State of the League: Before the NWSL can take on the world, it must find its place in the U.S.

The narrative around women’s sports has changed drastically over the past few years, expedited by the current political climate in the United States.

Right now, the WNBA is out in front in a way the NWSL — on the cusp of its 2025 season — can only dream of.

The NWSL doesn’t have a Caitlin Clark-esque marquee player, but Clark has served as an amplifying factor more than a foundational one. It’s also a transitional time for the NWSL when it comes to minting new stars that can transcend the league or make the cover of Time or Vogue. The leading candidate, Trinity Rodman, discussed her desire to play in Europe at some point in the same week she graced a Times Square billboard for the league.

The NWSL has always talked a big game about being the best in the world. In 2025, it wouldn’t hurt to take a step back and figure out how to truly matter in the U.S. first — though such an undertaking isn’t guaranteed to be fully under its control.

“We’ve talked about becoming really laser focused on our key initiatives. Everything that we’re doing right now from a business perspective is focused on cultural relevance and storytelling,” NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman said in her state of the league presser ahead of the Challenge Cup.

In theory, all of this makes sense — the part that worries me is that the scaffolding is being built upon brands rather than the league itself. Berman highlighted two new deals with e.l.f. Cosmetics and Alex Cooper’s Unwell, “both of whom are exactly within the strategy that we deployed for the offseason to really get after our next generation of fans.”

She pointed to “share of mind, share of wallet and cultural relevance” as vehicles for the league’s strategic plan in a meeting with on Tuesday, saying the league has key results they monitor to see how much they are moving the needle. The NWSL measures awareness (via brand tracker surveys both aided with leading questions and unaided), how marketable their players are, how the league resonates from a public relations perspective and sentiment on social media.

While the NWSL feels bigger and more successful than it’s ever been, it’s hard not to compare it to a league like the WNBA — and some of those tensions still come out of the NWSL working in real time how it communicates its ultimate goals beyond being the best in the world.

This offseason was also full of mixed vibes

Worries over player departures, especially center back Naomi Girma, dominated the conversation, but the league also launched its 16th expansion team in Denver with a whopping $110 million fee and plenty of buzz. They released a four-part series, “For the Win,” going behind the scenes of last year’s playoffs with media rights partner Prime Video. The league also settled with three attorneys general regarding past systemic failures to protect its players from abuse, even as it grapples with the present — most recently launching a formal review into Bay FC’s coaching staff.

There’s no such thing as a quiet offseason in the NWSL, but that’s a lot on top of all the usual free agency moves and trades — and the first winter where teams had to sign young players without the mechanism of the NWSL college draft.

Despite the activity, it feels like the NWSL is heading into a new season with a little less momentum than usual — not ideal for a league that wants to be a driver of culture.

Before the NWSL can achieve that cultural relevance though, they need eyeballs. Last year, they failed to crack the one million viewer threshold for a game. The championship got close, peaking at 1.1 million viewers up against college football, but averaged 967,900; 1.5 million watched the Skills Challenge, a number helped tremendously by NFL game lead-ins. For comparison, the WNBA regular season averaged 1.2 million viewers across ESPN platforms, up 170 percent from the previous year. Their most-watched game, Indiana Fever at Chicago Sky on June 23, averaged 2.3 million viewers.

This has to be the year the NWSL reaches that 1 million view milestone, and TV numbers for regular season games need to be up, too. This year, much like last year, feels like the NWSL is getting closer to an answer to those big-picture questions.

With the addition of two teams next year, the league has a decent runway to 2026, when it will need to figure out how to insert itself into the conversation of the men’s World Cup on home soil or provide audiences with counter-programming.

How the economic outlook could affect the league

The NWSL’s growth and destiny as a professional league are also not immune from the current state of affairs in the United States, especially if a potential economic recession comes into play.

According to a recent report by The New York Times, strategists at Goldman Sachs have increased the chances of a U.S. recession to 20 percent in the next year, and any slowdown here could then raise the risks of a global recession, according to analysts at JPMorgan Chase.

Every domestic professional league is likely watching the economic outlook closely, but historically, all three professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. have had to contend with the impacts of a recession. The NWSL has survived a short but steep recession before, getting through the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but this is now another time of uncertainty and volatility. While there were many contributing factors to the demise of its predecessor, the WPS, the league was constantly on unsteady footing financially, with an average salary of $25,000 in its final year.

Continued inflation or any meaningful signs of a recession could impact everything from ongoing and potential brand partnerships to fan purchasing power. During the Great Recession in 2009, the WNBA even had to retract a team, the Houston Comets.

Women’s sports, for better or worse, have always been viewed as a more affordable option for a fan compared to men’s sports. While that may still technically be the case, as premium options become the norm and demand rises, the NWSL will have to ask itself who’s attending their games and what the get-in price is. Will it be sustainable in the long run for younger fans — especially the Gen-Z audience the NWSL so desperately craves?

So far, at least, there haven’t been many signs of economic activity negatively impacting the NWSL. For instance, the Washington Spirit just opened up the upper deck due to demand for new season ticket holders, despite the impact of widespread federal worker layoffs across the metro area led by the Department of Government Efficiency.

But couple that volatility with a presidential administration that has made the “protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports” a focus, and the NWSL — and any other women’s professional league — could suddenly find itself in a very precarious place.

Around the NWSL ecosystem, the conversation has already started. Last week, Canada international Vanessa Gilles, on loan to Lyon from Angel City, said she was working on extending her time in France.

“I don’t see myself going back to the United States with the current geopolitical situation,” she told Le Progrès. “It’s a bit complicated to go back there as a Canadian.”

It’s an entirely reasonable position, but not one the NWSL has a decent answer to yet.

There’s a bit of a pretense of a business-as-usual approach across the league, but that sentiment could crumble at any moment with little warning.

Sports are an escape, but they cannot be completely divorced from society. The NWSL wants its spotlight in 2025, but that won’t come without the increasing creep of U.S. politics into the league and women’s sports as a whole.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Portland Thorns, Chicago Red Stars, Houston Dash, North Carolina Courage, OL Reign, Orlando Pride, Gotham FC, Kansas City Current, Washington Spirit, Angel City, Racing Louisville FC, San Diego Wave, Utah Royals FC, Bay FC, Soccer, NWSL

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