Moments after players heard their names announced in Friday's 2024 National Women's Soccer League draft, they walked backstage to a large piece of glass they could autograph to create the illusion of signing a camera lens. The idea was to capture their first signature as professionals, a subtle (and sponsored) creative touch on a celebratory day.
The irony is that they had not yet signed any professional contracts.
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In total, 56 players were selected by the NWSL's 14 teams on Friday at the Anaheim Convention Center. Many of them were there in person to cherish the moment under the blue-and-pink lights of the branded ballroom. The joy was palpable from the opening moments of the draft right down to one of the final selections -- who was picked well after midnight on the east coast -- who cried as she walked to the stage. Earlier in the day, NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman reiterated her love for the draft because of its ability to produce those personal moments.
The realities that lie ahead for those prospective professionals are far less glamorous than Friday's pomp and circumstance would suggest. Some rookies will play important roles on their teams in the year ahead. Many will fight for limited minutes on teams they had no agency to choose, while others still will never sign for the teams that called their names and then continue their journeys elsewhere.
How might rookie season playing time vary under different coaches? I picked two #NWSL coaches w/ many drafts under their belt and looked at how their players fare in their first season. Different distributions of draft picks, different distributions of playing time.
— Arielle Dror (@arielle_dror) January 12, 2023
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A draft is a uniquely American concept. Unlike the NFL and NBA, however -- leagues with relative monopolies on their respective sport -- soccer is a global market. As the rest of the women's soccer world professionalizes and more opportunities arise for players, the NWSL draft looks increasingly antiquated.
"The rest of the world embraces free agency and has for almost 30 years," Meghan Burke, NWSL Players Association executive director, told ESPN. "The draft is antithetical to free agency and a deterrent to elite players seeking to pursue their professional soccer careers. With the evolution of women's professional soccer that we have led, it's time for NWSL to evolve with the rest of the world on this issue if we are to remain competitive with the rest of the world."
On Friday, facing the same round of questions as last year about the future of the draft, Berman said little definitively about the event's future. She reiterated the NWSL's goal to be the best league in the world, and that the league would work closely with the NWSLPA "to assess all of the mechanisms and levers that we can pull ... [and] think strategically about shifts that we may want to make in the future that allow for us to compete in more meaningful ways."
The NWSL recently announced that it doubled the number of permissible U-18 signings to four per team. Globally, talented teenage players are commonplace among professional teams. Top European clubs have academy pipelines in place to identify those players and facilitate their movement to the professional level. There is no greater example than what has happened in Spain, a country that dominated Europe and the world at the youth levels over the past decade before winning the 2023 World Cup upon a foundation of many of those players. Barcelona is widely considered the best team in the world.
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Historically, the NWSL has instead worked to keep young players out of the league. Only in recent years, following a 2021 lawsuit filed by then-15-year-old Olivia Moultrie that challenged the league's vague claim of an 18-year-old age limit, has the NWSL changed course. Moultrie is now 18 and a regular in the Portland Thorns' lineup, her successful legal challenge (settled out of court) opening the floodgates to an NWSL youth movement.
Forward Alyssa Thompson was last year's No. 1 draft pick to Angel City FC as an 18-year-old straight out of high school. Thompson made the United States' World Cup roster a few months later and her sister, Giselle (18) just became her Angel City teammate. Forward Jaedyn Shaw joined San Diego Wave FC as a 17-year-old in 2022 and scored in the first three games she played. Last year, the Wave and Washington Spirit each signed a 15-year-old, breaking the record for the league's youngest signing in consecutive months.
First round lookin' so 🔥#NWSLDraft presented by @ally pic.twitter.com/Y5phA882Nm
— National Women's Soccer League (@NWSL) January 13, 2024
Three teenagers were drafted in the first round on Friday -- including 19-year-old Ally Sentnor to Utah Royals FC with the first pick, and 18-year-old Savy King to Bay FC at No. 2 -- which equaled the number of teens drafted in 11 previous drafts.
For many team executives, these trends are further signs of the league's need to modernize its policies around player development. Over a decade into existence, the NWSL does not have any formal or centralized academy structure. Years of board-level discussion about a homegrown rule have not seen one come to fruition. Berman said on Friday that youth development is a priority topic for the league in 2024, noting there have been preliminary discussions about ideas to improve youth development and that U.S. Soccer will be an important partner in any effort to do so.
For the second straight year at the draft, Berman cited the 2022 hiring of NWSL sporting director Tatjana Haenni, a former Swiss international player and women's soccer executive with FIFA, as proof of the league's desire to strike a balance between what works abroad and what can work in the United States.
"We have to recognize that the culture of our country is quite different than Europe," Berman said on Friday. "And we live in a world where it is entrepreneurial interests that control the youth system and we need to find ways to work with the systems that exist as opposed to being a force that is disruptive just for being disruptive."
As several sources across the NWSL acknowledged, abolishing the draft is only one piece of an interdependent ecosystem built as a classically American single-entity model. Without a draft, pre-professional players would be left to negotiate and sign with teams individually like any other player. Such a scenario would require complete free agency in the league, which the NWSL still does not have: the league's first collective bargaining agreement (which runs through 2026) grants free agency to players of a certain tenure in the league.
NWSL teams are at least planning for a world without a draft. Conversations about trades involving future draft picks now include contingencies should the draft not exist, multiple sources confirmed to ESPN. Notably, no 2025 draft picks were traded on Friday -- in the past, teams have made draft-day trades that allowed them to stock up on future picks.
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In addition to the non-U.S. leagues, competition for young players also awaits the NWSL on the home front. The USL Super League plans to launch in August as a competing first-tier league (pending sanctioning by U.S. Soccer). The USL Super League will not use salary caps or drafts -- making it very much the opposite of the NWSL's parity-first model. The USL Super League will also play a fall-to-spring schedule to align with the global calendar, something that's been an ongoing headache for the NWSL.
While the USL Super League is an unproven entity met with skepticism by many within the NWSL, it will allow young players to choose where they play and sign contracts immediately. The alternative for many is leaving their future to the mercy of random selection, and the stress of going through an NWSL preseason without a contract.
Multiple USL Super League teams held invite-only combines last week, ESPN confirmed, in order to scout college talent ahead of the NWSL draft. The USL Super League could be well positioned as a destination where players who might be late-round NWSL picks -- and therefore unlikely to get the playing time they need to develop -- could play significant roles on teams in the new challenger league. Many USL clubs already have an existing academy infrastructure, too, giving the USL Super League an immediate advantage at the base of the pyramid.
One NWSL team technical staff member this week acknowledged the draft will be "antiquated sooner rather than later," while others feel that the time has already come.
For one, the draft has been manipulated for years by teams to land a player who would not have turned professional somewhere else. Angel City had to trade up to the top pick last year to acquire Thompson, who was turning professional specifically to play for her hometown team in Los Angeles. In 2016, the Thorns made a draft-day trade to try to get Mallory Swanson (then Pugh) via another league mechanism, but Swanson reported to UCLA that spring.
The draft is also about creating parity, a cornerstone of the NWSL that has long made it the most unpredictable, competitive and entertaining league in the world. Drafts inherently allow the worst teams to acquire the best available new players, the idea being that those teams can rebuild and compete better. Yet players don't necessarily want to sign up to join the worst team, a problem that has previously dogged the league. Neither of the two top-six draft picks by Sky Blue FC (now Gotham FC) in 2019 reported to the team that spring, instead choosing to sign in Europe. Sky Blue was the laughingstock of the NWSL at the time and made global headlines for its unprofessional standards; players drafted there had no obligation to show up and also had options beyond the NWSL.
Bay FC general manager Lucy Rushton acknowledges that the biggest challenge of the draft system is that a player's inability to choose their team might mean the entire league loses out on them. Rushton comes to the NWSL from MLS, which also uses a draft system -- one that has changed drastically over time. She sees value in the NWSL draft, particularly given the lack of current infrastructure to support other entry methods.
"I think it comes down to your beliefs on youth development, your head coach's willingness to work with young players, and their beliefs around talent development and their qualities and skills around talent development," Rushton said. "It's totally different coaching a group of average age 28 to 32, to having an average age of 24 in your roster. It's a totally different way of coaching."
The draft is not evil, nor is it irrelevant. It is uniquely American, something that existed from the idea that the NWSL had a monopoly on American talent. It has no such status, which league executives increasingly understand. There might be better ways for players to develop and transition from amateurs to professionals, ultimately, and the draft is another element of the NWSL caught in the crosshairs of what is best for the sport and best for the business. Right now, NWSL business is booming, with expansion fees increasing tenfold over a few years and the Thorns' recent record sale for $63 million. Whether the sporting and commercial prerogatives of the NWSL can co-exist is an ongoing tension that won't soon go away.
"One of the reasons that we are able to increase enterprise value of our franchises the way we have is because of some of those mechanisms like a salary cap, like an expansion draft," Berman said. "It is what creates intrinsic value of a franchise. It's the reason that the United States has led the world in increasing franchise values for professional sports leagues in leagues like the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball."