The NWSL Is Picking Players Over Parity. How Will Fans Respond?

Player drafts in pro sports have been a particularly U.S.-based concept centered on promoting on-field competitive balance. The NWSL is abandoning that—in dramatic fashion—in service of much bigger aspirations.  

The league’s newly signed, four-year extension of its labor agreement with the NWSL Players Association eliminates both the draft and player trades without consent, and arrived two years before the expiration of the current term. In doing so, the NWSL became the largest U.S. pro sports league to eliminate its draft. But the decision to end the draft brings the league much closer with the rest of pro soccer around the world, and is aimed in part in better positioning the NWSL as the location of choice for the very best women’s player talent.

“Given our vision to be the best league in the world, we determined that this was the right time to align with global standards and achieve long-term labor peace,” said NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman. “This CBA gives us agency over our business, and gives the players agency over their careers.”

The move also positions the NWSL in line with FIFA’s “Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players,” and is premised fundamentally on granting unrestricted free agency to all players. 

The NWSL even received plaudits from those outside the sports world, including the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the U.S. Players unions in several major U.S. pro sports, including the NWSLPA, are part of an AFL-CIO sports council.

“This game-changing collective bargaining agreement sets the gold standard for all professional sports and affirms what workers in unions can accomplish when we stand together,” said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler. 

Downside Risk?

As the NWSL more closely resembles other international pro soccer leagues, it also separates itself from most major U.S. properties, including Major League Soccer. The draft is seen as such an important tool to promote competitive balance that MLB in its most recent labor agreement joined the NBA and NHL in introducing a draft lottery to discourage tanking. It also prohibited teams receiving revenue-sharing funds from gaining a lottery pick in more than two straight years.

The NBA, meanwhile, continues to wrestle with its own long-standing issues around alleged tanking for better draft picks, even with a decades-old lottery.

The extensive focus on competitive balance, and draft rules within that, is directly tied to a belief and underlying business model that overall fan interest and revenue are greatly boosted when every team has a regular shot at winning a title. MLB, in particular, has aggressively marketed the fact it has not had a repeat World Series winner since 2000—a streak almost certain to continue this year.

Conversely, men’s soccer leagues in Europe have been rife with dominance by just a handful of economically powerful clubs. Manchester City has claimed the last four Premier League titles, as well as six of the last seven, and only six clubs overall have won that league in the last 30 years. In the same time frame, just five clubs have topped LaLiga, and only six have done so in Serie A. Paris Saint-Germain has won Ligue 1 in 10 of the last 12 seasons.

As the NWSLPA called the draft “an antiquated model that treats people as property,” the NWSL, amid its ongoing and meteoric growth, will need to guard against a similar rise of superteams.