Jeff Kassouf
May 1, 2025, 08:58 AM ET
The NWSL has positioned itself as the most competitive women's soccer league in the world, pointing to its unpredictable results on a weekly basis. This has been the league's chief value proposition since its inception in late 2012: chaos is entertaining. Commissioner Jessica Berman even refers to this parity as one of the league's "superpowers."
But there have been growing fears that such parity might start to wane as the league maintains an aggressive pace in expanding the number of teams. There is not infinite talent available, and eventually there won't be enough top-tier players and coaches to go around. Indeed, in ESPN's NWSL GM survey last year, almost all GMs cited parity as the league's best selling point, but several worried about talent retention and over-expansion.
For now, such fear have not come to pass. The past two weeks of wild NWSL results illustrated exactly what Berman and the GMs covet -- and what the NWSL's competitors in the UEFA Women's Champions League and England's Women's Super League still can't consistently match.
Some big clubs in England, France and elsewhere are spending more than their NWSL counterparts and are earning prestigious reputations for it -- but judging by on-field competitiveness, is it the NWSL that the rest of the world should look to as the global gold standard?
On Saturday, the NWSL's last-place, previously winless team scored twice in the dying minutes to hand the NWSL Shield favorite its first loss of the season. As Kansas City Current head coach Vlatko Andonovski put it after the loss to the North Carolina Courage: "This is just another example of how good this league is, and how you literally cannot relax even for a second regardless of who you're playing."
A day earlier, a perennial underachieving Angel City team dominated the defending champions Orlando Pride for 70 minutes only to give up three unanswered goals and lose. And another title contender in Gotham FC went on a whiplash-inducing three-game road trip in which it won 4-0, lost 4-1, and beat last year's runners-up 3-0 -- all within eight days.
"I talk to players or coaches who have come from Europe who, even this past week, told me that -- without naming names -- that they were watching the Champions League games and there were complete blowouts," Berman told ESPN in early April, after two of the four UEFA Women's Champions League quarterfinals were decided by five or more goals on aggregate.
"And the narrative being that the NWSL is like the Champions League every single week? It's like, no, the Champions League doesn't even get competitive until the very end. We are competitive every single week. And that is a superpower."
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Ashley Sanchez's goal completes stunning comeback for Courage
The Courage score a pair of goals in the final three minutes of play against the Current to secure their first win of the season.
Most of Europe's top leagues are duopolies, and even the UWCL ends similarly each year. Arsenal's surprising second-leg victory over Lyon on Sunday is the only thing that prevented yet another European final between Barcelona and Lyon, the only two teams to win the competition in the past nine years. Barcelona trounced English champions Chelsea, 8-2 on aggregate in the other semifinal.
Few would argue against Barcelona being the best and most talented team in the world -- recent data backs that argument -- but the NWSL differentiates itself by having a greater collection of talent spread throughout the league, which means more consistent competition. Eight of the top 20 teams in the most recent Opta power rankings are from the NWSL -- twice as many as any other league.
Spain has a two-team race at the top, with Barcelona aiming to hold off Real Madrid for a sixth straight league title. Lyon just won its 18th French league title in the past 19 years and Chelsea on Wednesday clinched a sixth straight crown in England. Last weekend, Bayern Munich clinched a third straight Bundesliga title in Germany, where only two teams have been champions since 2013.
The NWSL views such repetitive results as both boring and bad business. Owners want to invest in having a shot at winning. Players want to develop against better competition. Coaches want to have their ideas challenged.
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Aubrey Kingsbury makes a great save
Aubrey Kingsbury makes a great save
NJ/NY Gotham FC forward Esther González, who won the 2023 World Cup with Spain and leads the NWSL this season with seven goals, prominently made the claim two years ago that every NWSL game is like playing in the Champions League, or against Barcelona. That is why she left Real Madrid for the NWSL.
Washington Spirit head coach Jonatan Giráldez left his post at Barcelona last year to come to the NWSL. Parity matters not just to fans seeking entertainment, but to coaches and players too: it is the NWSL's secret sauce.
Nothing -- including the NWSL's longstanding parity -- lasts forever
A thrilling start to the 2025 season makes it clear the NWSL's claim to parity is not going away -- at least not yet. But in the long term, the threat of the NWSL becoming a less exciting league remains, and maintaining competitive balance is arguably the NWSL's greatest challenge going forward.
The NWSL has aggressively expanded in recent years, growing from 10 teams in 2021 to what is expected to be 16 teams next season. Expansion is good for business, but it has spread out both the player pool and coaching talent.
Last year's results showed the league might be flirting with its kryptonite. Forty points separated first from last place, the largest margin in NWSL history. The top four teams -- the Orlando Pride, Washington Spirit, Kansas City Current and NJ/NY Gotham FC -- were also in a class of their own: There was a 16-point gap to fifth place.
Those same four teams sit at the top of the NWSL after six weeks. It is a small sample size, but data projections suggest that the same four teams will be the frontrunners again.
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Caiya Hanks' delightful finish makes it 2-1 Thorns
Caiya Hanks' delightful finish makes it 2-1 Thorns
Their success is no coincidence. All four have made smart, ambitious coaching and sporting director hires that have in turn led to the arrival of some of the league's best players, like Orlando forward Barbra Banda and Kansas City forward Temwa Chawinga, who jockeyed for the Golden Boot last year.
Likewise, some struggling teams still don't look competitive. The Chicago Red Stars, who have been without U.S. women's national team forward Mallory Swanson due to an excused absence, sit in last place with only 3 points from six games. They opened the season by losing 6-0 to Orlando, the defending champion, in a game that was never in doubt -- exactly the type of result that NWSL executives hope to mitigate from becoming the norm.
The NWSL also has a new collective bargaining agreement that, starting this season, eliminated drafts and granted players full free agency. A draft is one of the pillars of parity in American sports: A last-place team gets the first pick to acquire a top young player and rebuild. With the draft gone, the rich could get richer by signing the next wave of stars who want to be in the best environments.
Expansion will also continue -- and it will stretch resources, too. Berman said she could see the NWSL growing to the size of the NFL, which has 32 teams. But many executives throughout the league, including some owners, have voiced concerns about over-expansion to ESPN, including in last year's anonymous general manager's survey.
All these developments point to legitimate evidence for concern that the NWSL's prized competitiveness is under threat. Berman rebuts that the CBA mandates minimum spending by each team. Every team is also operating under the same salary cap.
Berman also argues that the developing separation of teams is an evolution of the NWSL's parity.
"I think we could all acknowledge that the parity that exists today is different from the parity that existed two seasons ago," she said. "And I don't think the fact that it's evolved or changed means that the league doesn't have competitive balance. It's just manifesting in different ways."
She pointed to the four teams vying for the NWSL Shield last year in their own trophy race, and the rest of the league remaining mathematically eligible for the other four playoff spots for most of the season. Playoff games were also mostly tense affairs, she said.
That is true, but the playoffs were also chalk: The higher seed won all seven playoff games last season.
So, is the gap widening between the best NWSL teams and the less ambitious clubs? Or was last year an anomaly, and recent results are a regression to the mean? And would it really be a bad thing if a few NWSL teams perennially dominated?
The NWSL is currently in search of those answers. The league knows its strengths -- and what it does not want to become.
