rather rudimentary and full of flaws. Their hope is that by leaning into stringent financial restrictions—signaled by a stubborn refusal to raise the salary cap and the creation of the highly mockable and offensive High Impact Player Rule—the unambitious can’t be exposed by the ambitious.
The growing market for women’s soccer talent signaled to everyone but Berman and a voting majority of NWSL owners that there was a desperate need to raise the cap. Instead, Berman and those owners dug their feet in like Spider-Man straining to stop a train. As a result, the league waved goodbye to several key talents—former MVP Kerolin and Naomi Girma in January of 2025, Alyssa Thompson in August of 2025, and kicked off 2026 by saying goodbye to Sam Coffey.
Player freedom is one thing, but the scales are now lopsided, and the NWSL isn’t equipped to compete for stars to replace those it lost. Yet, none of this was enough for the league to budge. Instead, it was Trinity Rodman’s resolute desire to remain with the Washington Spirit that forced it to throw together a cockamamie scheme, the High Impact Player Rule, as a solution to avoid raising the cap.
All of this points to the version of parity NWSL leadership is making its North Star. The biggest issue with the dogmatic devotion to propping up parity is that it allows owners to (not so) quietly replace quality with competition and hope no one notices. The hope is that artificial mechanisms will squeeze the ambitious and unambitious close enough together to ensure competitive games. If a league owner or club wants to spend, they can, just not enough to raise the floor for the tight-walleted among them.
It’s a sinister ploy motivated by the fearfully unambitious, who are seeing a growing global market for players and clutching their pearls at increased transfer fees and player salaries. You don’t have to squint too hard to believe the sudden undervaluing of NWSL talent appears to be aimed at slowing the growth of the market. Chelsea didn’t even have to set a new record to pluck then-20-year-old Alyssa Thompson, who’d signed a contract extension just two months prior (she’s currently tied for the Blues’ leading scorer). Twenty-seven-year-old Sam Coffey headed to Manchester City after an $875,000 agreement, which was just $13,000 more than Racheal Kundananji’s transfer fee two years ago. Delphine Cascarino signed a contract with San Diego Wave that included a clause allowing her to return to Europe without a transfer fee at all.
NWSL owners and front office employees being unwilling to participate in maximizing their return on players can only be one of two things: incompetence or an intentional play to lower prices. I’d rather call their bluff than call them stupid. All of this is especially annoying in this moment—months after the NWSL achieved its first million-viewer event—because assembling an exceptional women’s soccer team is still remarkably inexpensive and one of the best bargains in sports, especially given the global notoriety received in return.
Two-percent of the transfer fee that Liverpool paid to add Alexander Isak to their men’s team would shatter the current women’s transfer fee. For the first time, two players, based on their NWSL salaries, are being added to the list of millionaires living in the United States, a list that is nearly 24-million names long. Instead, the $400-million in expansion fees over two years that NWSL owners have pulled in has had no bearing on the salary cap, player compensation, or transfer funds.
Despite a popular refrain on social media, Berman’s job description is not to be a puppet for the owners. When her hiring was first announced, the press release tasked her with “supporting players on and off the pitch, working with NWSL clubs to continue to build on the positive momentum of the league’s growing audience, and collaborating with NWSL partners to create the most engaging and entertaining fan experience.” In this current landscape, it is not in her job description to sacrifice growth and quality to pacify those owners without ambition.
The other, and potentially most damaging, fatal flaw in their grand scheme is that women’s sports fans aren’t stupid. For Soccer.’s most recent report asked American soccer fans why they follow their favorite league. Quality of play (34%) outranked competitive games (32) and specific player interest (31). It’s crude and infantilizing to believe that soccer fans who care about and watch women’s sports don’t have a similar eye for high-quality soccer as those watching the men’s side. The report also finds “women represent a newer and younger fanbase, with higher percentages in younger demographics (16-24) and more recent adoption (20% of women vs. 12% of men became fans in the last 1-5 years).” This would be terrific news for a group of owners in a premier women’s soccer league that wasn’t sold on treating its audience like hordes of stans who chase celebrity over substance.
Owning a professional women’s soccer team in the NWSL should be a privilege, not a right. It is quite the coincidence that Berman and the owners who control the NWSL through their votes want you to believe that the purest path to parity is the one that’s designed to keep the most money in their pockets. Attaining honest parity is so much simpler: every owner just has to give a shit. ◼︎