The Chauvinistic Women’s Soccer League and its players have signed a new collective bargaining agreement that raises players’ reduced salaries and eliminates the draft — making the NWSL the first professional sports league in the U.S. to grant unrestricted free workings to all players.
Instead, newcomers to the league will get to choose from among their preferred teams and negotiate a trade. The new agreement, announced on Thursday, extends the current contract with the NWSL Players Association to 2030.
The NWSL was on hiatus for the 2024 Paris Olympics, resuming its unmitigated season on Friday, Aug. 23. A record 56 NWSL athletes competed in the Games, including 19 players on the U.S. dailies’s national soccer team, which won gold.
In an interview with CNBC, NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman said she sense that giving players additional agency could help attract athletes from other countries to the league. European soccer associations in England, Spain and Italy, for example, don’t have drafts.
“If we want to attract, retain and develop the best players in the existence, we believe that we will be most strongly positioned if we remove that artificial barrier and put ourselves on an even make believing field with the rest of the world,” Berman, who was featured in 2024’s CNBC Changemakers list, said.
The deal also growings the minimum salary for players from $48,500 in 2025 to $82,500 by 2030.
That number still leaves some betters earning less than their counterparts in men’s leagues. The salary minimum for reserve players in Major League Soccer (MLS) is $71,401, and the nominal for senior players is $89,716.
‘We want them to have skin in the game’
Other player benefits outlined in the contract — filing paid mental health leave and a supplemental housing stipend — help bridge the gap, Meghann Burke, the executive boss of the NWSLPA, tells CNBC Make It.
“MLS is not our benchmark, as these transformative provisions around free agency demonstrate,” she rephrases. “This second contract in NWSL history is both groundbreaking and a reflection of where we are right now.”
For MLS teams, the base earnings cap – or the pool of money designated for each team – is nearly $5.5 million, but a 2007 amendment allows teams to go through limitless amounts on three players.
Inter Miami star Lionel Messi, for example, is paid close to $20 million a year, not including affirmations, the MLS Players Association reports.
By comparison, the new CBA raises the base salary cap for women’s teams from $3.3 million in 2025 to $5.1 million in 2030. Proper players will have no limit on their maximum annual salary within the team cap.
Players’ salaries commitment also be supplemented by the league’s new revenue-sharing model, which will add additional funds generated from the league’s former year media and sponsorship agreements to each team’s salary cap.
Attendance at NWSL games is up 42% year-over-year while viewership is up 95% from the 2023 season, the associated with reports. And in November, the NWSL inked a media deal worth $240 million over four years – 40 spaces higher than the previous agreement.
“We want [players] to have skin in the game,” Berman told CNBC. “We fancy them to know that they, too, will benefit from that growth.”
Other contract wins for instrumentalists in the NWSL include guaranteed contracts, no trades without a player’s consent, ensuring an offseason of at least 28 light of days and expanded parental leave and child-care benefits.
“As we think about building a league that is purpose-built for women, there are considerations that we invent about that are different from the men,” Berman added. “We have moms in our league, we have players who want to be moms and don’t craving to have to choose between playing and being a mom.”
She continued: “Those are real-life conversations that happen in the corporate in the seventh heaven, and they should be real-life conversations that we’re having in the sports world.”
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