The NWSL's Board of Governors recently voted to approve a “High Impact Player” rule that would allow teams to offer certain athletes contracts that go beyond the salary cap, allowing the league to compete with higher offers from Europe. However, the NWSLPA doesn't agree with the proposal and expressed concerns over what the mechanism would mean for teams.
Players Association executive director Meghann Burke revealed the issues the NWSLPA has over the move to ESPN, going into detail about the lasting impact it would have on the NWSL.
“We feel this is a significant decision that doesn't just solve a short-term problem, but it affects our long-term future,” Burke said. “The permanence that it will have with regard to how the market is structured, to how rosters are structured, the locker-room dynamics — we just don't feel that it delivers anything of value that simply increasing the team salary cap wouldn't, without having negative consequences.”
Burke also said that the NWSLPA proposed that the league simply raise the salary cap by $1 million from 2026 instead, which would allow teams to decide which players could receive the money.
“The league is trying to control and interfere by trying to dictate which players get paid what with this pot of funds. Our position is that teams — GMs, soccer ops, business folks at the team level — are uniquely positioned to make judgment calls about how to structure their rosters, how to negotiate deals,” Burke said.
“We genuinely believe that how you measure a player's value, both in terms of sporting merit and business criteria, is nuanced,” Burke added. “It is more complicated than a handful of bullet points. It is within the purview of the teams to make those judgment calls, and in a system of free agency like we all agreed to, that's how it works. It's a free market.”
According to Burke, the overwhelming opinion from the 400-plus players in the NWSL was that the potential rule was not a good idea. This back-and-forth comes after the league controversially rejected a salary the Washington Spirit offered Trinity Rodman of a similar amount. Speculation has surrounded Rodman's next move since her contract with the Spirit expires after 2025.
“Part of my assessment of the league's handling of this matter is that if they had not rejected the original deal that Trinity struck, which we continue to contend complied with the league rules and the collective bargaining agreement, we still would have had two more years to assess if there were other mechanisms available to teams to retain top-end talent that's commanding high wages,” Burke explained.
The proposed salary cap resolution would allow teams to spend up to an extra $1 million to entice top stars with only a partial hit to the cap, and the player's salary would need to be 12% of the team's total cap before funds can be used.
