The Empty Pot

The Thorns are caught procrastinating on their offseason plans again, as franchise pillar Sam Coffey departs for life in Europe

A month ago, out of the doldrums of winter, Portland was greeted with the pleasant surprise that Sophia Wilson chose to return to the Thorns for 2026. And now, again with no warning, just as big of a surprise, this time a piece of devastating news: Sam Coffey has transferred to Manchester City in England.

Immediately from her 2022 rookie year, Coffey arrived at once with incredible consistency, tenacity, poise. She brought the team-lifting impact of a ten-year veteran — this is both on the field, with her metronomically correct decision making, and off the field, where she was a no-doubt team captain for the 2025 season, at age 26.

These are all of the ingredients you need to create one type of ultra-rare and treasured career in sports: the one-team athlete. You’ve got soccer’s own Ryan Giggs and Paolo Maldini, to American sports icons like Kobe Bryant, Lou Gehrig, Lisa Leslie, or Ray Lewis. I had been walking around, assuming — and without realizing I was assuming it — that Coffey would eventually join this lofty pantheon. Something about her early-bird, Type A personality, combined with Portland’s vicious grandstand of the tattooed, went together like peanut butter and jelly. Well, shoot: this is a pretty big thing to assume. The list of great athletes who end up changing teams is a way longer list — from Babe Ruth up to Breanna Stewart and LeBron James.

In the end, it’s 90 games, five goals, and a monster 17 assists for Coffey’s four-year tenure with the Thorns. The 17 assists puts Coffey at third-most in team history, trailing only Meghan Klingenberg and Tobin Heath, and tied with Christine Sinclair. But of course with Coffey everything went way past the statistics, and was all about her intangible leadership and connectivity deep in the midfield — a true soccer connoisseur’s soccer player.

So what does it all, like, mean?

Coffey’s departure for England prompted Abigail Segel of The Guardian to take a victory lap on behalf of Europe, over the vanquished NWSL. Segel points out the cold, inarguable statistic that only four of the 11 players who started for America in the 2024 Olympic gold medal match still play in the NWSL. Segel lets off a pointed shot at the convoluted set of priorities coming from the NWSL league office:

Essentially, NWSL clubs who may actually want to pursue Chelsea- and Barcelona-like ambitions are hampered by being in a league that at once wants to have a hand in everything and responsibility for nothing.

Well hey, now I feel like an older brother defending my younger sibling from the school bully. Yeah, the NWSL league office does make self-inflicted errors all the time — but only us Americans understand why they make those errors, and just how bad they are.

For one thing: this is actually not at all about player salaries, or the NWSL’s overly dramatic fiddling with the salary cap this offseason. What this is actually about is: the whimsy and romance of a walkable European city.

There’s something that just feels right about a soccer player being in that type of environment, and not the endless driving of American sprawl. While Coffey’s new home in Manchester has become 21st-century soccer capital, this is also an industrial city that isn’t exactly Mykonos or the Balearic Islands. And, hey, there’s no faulting Coffey here — I’d probably look to make the exact same move with my career, even though NWSL teams draw dramatically bigger attendance than every team (except for Arsenal) in soccer-mad Europe. So, yes, the NWSL makes mistakes all the time. This isn’t one of them.

When’s the project due? Yeah, I got time

When I last chatted about the Thorns’ firing of Rob Gale, I left off with the sentiment that I wouldn’t mind if the team took quite a bit of time to find their next head coach. And I meant it. But, maybe I should have been more clear: I was imagining a three- or four-week coaching search counting as “really long.”

We’re now a full two months away from Gale’s firing, with absolutely no follow-up news. The Thorns themselves have all re-assembled, for a ten-day preseason training camp in Santa Barbara. They’re back at work! But: what are they working on? Who is leading them? It’s probably last year’s assistant, Sarah Lowdon, who remains listed on the team website as Interim Head Coach. Is it even possible for this trip to be a productive use of everyone’s time without an actual vision and strategy for how the team should play?

It feels suddenly very tiring to see yet another example of the NWSL, on both the league level and the team level, act in a way that is completely alien to how every other major American sport would act. A two-month absence at head coach in any other league would be met with tidal waves of criticism. The Thorns were already pushing their luck last year by taking the same most-of-the-offseason to hire General Manager Jeff Agoos. While Agoos had one of the best years of any NWSL GM in 2025, the Thorns were still undone by a lack of depth in the postseason. Cramming your entire offseason into a few short days and weeks is nobody’s idea of a recipe to build depth.

Instead of the Thorns learning their lesson, the same idea has now bled into this coaching search: taking this long is nobody’s idea of a great process. At this point, the hiring will be coming so late, it’s created a gigantic time crunch that could have a huge negative impact on whoever ends up leading the sideline on Game #1.

Roster rotation

Speaking of having an alien process — wow, Thorn Town is on one today — it also hasn’t felt great to see the Thorns collect huge transfer fees for the departures of Hina Sugita and Sam Coffey — and not replenish the roster with established veterans of similar quality. Sophia Smith is receiving a justified pay raise heading into the 2026 season, and it’s substantial enough to impact the team’s ability to make big signings. Still, we in the public have no way of knowing how the Thorns are actually managing their $3.5 million in cap space. And the burning question here would be: how close is the team to spending 100% of that available budget? (Hint: any unused money is potential wasted.)

This winter, the Thorns have added three players to the roster, all of them rookies coming out of NCAA play. I feel of two minds here: you don’t want to simply replace players of Sugita’s and Coffey’s quality with rookies. However, the Thorns had such a brilliant time scouting the 2025 NCAA field, with a rookie class of Caiya Hanks, Jayden Perry, and Pietra Tordin, I can’t help but feel a sense of optimism with these players as well. There is also a throughline here: the team focused on getting younger throughout the 2025 season, and are staying consistent with that mindset.

With the draft of NCAA players now abolished, last year I felt like I was missing a tool that projected how incoming rookies would have been ranked, if there was a draft. The website American Soccer Analysis went a long way to solving that this year, with the absolute monster NCAA Women’s Soccer Scouting Dashboard. This thing is giving you some pretty monster insights on each prospect’s playing style. However, given the incredibly low ranking each of these three players are given in the overall class, combined with the scouting acumen of the Thorns’ front office, I feel like that part of the tool doesn’t totally match with the projections in NWSL front offices.

Here’s what we can learn from the stats about these three rookies, in the order they were signed by the team:

Shea Harvey | #15 | M | Stanford

Harvey completed three seasons at Stanford, but is still only 20 years old. At first glance, Harvey looks like a close stylistic replacement for Coffey in the midfield, with a profile based on short, accurate passes. Harvey received three years of a guaranteed contract — the biggest financial commitment made to any of these players.

Maddie Padelski | #11 | F | University of Alabama

Padelski has been screaming into her professional career at warp speed: first, she joined Alabama after only three high school years. Now, this jump to the NWSL comes after just two years with the Crimson Tide. Add it all up and Padelski is still only 18 years old, the next ultra-young player who the Thorns are projecting to have a big future. Padelski has a bit of an imbalanced profile: much like Pietra Tordin, she is not a connecter or a passer, but an aggressive finisher. Padelski is signed for the 2026 and 2027 seasons.

Carolyn Calzada | #4 | D | Notre Dame

While I can’t quite figure out if Calzada is a central or outside defender, she does have the unique combination of excelling in both: winning aerial duels, and initiating offensive creation. At 5’9”, Calzada is the same height as Jayden Perry, as former pro defender Jeff Agoos continues to build a physically imposing back line. Calzada’s contract is guaranteed for both 2026 and 2027, and the player and team will negotiate on a mutual option for 2028.

We’ll finish off with a couple of other moves to fill out the roster:

• After a lost season with the Thorns in 2025, Daiane has been temporarily transferred to the Mexican team C.F. Monterrey. That transfer is to to expire in mid-July, after the end of both the Mexican season, and the month-long NWSL break for the 2026 Men’s World Cup. So, we could see Daiane back at mid-season. A reunion sure does feel unlikely, though. The Thorns signed Daiane last winter before Agoos was installed as GM, and it’s felt like an unfortunate mis-fit between player and team the entire time.

• Former Thorn Nicole Payne has signed with the Orlando Pride for a one-year deal. Payne will be looking to come back from the ACL injury that wiped out her 2025 season.

• This is going a bit far back now, but former Thorn Izzy D’Aquila has found a home in Sweden. Last year, D’Aquila scored eight goals in just 13 games for her team Malmö, who recently re-signed her.

• There has been a very bizarre lack of news about midfielder Laila Harbert. All signs point to Harbert not being a Thorn anymore: on paper, her loan with Portland ended with the new year, and she is back with her parent team, Arsenal. Although, Harbert is not playing any games for them, either. Also note that the new rookie, Calzada, has taken Harbert’s uniform number, #4. I had been almost certain the team would work to bring back Harbert this offseason. Now that it hasn’t happened, it feels like there was a lack of a long-term plan with Harbert the entire time. It feels almost rude to have such a young player uproot themselves and move to a new country, all for 62 total minutes of substitute work, across just a few weeks of play.