NWSL, Salary Caps, and you - Part 2
My drive to say things isn't deterred by a dead discourse
Check out my previous post, which is kind of a salary cap explainer, here.
So, what is the salary cap in the NWSL going forward? You didn’t really mention hard numbers.
That’s because like everything else in this league, it’s not entirely clear.1
What we know is that in the new, unreleased CBA, the player’s and owners negotiated the salary cap for each season, which wasn’t the case in the previous CBA. So through the history of the league, here is the salary cap growth:
A couple of other notes, which is why it makes this kind of analysis difficult, are:
Allocation money, which could have been used to pay down a player’s cap number, was phased out in 2023 and will be eliminated completely in 2026.
There is a revenue sharing component with the players that isn’t listed above based on television and sponsorships. It’s reported that it would be at least $200,000 a year.
By 2030, there is reportedly going to be a phase out of non-salary benefits that don’t hit the cap. This specifically is the housing allowance2 that has been part of the league’s compensation scheme since 2018.
One thing that you’ll notice is that the salary cap increases are fairly modest year-over-year, except for 2027’s cap, which has an increase more in line with current increases. This is because of the expected revenue boom for soccer in the US because of the 2026 World Cup, and to help compensate for allocation money disappearing.
What do the players actually get then?
I’m going to try to show how much money the players actually get under the salary cap.
I’m taking a little bit of liberty here, assuming that the league’s plan is to add 2 teams a year until the expansion bubble breaks. The one interesting thing to note is that because the cap isn’t growing with respect to potential revenues in the new CBA, which hurts the individual player, players as a whole are benefiting to the tune of 52 new jobs in 2026 to mitigate that lack of cap growth.3
That is all very boring (or interesting). What do you think the salary cap should be?
Only dealing with the cap itself (so not the escalators tied into sponsorship/TV money, or incentive-based bonuses),4 Lets take a quick look at reported revenues from 2024 as reported by Sportico.
There are a bunch of variables we don’t know because the league doesn’t want us to. Most of the revenue is local, this doesn’t include playoff revenue, or each team’s share of Boston, and Denver’s expansion fees5, and assumes each team pockets $1.5m from the broadcast deal.
As stated in Part 1, most leagues do around a 50% split of player-related revenues (defined as anything that a player contributes to, which would be broadcast and merch mostly, usually not team-focused sponsorships and premium spaces). Which makes cases like Kansas City and Angel City hard because KC owns their stadium so they can pick up a ton of ancillary income that isn’t player-based, and Angel City is basically a sponsorship mill, so I’m going to go more towards the NFL scheme of putting everything into one pot and splitting it in half.
Based on 14 teams, and $215.2m in revenue, the 2025 salary cap should be in the neighborhood of $7.7m per team for the 364 active players in the league. That is about 132.9% more than the stated cap of $3.3m.
Part 3 coming soon to wrap it all up in a bow, as we wait for actual games.
This has been true for a while, especially given the spotlight on the abuse controversies in the last few years, but the league’s lack of transparency on pretty much everything erodes a lot of trust, and in my opinion, this holds back growth.
It is currently set to team provided housing, where no more than 3 players can live in one house/apartment with one bedroom per player, or a stipend that is equal to “one-half of a two (2) bedroom apartment at the rate paid by the Team for Team-provided housing.”
Solidarity
Like MVP etc.
This would be $11.6m if the league distributes the whole fee to the teams equally