SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- The NWSL x Liga MX Femenil Summer Cup concluded on Friday a lot like it began three months earlier: with little fanfare.
Kansas City Current forward Temwa Chawinga scored a brace to lift her team to a 2-0 win past a depleted NJ/NY Gotham FC side that signed seven national team replacement players in order to field a roster, in front of an announced crowd of 3,668 fans. The field cleared quickly before Kansas City captain Lo'eau LaBonta and head coach Vlatko Andonovski fielded a few questions in a tent-turned-news conference room, and Current players and staff hustled to catch their flight home.
"No time to celebrate," Kansas City forward Michelle Cooper joked before she shook off a wad of confetti that was stuck to the bottom of her yellow cleats.
Remove the fireworks that pierced through the relatively quiet night sky, and there were few signs to the outside world that this was the championship match of an innovative tournament between two leagues on the rise. Some fans traveled far, but the more-than-half-empty stadium -- which noticeably lacked the presence of sponsor executives, league personnel (including NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman) and board members who typically descend upon the league's championship -- felt more like a flashback to the league's lean early years than the start of a new era.
And while players and coaches from both NWSL sides spoke to how they wanted to win a cup final, they also referred to "bigger trophies" to be won: the playoffs start in less than two weeks.
All of which means that it is possible the Summer Cup final was a one-night-only event. Multiple sources across the NWSL have told ESPN that they do not expect the Summer Cup to return next year, although the league has not yet finalized 2025 plans. If the NWSL abandons the Summer Cup entirely, it will mark the third consecutive year of drastic changes to the league's attempt at holding a cup competition.
An NWSL spokesperson declined to comment on the future of the competition.
The league's difficulties in establishing a competition outside of the regular season underscore several overlapping tensions for the NWSL: many players need more meaningful games, and the league needs more marquee events to sell to TV, sponsors and fans. But the calendar continues to get more congested and many players -- especially those playing internationally -- are burnt out.
The recurring issue raises the questions: Does a reasonable solution even exist? And is a secondary competition necessary?
A good idea that fell flat
The concept of a joint tournament between clubs from the U.S. and Mexico had been discussed internally in the NWSL in recent years before coming to fruition in 2024.
Since its inception, the NWSL has been played through World Cups and Olympics despite most of the world halting play outside of those competitions. This year, for the first time, the league instituted a six-week pause to the regular season to account for the Paris Olympics. It almost had to: 56 of its players were competing in France.
Still, the Summer Cup was awkward from conception. Only six Mexican clubs joined all 14 NWSL teams. The imbalance of teams instantly made the competition feel more like the old NWSL Challenge Cup -- effectively a league cup with some guest teams -- which is a point some NWSL coaches made publicly.
Additionally, the Mexican teams themselves felt like guests, more than partners.
"The Summer Cup lacked organization and a proper connection between both leagues, as it was very one-sided towards the NWSL," said one Liga MX Femenil source who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the tournament.
"The Mexican league is professional and can offer many interesting perspectives, but it seems the NWSL way was the only way, which meant the Mexican teams had to learn how things are done in the USA and we were the ones who had to adapt to their way of doing things."
The 20 teams were divided into five groups of four and, bizarrely, one group winner (Utah Royals) did not even advance due to having less total points than the other four. All four semifinalists were from the NWSL, with teams from Mexico winning only three of the 16 inter-league matches.
The imbalance between leagues extended to travel. Most of the competition was played in the United States and, while NWSL teams had only the Summer Cup to worry about, Liga MX had already begun its new season in July, leaving Mexican teams to play multiple games per week while shuttling to and from the United States. In one of the most extreme examples, Tijuana played four games in 10 days, traveling to Portland, back to Tijuana for a league game, then back up to Seattle, and then Utah for Summer Cup.
The new tournament and confusing format contributed to its commercial struggles. Several NWSL teams hosted games at alternative venues, either to save on rent or to test out a new area of their market, as Gotham did by hosting games outside of Philadelphia. Other teams stuck with their usual venues and played in cavernously empty stadiums.
One NWSL team executive described the Summer Cup as "a total bust" that lost a lot of money due to low ticket sales and poor advertising. It also lacked selling power as a tournament devoid of many of the league's stars. Those issues persisted at Friday's final.
A hearty-but-humble crowd watched two far-away teams compete for a trophy with an unclear significance. Advertising of the game appeared to be minimal around San Antonio and interest nationally was minimal.
An NWSL spokesperson said the Summer Cup final was awarded to San Antonio after the league put out a request for proposals (RFP), a common bidding process for events. The final, like the rest of the tournament, operated in the shadow of international play. Friday's game also fell in an international window and kicked off 24 hours after the United States women's national team defeated Iceland about 80 miles north in Austin.
This meant the Summer Cup had to compete for both attention and players. While Kansas City started most of its usual lineup on Friday, Gotham was without a handful of players due to injuries and international duty during the FIFA window. Some of their replacement players have not regularly trained with the team and have other jobs.
Signing players to temporary contracts is even more difficult now that the USL Super League, which is also sanctioned as a first division, kicked off in August. Players who were once fighting for these spots on the fringes of NWSL rosters now have contracts and important roles in the USL.
Annual stops and starts
Many NWSL general managers expressed in ESPN's recent anonymous survey the need to have a competition for player development, but the league has not yet found a sustainable solution with its cup competitions.
The NWSL has neither a formal academy system nor reserve league. A cup competition provides teams with games that coaches generally seek out, anyway, to test out tactics and evaluate players further down the roster. The Summer Cup -- and, previously, the Challenge Cup -- filled that void.
"I'm very thankful to play in this tournament, because it came at a time when we as an organization, as staff, were trying to figure out what we were going to do with the summer," Andonovski said last week. "So, for us, it made it a little bit easier that we could play a meaningful competition."
The Challenge Cup started as a tournament to salvage the 2020 season during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it morphed into a preseason tournament in 2021 and 2022 before becoming a season-long cup competition last year. But last year's Challenge Cup faced issues like this year's Summer Cup: Rosters were hard to fill when international players were gone, regular starters were fatigued and the games were difficult to market to fans to make them commercial successes.
So, the Challenge Cup was reduced to a single game this year and it was played on opening weekend between the league champions, Gotham, and last years' Shield winners, San Diego Wave FC. Sources previously confirmed to ESPN that the Challenge Cup only avoided complete elimination this year because of sponsor obligations.
Last year's Challenge Cup at least had financial incentives: Each player on the winning team last year received a $10,000 base prize, plus appearance bonuses. This year's Challenge Cup paid a $3,500 prize to each player on the winning team for a single game.
An NWSL spokesperson confirmed that Kansas City earned $55,000 for winning the Summer Cup, which would equal a little over $2,000 per player for five games, depending on how it gets divided.
More games, more problems?
Pay is one factor; bandwidth is another.
Teams are competing in more games with less rest as new domestic and international competitions arise, a point that Gotham coach Juan Carlos Amoros has made frequently throughout the season. The night before the Sumer Cup final, USWNT head coach Emma Hayes said her squad's "rusty" performance -- a group comprised of mostly NWSL players -- "looked like a team with a lot of players on the back end of the season."
As defending league champions, Gotham has played more games this season in all competitions than any other NWSL team. Gotham's Summer Cup semifinal and final bookended nine NWSL regular-season games, four games in the first edition of the Concacaf W Champions Cup -- which included midweek travel to Jamaica -- plus a friendly against English champions Chelsea. That's 17 games over the past two months. With a playoff berth clinched, Gotham will play at least 40 games this season (including a preseason tournament in Colombia.)
The new collective bargaining agreement between the NWSL and the NWSL Players Association increases minimum salaries each year through 2030, but the number of games players are being asked to compete in keeps increasing, too, meaning that the workload is increasing along with the pay.
The NWSL added two expansion teams this year, which increased the regular season by four games. Two more teams are expected to join the league in 2026, which will likely add four more games to the schedule. Multiple NWSL teams will also compete in Concacaf's new club competition each year.
"There's a balance," said Gotham goalkeeper Abby Smith, who is one of the team's player representatives with the NWSLPA. "We need to make sure that we are paying for players for more games, but also having the staffing to support the players and making sure that we're doing the right things for recovery."
Smith subbed on for the final moments of Friday's final to earn her first appearance in 433 days due to injury. It was a "special" moment both for the emotional toll of the comeback and for the fact that it took place in San Antonio, where she and her husband used to live. It also further illustrated the value of having a cup competition to give more players game minutes.
How to optimize a cup competition going forward -- if at all -- remains a work in progress for the NWSL. One option could be to give teams time in the schedule and autonomy to book friendlies that suit them on the field and commercially. The arrival of the USL Super League also legitimizes calls for a women's version of a U.S. Open Cup.
Still, there are also numerous elephants in the room for any plan going forward.
The calendar, and whether to stick with the current framework or flip it to a fall-to-spring model, remains one of the most divisive topics in the league, even if a drastic change is unlikely right now.
And then there is the 2026 Men's World Cup in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The NWSL will almost certainly have to pause play, too. Multiple NWSL teams have applied to have their facilities used as base camps for World Cup teams, and several more NWSL teams won't have access to their home stadiums or facilities for much of the summer.
Those conflicts will affect the NWSL's regular season first and foremost, and they also illustrate how difficult it is to add competitions to the schedule.
Conceptually, the Summer Cup has merit. The NWSL and Liga MX Femenil are both growing on and off the field and could mutually benefit from more collaboration; Gotham and Kansas City players unanimously agreed that exposure to new teams was a positive.
"I don't get international play," LaBonta said after her team's triumph on Friday. "That was really fun for us because being in the NWSL for so long, you play the same teams over and over."
Better execution is needed, however, as is more balance with Liga MX Femenil as a partner. Kansas City played in the only group that had two NWSL teams and two Liga MX Femenil teams.
At minimum, more games should be played in Mexico, where teams like Tigres and Rayadas in Monterrey, and Club America in Mexico City, have shown that fans will turn up for big games. NWSL players would experience a completely different kind of pressure in some of those scenarios.
Whether the opportunity to improve the Summer Cup even exists next year, however, is the bigger issue.