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The National Women’s Soccer League has plenty to celebrate going into its 13th regular season. Momentum from a final that drew more than 1 million viewers. Two new expansion teams (one of which, Denver Summit FC, just crossed 50,000 tickets sold for its March 28 home opener). And a new team in Atlanta that will join in 2028 with a $165 million expansion fee.The league that started with just eight teams has now doubled in size, with the average franchise worth $184 million, up 77 percent since September 2024 and 179 percent since 2023, per Sportico’s annual valuations.
Commissioner Jessica Berman signed a three-year contract extension in the fall and sees 2026 as the league’s “next chapter of growth,” as it strives to be the best women’s soccer league in the world.
The question is whether that chapter will be propelled or stymied by its own ambitions.
Tucked inside the NWSL’s new 5th Avenue headquarters in Manhattan, Berman spoke about the state of the league and answered questions from a dozen journalists for more than an hour. The league’s new office is another physical marker of its vision for the future.
“Our goal is to make sure that the NWSL’s games are the most consistently exciting and elite women’s soccer, on and off the pitch, anywhere in the world,” Berman said. “In many ways, we feel like this is our superpower when we compare ourselves to what is happening around the world. We want to be a leader that shares best practices and helps to elevate the ecosystem.”
However, maintaining that superpower — the league’s parity — nearly cost the NWSL some of its well-earned momentum.
Not long after Gotham FC lifted its second NWSL Championship in three years last November, the league’s focus quickly shifted to the threat of losing one of its biggest stars, Trinity Rodman. The confetti had barely finished falling at New York City Hall before questions about the Washington Spirit forward’s future in the league took the spotlight.
Rodman, who quickly became a face of the NWSL with her performances on the pitch and marketability off it, wanted to stay with her club when her contract extension expired in December. However, the Olympic gold medalist was also due for a pay raise.
At the time, many wondered if Rodman, who was drafted by the Spirit in 2021 at the age of 18, would be tempted by offers from competing leagues and teams around the world. Those fears only deepened when the NWSL rejected an initial agreement between the Spirit and Rodman because the league felt it violated the spirit of the salary cap.
After some back and forth and a couple of grievances filed by the NWSL Player Association, Rodman re-signed with the Spirit under the newly created High Impact Player rule. The league established the roster mechanism, which currently allows teams to spend up to $1 million over the salary cap on players who meet certain criteria set by the league, in hopes of keeping Rodman and other “high-impact” players.
The league remains confident that the HIP rule is a better alternative to raising the salary cap, which Berman has long repeated is the key to maintaining parity.
“We have raised the salary cap. We quadrupled the salary cap in the last three years,” Berman said on Wednesday. “If we want to … attract and retain top talent, we believe that having a targeted, tailored mechanism to do that will allow us to better achieve and more quickly achieve that objective.”
The NWSLPA has said the NWSL is violating federal labor laws when implementing the HIP rule, and, in January, called for the mechanism to be revoked.
“We’ve taken a very reasonable position of asking the league to engage in collective bargaining in good faith,” NWSLPA executive director Meghann Burke told The Athletic in January. “We’ve made a proposal, which is, rather than adopt these bizarre criteria, simply increase the team salary cap by the amount you’ve already agreed teams can spend, simply add a million dollars to the salary cap. That is something they could do at any point in time.”
The salary cap, as outlined in the current collective bargaining agreement, features a base of $3.5 million in 2026, with that figure rising to $3.7 million after revenue-sharing adjustments. By 2030, the base will jump to $5.1 million.
As with all salary caps, the idea is to maintain a sense of financial fairness among teams. Incremental increases to the salary cap are baked into the existing CBA. The league is also able to raise the salary cap in any year at “its discretion, after consultation with the NWSLPA.”
However, the NWSL competes in a global market, and teams around the world can offer players significantly more money because they don’t face the same restrictions.
For now, the HIP rule is the league’s answer to this dilemma, though the NWSLPA continues to oppose it, saying it must be collectively bargained. Both of the union’s grievances remain pending as of Thursday and could head to arbitration if they remain unresolved.
On Wednesday, in a release that shared updates to its competition guidelines and rules, the league said it would “regularly review and update” the criteria for HIP players.
“The evolution of the HIP rule is going to be dependent on how it’s utilized,” Berman said. “We will evaluate its effectiveness to make sure that it is helping to achieve its intended objective, and its intended objective is to put us in a position to attract and retain elite talent.”
The league said it plans to do an “after-action review” following the primary transfer window, which closes on Monday, and again following the next transfer window in the summer. This, Berman said, will help “determine how and when we may want to consider any modifications” to the HIP rule.
The salary cap will remain a lingering equation for the NWSL, especially as the league continues to grow exponentially through expansion fees, commercial partnerships and a new media rights deal in two years.
Another consideration the league must make when considering its place on the global stage is the competition calendar.
The league confirmed it is “analyzing” the possibility of a change to the European season schedule, which runs from September to May. This would align the league’s transfer windows with many of the world’s top leagues and avoid putting the NWSL Championship up against major games in other American sports like college football in November. Major League Soccer recently announced it was flipping its calendar for those exact reasons.
The calendar is “one of the more important strategic decisions that any professional league has to analyze when we think about how we have to live in a very delicate and symbiotic relationship between the professional leagues and the national teams,” Berman said. “The current (FIFA) women’s international match calendar runs through 2029 and so we’re taking that into account as we think about what our future state looks like.
“No decision has been made about what we might do. We’ll continue to consider it with our board.”
The NWSL’s vision to become the best league in the world will be the theme for 2026, with this season the first step in a long-term strategy to best position itself in the run-up to the United States co-hosting the women’s World Cup in 2031.
In previous years, the league’s growth has been guided heavily by expansion. That won’t change, at least not anytime soon.
Denver Summit FC and Boston Legacy bring the number of clubs in the NWSL to 16, with a 17th club debuting in Atlanta in 2028. Berman said the league will likely announce an 18th team this year, which will debut alongside Atlanta.
Atlanta was the first expansion franchise awarded after the NWSL moved to a rolling expansion model, meaning new clubs can be announced at any time as the league explores its options year-round. The league will have a new media rights deal in 2028 with 18 teams in place, signaling its desire to leverage a larger footprint during potential negotiations with its broadcast partners.
Among the group of interested cities, Haslam Sports Group (HSG) — which owns the NFL’s Cleveland Browns and the Columbus Crew in MLS and co-owns the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks — maintains a strong interest in bringing a team to Columbus, Ohio.
The salary cap, expansion, and the calendar are all considerations as the league works to position itself among the best in the world. And with the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup a year away, this moment of inflection could be hitting an acceleration boost soon.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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