In new bargaining agreement, women’s soccer abandons draft

TThe National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and its players’ association reached a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in July, the terms of which were made public Thursday, in a major step forward for player empowerment, particularly for female athletes. Gains for players in the U.S.-based NWSL include guaranteed contracts, no trades without a player’s consent, more charter flights, income sharing and expanded parental leave and childcare benefits.

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

The NWSL has eliminated its draft. Teams will no longer select college players on a pre-set date or claim foreign players through the “discovery” rule. Players themselves will be able to negotiate with teams of their choice, much as they do in other men’s and women’s soccer leagues around the world.

Teams will be limited by a strict salary cap that will prevent wealthy owners from buying out all the top talent, in an effort to maintain parity within the league. That base salary cap, however, will increase each year through 2030, from $3.3 million in 2025 to $5.1 million in 2030, with the ability to add additional media and sponsorship revenue to that amount. The minimum salary will gradually increase from $48,500 in 2025 to $82,500 in 2030.

Learn more: U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Claims Victory at Paris Olympics with Thrilling Gold Medal

“This is, in Joe Biden’s words, a massive deal,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told TIME between meetings at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “Women, especially those working in football, have been fighting for years to be recognized, paid and protected as they deserve. And this contract recognizes that they have a voice and control over their workplace.”

“We’re seeing women rise up in every arena, including running for president of the United States,” Shuler says. “It’s a reflection of what’s happening across the country: women are rising up and demanding more.”

The collective bargaining process began in late August 2023, when the NWSL sent a letter to the union asking if the players would be interested in a midterm negotiation (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), said the union was fully prepared to send a similar letter to the league. The league beat them to it.

The 2023 World Cup was an opportunity to revise the deal. The United States, Canada and Brazil, the three countries with the most NWSL players, were all eliminated from the tournament early on. The world wasn’t just catching up to traditional soccer stalwarts like the United States. Other countries were surpassing them.

The NWSL could no longer rely on being a traditional hotbed of women’s soccer to build its reputation. If the NWSL wanted to continue attracting the best talent on the planet, it needed to offer more favorable benefits to players, such as higher salaries, while allowing players to join the league with teams of their choice.

“Some of the things we’ve been saying for years have become undeniably true,” Burke says. “People who might have had a hard time accepting global rules have come to understand that we’re competing in a global marketplace. This is the world’s game, and the world is bigger than us.”

The players were all thrilled to get out 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 following year, she was selected by the Washington Spirit in the 2013 NWSL Supplemental Draft. Both experiences created anxiety for Huster.

“I can tell you, having been in a lot of drafts, it’s tough,” Huster said. “Not knowing where you’re going to end up, what’s going to be needed, if you’re going to have family around, if it’s going to be a place where you’re going to get playing time? All of those things are different aspects of a player’s life that have to be in the player’s hands.”

Union officials say foreign players don’t understand the need for the draft. It seems so unfair to them that their rights are limited to one franchise. “As the game has evolved, our players have begun to understand that the draft is really a buying and selling of human beings,” Burke said. “Maybe we should have a problem with that. It’s not something to be happy about.”

On the business side, drafts have proven to be effective revenue generators for some sports, boosting the bottom lines of owners and players. The NFL draft, for example, is now a three-day audience spectacle that brings in advertising revenue, boosts the economies of the cities where it is held and, perhaps most importantly, keeps fans interested in the offseason, which translates into bigger viewership for games. The NBA draft is second in terms of cachet.

NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman considered the possibility of one day turning the NWSL Draft into a valuable asset. But she decided — quite rightly, most likely — that giving players more flexibility was worth more than keeping the asset. She agreed with the players that it should be eliminated.

Just because other American men’s leagues have held drafts for nearly a century doesn’t mean that emerging women’s leagues should follow suit. And leagues like the NFL and NBA—and at this point, the WNBA—benefit from a college sports machine that produces marketable stars upon arrival, and from a surge in viewership and interest in the drafts. Caleb Williams and Caitlin Clark, the top picks in the 2024 NFL and NBA drafts, were already household names to sports fans. Women’s college football stars aren’t as household names, and they’re unlikely to be any time soon, given the level of media investment and sponsorship that’s pouring into the NCAA’s revenue-generating sports.

“There’s no denying that the college football and basketball industry is huge,” Berman tells TIME. “The average American knows who these players are before they even get to the big event of the NFL draft. And that was true not just five or 10 years ago, but 15 or 25 years ago. So from a business perspective and a risk-reward perspective, it’s worth thinking about building a crown jewel on top of a mansion that’s already been built for you. We don’t have a mansion. We’re not only facing global headwinds, but we’re building a crown on top of something that doesn’t exist. It makes the math a lot easier.”

Additionally, without a draft, the NWSL has the opportunity to create signing windows and scouting clusters that have a similar impact to the draft: keeping fans engaged, but perhaps for even longer stretches of the offseason.

“When you go into collective bargaining in major professional sports leagues, both sides, especially the owners, are trying to play the heavyweight role and not necessarily looking for win-win solutions as much as they should,” says Marc Edelman, a law professor at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business. “With Jessica at the helm of the NWSL, it seems like the players have realized that allowing players, who are essentially the work force of the league, to have a greater say in choosing their home market is a huge benefit, not only for the players themselves, but also for the league, because it promotes stability for teams. It also promotes relationships between fans and individual players, and frankly, it may even allow some players to continue to compete in the league longer.”

Will other leagues follow suit? Should they? With the NFL and NBA drafts so ingrained in the business models of those two leagues, it seems unlikely that they would abandon the event. Baseball and hockey could consider it, though, imposing spending caps to prevent, say, the New York Yankees from scooping up all the amateur talent.

Berman says his intention is not to force other American leagues to abandon drafts. “For me, the takeaway from all of this is that I’m proud of our league, our owners and our players for testing hypotheses that have proven true in other contexts and giving us permission to be innovative and have a growth mindset,” Berman says.

But if other commissioners want to think seriously about the project’s relevance, they can move forward. “Internally, ask yourself that question,” Berman says. “You might come to the conclusion that the project is still fulfilling its purpose. And that’s an important exercise. A decision to maintain the status quo is still a decision, right? You just have to make that decision intentionally. As leaders, we have to force ourselves to do that, to not default to doing the same thing we’ve always done because we’ve always done it that way. That’s what we’re passionate about.”