#berman out

In late November, the Washington Spirit and Gotham F.C. met at PayPal Park, in San Jose, California, for the National Women’s Soccer League’s championship game. During a scoreless first half, Trinity Rodman, the Spirit’s star forward, sat on the sideline, but she was never far from mind. She’d been out for weeks recovering from an injured knee, but she had been cleared to play, and everyone knew that she had the skill and the daring to change the game in an instant. At the Paris Olympics in 2024, she had been part of the dominant front line of the U.S. Women’s National Team that accounted for ten of the team’s twelve goals on its gold-medal run. In August, when Rodman returned from an earlier injury, she needed less than twenty minutes before she slammed a shot off a short bounce high into the corner for a game-winning goal in stoppage time. But the attention on her in the N.W.S.L. championship final as she ran onto the field, in the game’s fifty-seventh minute, had as much to do with what she might be able to do off the field as on it. More than the league title was at stake. So was the league’s future.

Rodman is twenty-three years old. She turned pro at eighteen, in 2021, without playing a single college match. When she was drafted, No. 2 over all, the N.W.S.L. was almost a niche concern, barely known even to legions of fans who fervently followed the U.S.W.N.T. Teams were valued at a few million dollars, and several had folded. Games were hard to find on television. Players endured conditions that made a mockery of their professional status. But that changed, quickly and dramatically. In 2022, Michele Kang, a former Northrop Grumman executive turned health-care entrepreneur, bought the Spirit for thirty-five million dollars. At the time, Kang vastly overpaid for the franchise. Today, cities are building new stadiums and facilities, and the latest expansion team, Atlanta, recently paid a fee of a hundred and sixty-five million dollars to join the league.

The N.W.S.L.’s explosive success has rested in part on its claim to be the premier women’s soccer league in the world. But that claim is being tested. Clubs abroad have been building robust development programs and increasing funding for their professional sides. At the World Cup in 2023, the U.S. national team, which drew almost entirely from the N.W.S.L., failed to make it past the round of sixteen. At the Paris Olympics the following year, the U.S. women won the gold medal, but there were signs that European leagues were threatening—or had already overtaken—the U.S. hegemony. The problem was money. Clubs in Europe were flush with cash, supported by the immense coffers of their parallel men’s teams and a surge of investment. In 2024, the N.W.S.L. responded to the challenge with a new collective-bargaining agreement that abolished the draft and gave every player free-agency rights—a radical arrangement for an American pro-sports league, but standard in soccer’s flourishing global market. But the N.W.S.L. retained a stringent salary cap—unheard of in leagues worldwide—as a way of preserving parity, a value that is taken as a given in sports leagues in the U.S. but not abroad. The salary cap in 2025 was around $3.5 million for a single team. That figure quickly became too small. In January, the U.S. defender Naomi Girma—who has a case for being the best defender in the world—was lured away from the San Diego Wave to Chelsea, a member of the Women’s Super League in England, with a record $1.1-million transfer fee. In September, Chelsea signed the Angel City forward Alyssa Thompson to a five-year deal, paying Angel City around $1.3 million for her rights. On the same day, the London City Lionesses signed Grace Geyoro from Paris Saint-Germain in a deal worth $1.9 million, a new record.

So the scrutiny on Rodman as she entered the N.W.S.L. final in November was intense. Her performance that day proved to be, by her own assessment, a disappointment. About twenty minutes after she came on, Gotham’s Rose Lavelle scored what would end up as the game’s only goal. After it was over, Rodman was visibly distraught. More than the loss seemed to be weighing on her. Her contract with the Spirit was expiring at the end of the year. She had made clear that she did not want to leave the team, but the championship was possibly her final game.

There was little doubt that Rodman could command an eight-figure salary on the open market. In fact, the D.C. Power, a team in the new Gainbridge Super League, which is seeking to challenge the N.W.S.L. as the dominant women’s league in the U.S. and has no salary cap, reportedly offered Rodman upward of a million dollars. Rich European clubs were also interested in Rodman. Players have many reasons for choosing which club to join, including geographic considerations and tactical styles. Not everyone goes with the highest bidder. But money matters, too. Constrained by the salary cap, there was no way that N.W.S.L. teams could remotely compete with those sorts of deals.

The stakes were high: if Rodman departed, not only would it fuel the growing sense that the N.W.S.L. is unable to retain top talent but it would also mean the loss of the league’s most charismatic and recognizable player. Alex Morgan is retired; Megan Rapinoe is now a podcaster. Rodman is sponsored by companies such as Adidas and Red Bull. Verizon put her in a commercial. Home Depot signed her for its “creator portal.” Dove Men built its advertising campaign for the 2026 fifa World Cup—the men’s tournament—around her. During the annual state of the league address in November, just before the championship game, the N.W.S.L.’s commissioner, Jessica Berman, said that the league would “fight” to keep Rodman. But she also defended the need for a salary cap to maintain balance and encourage owners to continue to invest.

Then, in early December, the Spirit reportedly presented Rodman with a contract that would average out to more than a million dollars—back-loaded so that most of the money would be paid after the N.W.S.L. negotiated a new television deal, which should lead to a rise in the salary cap. But the league office—which played a role in contract negotiations because, technically, players sign with the league, which operates as a single entity, and not directly with individual teams—rejected the deal, calling it not within the “spirit” of the salary cap. The logic was that Spirit had projected the league would grow at a rate that the league itself found unreasonable, and so would not be able to field a team while also paying Rodman. The Spirit could point to a mechanism where it could buy out the remainder of the contract if it turned out to be infeasible, but that didn’t sway the commissioner. In effect, the league was betting against a high projection of its own success.

The commissioner’s office did little to elaborate on the decision. “Our goal is to ensure that the very best players in the world, including Trinity, continue to call this league home,” a spokesman for Berman told me in an e-mailed statement. “We will do everything we can, utilizing every lever available within our rules to keep Trinity Rodman here.” Except that it wasn’t clear which rules, if any, the Spirit was breaking. The N.W.S.L. Players Association immediately filed a grievance, saying that the league had interfered with Rodman’s free-agency rights—and so, potentially, every player’s rights. “Not a single person” pointed to a rule that had actually been violated by the proposed contract, the N.W.S.L.P.A.’s head, Meghann Burke, told me. Whether or not a contract was a wise contract was a question best left for individual teams and players to decide, she argued. It was, she added, “really difficult for me to understand other than the league wants control.”

In mid-December, ESPN reported that the owners were crafting a new rule to create an exception to the salary cap for “High Impact Players”—not limited to Rodman but obviously built around her profile. Near the end of the month, the rule was officially enacted by the N.W.S.L., over the union’s objections. It allows for teams to use up to a million dollars to sign players who meet certain criteria, including the amount of minutes played on a national team, being recognized as an N.W.S.L. M.V.P. finalist in one of the two previous seasons, or being named to one of a number of lists, such as the top thirty in the Ballon d’Or, the top forty of the Guardian Top 100 football players, or the top forty of the ESPN FC Top 50 players in the two years prior. One of the lists—the SportsPro Media Top 150 Most Marketable Athletes—had no measure of sporting value.

“There is not a single player I’ve heard of who supports this rule,” Burke told me. Some of the lists were famously Eurocentric. African players—who include some of the N.W.S.L.’s best—were less likely to be eligible for the funds. And the inclusion of marketability criteria created incentives that could better fit a social-media influencer than an élite athlete. The union’s proposal was to increase the over-all salary cap by a million dollars, and to give individual teams the right to use the funds as they saw fit, rather than dictate how the money could be spent. The C.B.A., in fact, allowed for the cap to be lifted in consultation with the N.W.S.L.P.A. at any time.

Does it need to be? The arbitration between the league and the Players Association over Rodman’s contract is ongoing, but it seems likely now that the Spirit and Rodman will be able to come to some sort of deal, given the new funds that have become available. (Many people are already referring to the High Impact Player rule as “the Rodman Rule.”) Whether the league can keep up with the next star player who nears the end of her contract, though, is still an open question. The owners have been quiet so far about their own views of why they want to keep—and cap—salaries for élite players, even if it means losing out to other leagues—whether on Rodman or the next big free agent. (The M.L.S. has a similar designated-player rule, which has been used to attract stars like David Beckham and Lionel Messi, but it does not cap the money that can be spent.) Some owners are clearly more willing to spend on salaries than others. The Lionesses, which is responsible for the current record transfer fee, happens to be owned by Kang, the Spirit owner. And Chelsea is partly owned by Alexis Ohanian, who also has a significant stake in Angel City F.C. But however high team valuations continue to rise—Angel City F.C. is now said to be worth around two hundred and fifty million dollars—it seems that some teams are reluctant to increase spending on salaries at a similar rate, even as the global market drives them upward.