Why Women’s Soccer Ditched Its Draft

The National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and its players association agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in July—the terms were made public on Thursday— marking a major step forward for player empowerment, especially for female athletes. Wins for players in the U.S.-based NWSL include guaranteed contracts, no trades without a player’s consent, more charter flights, revenue sharing, and expanded parental leave and child-care benefits. 

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And while the deal represents one of the most progressive, pro-player agreements in North American sports history, one particular provision has the potential to shake up other leagues, on both the men’s and women’s sides: This new soccer CBA, for the first time, eliminates what has become a staple of American sports—but a foreign concept in most of the rest of the world. 

The NWSL has abolished its draft. No longer will the teams select college players on a preset date or lay claim to players overseas via “discovery” rule. Players themselves will be able to negotiate with the teams of their choosing, just as they do in other men’s and women’s soccer leagues around the world.

Teams will be constricted by a hard salary cap that prevents wealthy ownership from buying up all the best talent, with the goal of keeping league parity in place. That base salary cap, however, will rise each year through 2030—from $3.3 million in 2025 to $5.1 million in 2030—with the opportunity for additional media and sponsorship revenue to add to that haul. The minimum salary will jump incrementally from $48,500 in 2025 to $82,500 in 2030.

Read More: U.S. Women’s Soccer Scores Victory at the Paris Olympics With Thrilling Gold Medal Win

“This is, in Joe Biden’s words, a big effing deal,” AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler tells TIME between meetings at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “Women, especially women in soccer, have been fighting for years to be recognized, paid and protected the way they deserve to be. And this contract recognizes that they have a voice and control in their workplace.”

“We’re seeing women rising up in every field, including to run for President of the United States,” says Shuler. “This is emblematic of what’s happening all across the country, with women rising up and demanding more.” 

This CBA process got started at the end of August 2023, when the NWSL sent a letter to the union, asking if the players would be interested in engaging in midterm bargaining (the existing agreement, signed in 2022, was set to expire in 2026). Meghann Burke, executive director of the National Women’s Soccer League Players Association (NWSLPA), says the union was all prepped to send a similar letter to the league. The league just beat them to it. 

The impetus to rewrite the agreement was the 2023 World Cup. The United States, Canada, and Brazil—the three countries with the most NWSL players—were all bounced from the tournament early. The world was not only catching up to traditional soccer stalwarts like the United States. Other countries were outperforming them.

The NWSL could no longer just hang its reputation on its home in a traditional women’s soccer hotbed. If the NWSL wanted to still attract the best talent on the planet, it would have to offer more player-friendly benefits like higher wages, while allowing players to enter the league with the teams of their choosing. 

“Some of the things we’ve been saying for years became undeniably true,” says Burke. “Folks that might have had a hard time embracing the global rules came to understand that we do compete in a global market. This is the world’s game, and the world is passing us by.” 

Players were all too happy to rid themselves of the draft. The Western New York Flash selected NWSLPA president Tori Huster in the 2012 Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) draft; after the WPS folded and the NWSL launched the next year, she was selected by the Washington Spirit in the 2013 NWSL supplemental draft. Both experiences created anxiety for Huster. 

“I’ll tell you, from being in multiple drafts, it’s tough,” says Huster. “To not know where you’re going to end up, what’s going to be necessary, will you have family close to you, will it be a place where you get playing time? All of those things are different aspects of a player’s life that need to be in the hands of the player.” 

Union officials say that overseas players can’t wrap their heads around the draft; it seems so  unfair that their rights are conscripted to one franchise. “There’s been an emerging consciousness among our players, as the world’s game has evolved, to understand that the draft is actually the buying and selling of humans,” says Burke. “Maybe we should have a problem with that. This is not something to celebrate.” 

Commercially, however, drafts have proven to be effective revenue generators for certain sports, fattening the bottom lines of both owners and players. The NFL Draft, for example, is now a three-day ratings extravaganza that brings in advertising dollars, boosts economies in the cities in which it’s held, and perhaps most important, keeps fans engaged during the offseason—which pays off in bigger audiences for the actual games. The NBA draft finishes second in cache. 

NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman considered the potential payoff of building the NWSL draft, one day, into a valuable asset. But she felt—correctly, most likely—that giving players additional agency was worth more than holding onto that asset. She agreed with the players that it should go. 

Just because other American men’s leagues have held drafts for nearly a century didn’t mean emerging women’s leagues had to do so too. And leagues like the NFL and the NBA—and at this point, the WNBA—benefit from a college sports machine that produces marketable stars upon arrival, and increased draft viewership and interest. Caleb Williams and Caitlin Clark, the top selections in the 2024 NFL and NBA drafts, respectively, were already household names for sports fans. Women’s college soccer stars are not as well-known, and they’re unlikely to be anytime soon, given the level of media and sponsorship investment that flows into the NCAA revenue sports. 

“Undeniably, the college industry for football, for basketball, is massive,” Berman tells TIME. “The average American knows who those players are before they even get to the massive event that is the NFL draft. And that was true not just five or 10 years ago, but for 15, 25 years ago. And so from a commercial perspective and the risk-reward, it’s worth it to think about building a crown jewel on top of a mansion that has already been built for you. We don’t have a mansion. We not only have to confront headwinds globally, but build a crown on top of something that doesn’t exist. And so the calculus becomes a lot easier.” 

Plus, without a draft, the NWSL has an opportunity to create signing windows and scouting combines that have a similar impact as the draft: keeping fans engaged, but perhaps for even longer periods of the offseason.

“When you get into labor negotiations in the large professional sports leagues, both sides, but especially ownership, tries to play the role of heavy, and doesn’t necessarily look as much as they should for win-win solutions,” says Marc Edelman, a professor of law at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business. “With Jessica at the helm of the NWSL, it seems there was a greater understanding that allowing the players, who in essence are the labor force of the league, to play a greater role in choosing their home markets is a huge benefit, not only for the players themselves, but for the league because it promotes stability on teams. And it also promotes building fan relationships with individual players, and frankly, it may even keep certain players competing in the league for a longer period of time.”  

Will other leagues follow suit? Should they follow suit? With the NFL and NBA drafts so entrenched in the business models of both those leagues, abandoning the event seems unlikely. Baseball and hockey, however, could consider it, with some spending caps in place to prevent, say, the New York Yankees from hoarding all amateur talent. 

Berman says her intention isn’t to compel other U.S.-based leagues to ditch drafts. “The point of this for me, the takeaway, the teachable moment, the learning is that I feel proud of our league and our owners and our players for pressure-testing assumptions that have historically been true in other contexts and giving ourselves permission to be innovative and have a growth mindset,” says Berman. 

But if other commissioners want to think hard about reassessing the appropriateness of the draft, go right ahead. “Internally, ask yourself the question,” says Berman. “You might reach the conclusion that it’s still serving its intended purpose. And that’s an important exercise. A decision to maintain the status quo is still a decision, right? Just make that intentional decision. As leaders, we have to force ourselves to do that, to not default into doing the same thing we’ve always done because we’ve always done it that way. That’s the excitement.”