Season Preview Series: A League in Hibernation
This winter, the NWSL stayed big on ambition at the ownership level -- but front offices rarely felt competitive
At the end of this week, the Thorns get their regular season started! Leading up to the Saturday morning season opener at Kansas City, Thorn Town is previewing the season with a post every day this week. We start with a wide lens, and look at the state of the NWSL as a whole.
In the few short years since the height of the pandemic, the NWSL has boosted itself upward into a completely different stratosphere of the sports world. This winter, the league announced a 16th team would be beginning play in 2026, out of Denver. The expansion fee that the Denver ownership paid — this is a pile of money paid to the established owners just to be allowed into the NWSL doors — was $110 million dollars. If we go all the way back to three or four years ago, when Angel City FC and San Diego Wave joined the league, each franchise needed to pay an expansion fee of $2 million dollars.
Yes: the growth is literally exponential.
Despite all of that massive growth on the league-wide level, we are ending an offseason that was characterized by being almost completely quiet. Most teams only made marginal changes to their roster. No team was clearly ambitious with their offseason, forcing their way into the championship conversation from a lower spot in the 2024 standings. Out of The Guardian’s Top 100 Players of 2024, none of them were brought into the NWSL from other leagues, and two players departed the NWSL for abroad (Naomi Girma from San Diego and Tarciane from Houston).
And: I have no idea why.
So why not push for it?
It gets even more puzzling why the league was so quiet after you look closer at the NWSL salary cap. (The salary cap is the league-created annual spending limit on each team’s total player salaries.)
Like most things in the NWSL, the salary cap is flying through its own exponential growth:
2021: $650,000
2022: $1,100,000 | 69.2% growth
2023: $1,375,000 | 25% growth
2024: $2,750,000 | 100% growth
2025: $3,300,000 | 20% growth
In the sports world, even the 20% jump from 2024 to 2025 is gigantic. In the last thirty years, a jump of at least 20% has happened in the NBA twice, and in the NFL once. Even though a salary cap jump this big has become business as usual in the NWSL, it should still be treated as a historically rare opportunity for teams to add talents to their rosters. But: that didn’t happen.
Out of all the major sports leagues in America, the NWSL is the only one that prevents the exact amount of each player’s salary from getting out into the public. (Although there are a small handful of exceptions.) This means we can’t, from the outside, get a handle on if teams are budgeting their rosters wisely or not, like we can with other sports. So, the reasons for the NWSL’s malaise will remain mysterious.
Did front offices spend too wildly last offseason, when the salary cap jumped by a staggering 100% — leaving themselves no flexibility even with the 20% jump 2025? Or: is there actually salary cap space around the league that is just sitting there, being un-competitively un-spent?
Sensible Strategies
By my count, there were six teams around the league that I felt had strategically cohesive offseasons. These will not be the six best teams in the league. But, I felt each team responded to their 2024 performance in the best way to help their team in the long-term.
From last place, the Houston Dash grew methodically. They added a list of quietly productive veterans, like Danielle Colaprico, Delanie Sheehan, and Yazmeen Ryan. (It also has to be said, these moves were made by new GM Angela Hucles Mangano, who just came over from Angel City FC. Mangano’s tenure ended in Los Angeles after she was suspended for several months and got Angel City a three-point deduction in the standings because she broke salary cap rules in 2024.)
The San Diego Wave made the painful-but-wise move, after their nightmare 2024, to pivot to a youth movement. The team brought in nine players from outside the NWSL, a proven European winner in coach Jonas Eidevall, and basically did everything they could to wipe the slate clean and start fresh.
The Utah Royals had a dispiriting first half in 2024 — and a shockingly good second half. They were the one team who had strategic reason to hold pat and let their nucleus of young players keep developing together.
The North Carolina Courage were a balanced playoff team last year that directly addressed their biggest need. Bringing in forward Jaedyn Shaw should give a huge boost of goal-scoring firepower.
Washington Spirit and Orlando Pride: The class of the league both kept their championship-caliber cores together, while also adding experienced international talents to fill specific roles.
More passive than aggressive
That leaves eight teams where…I just couldn’t figure out what the thinking was. In most cases, it was inactivity that stopped a cohesive vision from coming together:
Angel City FC and Seattle Reign focused on bringing in or re-signing players over 30 years old, despite needing to build from the bottom of the standings.
All quiet in the middle of the pack. Last year’s 7-9 seeds, Racing Louisville, Chicago Stars, and Bay FC all stayed very still, making nearly a minimum amount of transactions overall. It felt like a lost opportunity for each team to push towards a more meaningful playoff seed.
Gotham FC is still a strong playoff team, but they had to say goodbye to a parade of contributing players. This indicates the team may have pushed too many chips in on the 2024 season, and had to sacrifice depth to stay salary cap-compliant now that it’s 2025.
The Kansas City Current signed many smart extensions to keep their explosive offensive group together for the long-term. However, the team did not sign a new defender with veteran experience, leaving their (relative) weakness from 2024 unaddressed.
And the Thorns?
The Thorns actually do deserve their own category here — and not just because this is Thorn Town. Let’s just say that not every team learns, days before the season, that they will be without four rotational players for the entire year. (Three players due to injury, and one player — annual MVP candidate Sophia Wilson — due to maternity leave.) In the face of this news, the Portland roster will still be under construction to some degree during the first few weeks of the regular season, up to the March 24th deadline for International Player Transfers.
Prior to that, though, you would have to put the Thorns in the “More Passive Than Aggressive” category. The team let the majority of the offseason go by before installing a General Manager. And, the team continued with their same strategy from last offseason, bringing in players who have intriguing potential — but with short, or blank, NWSL résumés. Not that any of the moves were necessarily bad moves. More like: these moves come from a mindset that is better-suited to a rebuilding team. The Thorns are not rebuilding, though — their chips are already all the way in. It’s never felt like the team had a ton of urgency when it came to Sophia Wilson’s upcoming 2026 player option. But, that’s one of the most urgent contract situations in league history.
This is why “growing pains” is a phrase
The excellent book The National Team by Caitlin Murray describes how the NWSL initially began play, in 2013, with the motivation to give USWNT players reps in-between international games. That era has been made ancient history in a hurry. We’re honestly even past NWSL 2.0 and well into NWSL 3.0 at this point.
In NWSL 1.0, it might have felt like a victory to roll from season to season with franchises staying in business, and players staying paid. In NWSL 2.0, victories might have felt like getting games on national television, or seeing new teams develop strong fanbases. Here in 3.0, the NWSL world can, for better or worse, take those past victories for granted.
And now a new set of challenges is presenting itself to the league — the pressure and privilege, if you will, of all that growth. As more and more new fans come to investigate the NWSL, these are people who are likely also fans of more-established teams and leagues in American sports. And they’re going to want to see the front office of their local NWSL team act like America’s billion-dollar franchises: conducting transactions quickly, strategically, competitively, and with a clear plan from every stage of the competitive cycle.