“The history of power in professional sports can be summed up very quickly,” DeMaurice Smith, the former executive director of the N.F.L. Players Association, told me recently. “Every sport up until this point is predicated on management and the owners doing everything to retain their power and control.” Granted, Smith comes to this subject from a particular vantage—he led N.F.L. players through a lockout and two collective-bargaining negotiations. But the evidence can be summed up quickly, too. In the United States, athletes in the major professional sports leagues have never had much say in where they play. What rights of free agency they do have were gained through long and ugly court battles and labor fights, and that free agency is generally restricted, limited, or discouraged by the leagues’ rules. Players rarely get to decide if, when, and where they are traded. It happens all the time—a family’s life changes in a moment. The cornerstone of major American professional sports is the draft, in which teams take turns selecting the rights to sign new players who want to join their leagues. Generally, the teams that fared worst in the previous season get the first picks, and players have essentially no control over who chooses them. Once drafted, many players sign contracts that aren’t guaranteed, if they are lucky enough to sign contracts at all. When leagues expand, as they often do, new teams are stocked through an expansion draft, in which teams “protect” some of their players but leave others for the taking.
The inaugural N.F.L. draft was in 1936. Drafts have existed in the other major men’s sports for at least fifty years. In 1970, a retired N.F.L. player sued the league, arguing that the draft violates the Sherman Antitrust Act, and won. But the league got around that quibble by working out a collective-bargaining system, through which players, as a group, accepted severe limits on their freedom in exchange for certain benefits and standards, and a claim to a portion of the ever-growing revenue generated by the mass-entertainment spectacles in which they play the starring role. Bargains, as everyone knows, can be Faustian.
All of this is done in the name of parity. The draft gives the worst teams an easier path to becoming better, and tying players to teams helps poorer clubs compete against richer ones. This has worked out well for owners, who have watched the values of their teams skyrocket. It’s worked out reasonably well for fans, too. Loyal fans prefer stars who stick around, and they want their teams to have a chance to win. Occasionally, people wonder why such a capitalist society takes a seemingly quasi-socialist approach to sports, and occasionally there is disquiet, from players and some fans, about the optics of mostly Black men being treated, in certain respects, like property by mostly white owners—particularly when, shortly before each year’s N.F.L. draft, those young men are stripped, measured, and prodded at the N.F.L. Combine. Still, it is not hard to see why the system persists. No one wants the games to stop, which is what happens in a lockout or a strike. And, when players refuse to play unless the terms of the arrangement change, they are criticized as spoiled and selfish. If they want to compete at the highest levels, they rarely have other options. Their leagues tend to be the best in the world. The rewards of celebrity are immense, and working within the system has made many of those young men very rich, too.
The women’s leagues established in the U.S. in the past few decades have hoped to replicate the success of the men’s leagues, and have thus far replicated their existing model, using the same arguments: parity, fan loyalty, the benefits of competitive balance. The leverage that owners have exercised in these leagues wasn’t usually the promise of money—because, until recently, there wasn’t all that much. (The minimum salary during the National Women’s Soccer League’s inaugural season, in 2013, was six thousand dollars. The first collective-bargaining agreement, in 2022, raised it from twenty-two thousand to thirty-five thousand.) The women, like the men, accepted the rules in part because it was what they knew, and in part because they had to. There were other leagues in Europe and some of those paid well. But the appeal of playing professionally in the United States—closer to home, alongside many of the best players—was obvious. So, to many female athletes, was the business potential of women’s sports. In some respects, the power that the leagues had over players was psychological. The players understood that their jobs were tenuous. Teams were forever moving, folding, or crying poor; there was often talk that the leagues could not survive. Some did not. But there was always promise of a brighter future. Social expectations and pressures played a role, too. “As women in American culture, we’re taught to accept what we’re given, and to make the most out of the circumstances we’re put in,” Brianna Pinto, a midfielder for the North Carolina Courage, in the N.W.S.L., told me.
For many years, women in sports did make the most out of their circumstances. But they worked to change those circumstances, too. Pinto, who is twenty-four, grew up in a world in which female soccer players were icons and celebrities, élite athletes who knew their value. They just wanted the same opportunities as the men had, Pinto said. That has been the rallying cry of female athletes for years—not only in soccer, where the members of the U.S. national team sued their own federation in pursuit of equal pay, but in basketball and hockey, which have strong records of solidarity. But last week, it emerged that the N.W.S.L. players also wanted something that the men didn’t have, at least not yet. They wanted freedom.
Sports don’t have to be constructed around the tight control of players’ rights. In the rest of the world, leagues look different—soccer leagues, in particular. Free agency exists everywhere. There are no maximum salaries. There is no draft. Transfers, in many places, must be approved by the players involved.
In the N.W.S.L., there has always been a tension between being an American professional sports league and being a part of the global structure of pro soccer, which plays by other rules. As women’s leagues have grown around the world—and as men’s leagues in other countries have discovered that investing even a small amount into women’s teams can pay hefty dividends—the supremacy of the N.W.S.L. in women’s soccer has been challenged, and even overtaken. The best club team in the world, Barcelona, plays in Spain. The most decorated team, Lyon, is in France. The Women’s Super League, in the United Kingdom, which includes sister clubs to Premier League teams, signed a gargantuan television deal in 2021, when the N.W.S.L. was relegated to producing its own broadcasts for CBS and streaming games on Twitch. The American system—with its salary limits, its no-consent trades, its system of “discovery rights,” which allowed a team to claim a player without even signing her—seemed more and more isolated, byzantine, and antiquated, at best. “The draft is the buying and selling of people,” Meghann Burke, the executive director of the N.W.S.L. Players Association, pointed out to me.
Many of the best international players began choosing not to come to the U.S. Even some top American prospects opted to play overseas, forgoing the draft altogether. Those who stayed started to challenge the draft process. Pinto was twenty when she was drafted, with the third pick, by NJ/NY Gotham F.C. She had been a promising talent within the U.S. soccer system; she was called up to the senior national team at sixteen. She was a star at the University of North Carolina, one of the top college teams in the country. But Gotham was stocked with veterans, including several at her position, in the midfield. She had trouble getting into games. In the off-season after her first year, Gotham traded her to the Courage. The Courage played close to home, and was led by a coach Pinto knew and trusted. She flourished. Had there not been a draft, perhaps she would have gone there sooner. “I would have done things differently,” she acknowledged.
Pinto was lucky. For others, the stakes were higher. In 2021, the league contended with multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and emotional abuse by coaches over a long period of time. Revelations surfaced for months. An independent investigation exposed a toxic culture permeating women’s soccer. In some cases, the coaches’ power over players did not just flow from their positions of authority but from the fact that the players were more or less trapped. Free agency did not exist at all in the league until the first collective-bargaining agreement, in 2022, and even then it could only come after six years in the league. In at least one case, a coach moved jobs, then traded for the player he had allegedly abused and, allegedly, abused her again.
At the most recent World Cup, in 2023, a striking pattern emerged. The countries whose teams were stocked with N.W.S.L. players, including the United States, failed to make it past the quarterfinals. The players contending for the world championship were largely employed by other leagues. Burke, the N.W.S.L. Players Association executive, started writing a white paper about why the league was losing ground. As it happens, she reached some of the same conclusions that the league office was coming to.
In many respects, the N.W.S.L. was thriving. Just a few years ago, its teams were mostly valued around a couple of million dollars each; this past spring, the San Diego Wave were sold for a hundred and twenty million dollars, and this summer, Bob Iger and Willow Bay bought Angel City F.C., in Los Angeles, at a valuation of two-hundred and fifty million dollars. The ownership of most clubs has turned over since the shaky, early days, and the new owners are willing to spend, building dedicated training facilities and new stadiums. Interest has surged: last year, the league signed a television deal worth two hundred and forty million dollars over four years—a roughly four-thousand-per-cent increase from the previous deal. But the league recognized that its continued success depended on attracting the top international talent and keeping the most popular American players. The C.B.A. was set to expire in 2026, and the league wanted to insure labor peace in order to negotiate a new, potentially bigger television deal when the current deal expired, in 2027. So, at the end of last summer, the league approached the players’ association about voluntary collective-bargaining negotiations, years before the current agreement was scheduled to end. Jessica Berman, the league’s commissioner, presented it to me as a chance to “align our interests” away from the glare of public scrutiny—a “win-win” situation for everyone to participate in and promote the growth of the league.
The players said that they would only negotiate if the deal was “transformational.” That meant guaranteed contracts and full free agency. The league was prepared for that: those core principles were agreed to last fall. It took another nine months to work out the financial details—not only the minimum salaries and salary caps, which both rise precipitously over the term of the agreement, but also complex cost-of-living adjustments for players in more expensive cities, which involved the assistance of an economist. During a weeklong break in the season, a handful of players on the bargaining committee, including Pinto, met with a group of owners in Philadelphia for the final round of negotiations; another three dozen players, including some of the sport’s biggest stars, joined virtually. The players sat in a room, on one side of a long, thin conference table, facing the windows overlooking Rittenhouse Square so that the management committee would have nothing to look at but them.
“I know what it feels like to be treated as a professional athlete,” Pinto told me. Her brother played in Major League Soccer, whose players travelled to games on charter flights and commanded huge salaries. “Being around all of these women who have fought so hard to get the league to where it is today, I feel like I would be doing them a disservice if I didn’t carry on the work.” I asked Berman, the league’s commissioner, whether she felt that female athletes had shown a level of solidarity that male athletes did not always demonstrate. She replied, dryly, “I think that’s been proven.”
