New USL Super League: Threat to the NWSL, or helping hand to boost women's soccer?

There is an inevitable question USL Super League president Amanda Vandervort faces in just about any interview, a version of which she has answered ad nauseum before the league she oversees even played a game: Why did the USL Super League launch as a first-division women’s soccer league when the National Women’s Soccer League is already thriving as the United States’ preeminent competition, and is arguably the best league in the world?

“Those Division 1 sanctioning standards were what we believed was right for the Super League, and so that’s what we set forth,” Vandervort told ESPN. “It was never about anything other than what’s right for us for the long-term sustainability of this league.”

And of the prospect that the NWSL and USL Super League are positioned as competitors?

“It’s just two leagues,” Vandervort said matter-of-factly. “We’re in different markets, and we’re both competing at the highest level.”

Neither the USL Super League nor the NWSL has been willing to publicly entertain the idea the two leagues are competitors, but an elephant in the room remains: The Super League’s first-division status is the same as the NWSL, and the Super League launched in mid-August with an approach designed to make it stand out it from its predecessors.

It’s the first women’s professional soccer league in the United States to align with the “global” (read: European) calendar, meaning its season begins in August and ends in late spring. There is neither a draft nor a salary cap, two mechanisms that are ubiquitous across American sports but mostly foreign to soccer worldwide. Many Super League teams have existing academies and amateur adult teams, creating pathways to professionalism that NWSL clubs lack.

Now, the Super League is trying to do something that has never been done before: create a second successful top-flight women’s soccer league in a country that already has one.

The Super League’s path to Division 1 status

Initially, the USL Super League was slated to fill a void as a second-division league, which has never existed in U.S. women’s soccer. Then, plans changed.

Last year, Super League leadership announced it would apply to the U.S. Soccer Federation for first-division sanctioning, which it was granted in February after meeting the federation’s requirements for professional standards. The league launched with eight teams, the minimum required for a top-flight league.

Operating as a first-division league has drawn everything from confusion to skepticism from sources across the industry, although there is widespread agreement that more professional playing opportunities for women in the U.S. is a net positive. Most skeptics don’t understand why the Super League didn’t stick with the plan of operating as a second division to fill a void in the pyramid.

“I don’t think it’s a threat,” one NWSL club general manager told ESPN in a recent anonymous GM survey. “I also don’t think it’s good for the NWSL. I’m frustrated that they were sanctioned as a first division, because I don’t think that would ever happen on the MLS side. I think when you look at the board — U.S. Soccer, that group that voted to do that — it never would have happened on the men’s side. Why did it happen on the women’s side?”

Unlike the rest of the world, the U.S. soccer pyramid is not connected. There is no promotion and relegation. American soccer is a closed system of private entities that simply must meet requirements set forth by the federation to be sanctioned. For a first-division women’s league, those include the league having eight teams in at least two time zones in season one, all stadiums featuring a minimum capacity of 5,000, and the majority owner of each team must own at least 35% and have an individual net worth of $15 million.

Several of the Super League’s ownership groups also operate USL men’s teams, meaning there is existing infrastructure in these markets. U.S. Soccer’s requirements for a second-division men’s league — like the USL Championship — roughly mirror the requirements to run a first-division women’s league. Vandervort and prospective Super League owners determined they could meet first-division requirements, so why should they confine themselves to the second division, where standards (like 2,000-seat stadium capacities) are much lower?

Soccer’s governance in the United States is capitalistic: There are no rules preventing multiple professional leagues in a single division, and there is precedent for competition on the men’s side. The USL competed with the NASL over the previous decade as each looked to establish a foothold in the men’s second division. The USL won a bitter battle that involved teams switching between leagues, and the ramifications remain with an ongoing antitrust lawsuit brought forward by the NASL against U.S. Soccer and MLS.

U.S. Soccer, it appears, has no choice but to approve any league that meets minimum standards, even if there is already a league at that level. At the Super League’s level, there is another league founded 12 years ago: the NWSL.

The NWSL by all accounts appears to be thriving. It is expected to announce a 16th expansion team in the coming months as franchise valuations balloon to $250 million, up from seven-figure numbers only a few years ago. The NWSL is in the first year of a historic $240 million TV rights deal (ESPN is a rights holder), a value of more than 50 times the previous deal. The NWSL and its players association also just announced a new collective bargaining agreement that will run through 2030.

But maybe the USL Super League is on to something: The NWSL just eliminated drafts and created full free agency with the new CBA. It’s impossible to give the USL credit for prompting the NWSL to make such sweeping changes — the players have been asking for many of these changes for years — but it might not be a coincidence the new CBA’s ratification came weeks before USL kicked off. The NWSL’s previous player CBA wasn’t supposed to expire until 2026.

The NWSL is entering unprecedented territory among major professional sports leagues in the United States by eliminating the draft and requiring player approval for all trades. Those mechanisms were long considered untouchable, paramount to maintaining parity, a characteristic of the NWSL that current commissioner Jessica Berman has frequently lauded.

A different approach to women’s soccer in the U.S.

Vandervort is a veteran executive who worked at Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) — the NWSL’s predecessor — as well as senior positions at MLS and global players union FIFPRO. She says she is not concerned about the Super League eschewing American sports league structures.

While mechanisms such as a salary cap ensure parity, Vandervort wonders why the USL Super League should concern itself with that. When pressed, she deflects with a different question: “The first question we ask is, ‘How do you build community in your market? And how do you build a great soccer team that is doing right by the players and right by the fans?’ It’s just a different perspective on the building of a league and the priorities that you place in your strategic vision.”

This community approach is the “ethos” of the USL, Vandervort said. There is proven success on the men’s side. The USL Championship, which is the second tier of men’s soccer, under MLS, has 24 teams. There are 12 teams in USL League One, which is a third-division men’s professional league.

“Startup mode doesn’t feel as start-up-y as it could have if we didn’t have a basis already of 120-odd people who already work in the office,” Vandervort said.

The USL’s approach serves as implicit differentiation from the NWSL, which has worked hard to position itself as the best league in the world through its parity. The Super League’s messaging has been about creating more opportunities for women players and establishing professional teams in underserved markets.

“In every single conversation, the international calendar was brought up as a positive impact on their experience,” Vandervort said.

A fall-to-spring schedule allows for player transfers that align with Europe, and summer breaks for major international tournaments like the World Cup and Olympics, a historical problem for the NWSL. (Multiple NWSL sources have called the calendar, and the topic of whether it needs to be overhauled, the most intensely debated agenda item in the boardroom.)

There are some early signs of promise for the Super League.

Opening weekend in the USL Super League was a success: all three games sold out, with an average of just under 7,000 fans. The Carolina Ascent’s crowd in Charlotte, North Carolina, for the league’s inaugural game was 10,553, better than the NWSL’s North Carolina Courage has drawn in seven years of operating a few hours up the road, just outside Raleigh. Average attendance in the NWSL surpassed 10,000 fans per game for the first time in 2024. The NWSL averaged just over 4,000 fans per game when it launched as an eight-team league in 2013.

Super League teams in Lexington, Kentucky and Spokane, Washington have built their own soccer-specific stadiums for both men’s and women’s USL teams, and the Tampa, Florida team overhauled a riverfront stadium within the city to make it a unique home. Spokane and Tampa both sold out their inaugural games on opening weekend, with about 5,000 fans each.

Still, there are growing pains, including a notable attendance drop after the opening-week buzz. Brooklyn FC postponed its inaugural match in late August because the field was unplayable after turf was installed over the baseball field at the Coney Island facility.

Industry sources describe a wide range of club standards across the Super League. One team, in Washington, D.C., did not announce any player signings until a few weeks before the season. Brooklyn FC still has not named its head coach nearly a month into the season. Multiple agents describe poor communication by some clubs behind the scenes.

Starting a league or a club is hard, several sources acknowledged, and some level of organizational dysfunction is inevitable at the outset. The NWSL had myriad issues in its early years.

USL and NWSL: Competition or partnership?

The quality of play in the USL Super League will require time to assess. There are plenty of names recognizable to NWSL fans, and several NWSL players who have struggled for playing time have been loaned to Super League sides. Young, relatively talented players who couldn’t earn minutes in the NWSL are bona fide starters in the USL Super League.

Proponents of the Super League — and even some NWSL executives who spoke to ESPN — believe that such opportunities will broaden the American player pool for the better. There is communication between NWSL and USL Super League clubs, but there is no formal collaboration.

The NWSL declined to provide further comment from commissioner Jessica Berman about the USL Super League, and a spokesperson pointed to the league’s statement from February, when the USL Super League received first-division sanctioning. The statement read, in part: “As the most competitive women’s league in the world, there are limited roster spots available in the NWSL. More opportunities to compete professionally is a good thing and we’re interested to see how a new league might contribute to the continued growth of our game.”

Still, these two leagues are competitors, even if neither Berman nor Vandervort will say as much. There are physical examples like overlapping markets — each league has a team playing in the same stadium in Washington, D.C., for the most extreme example — and there are idealistic tensions. Innovation from a challenger league can force (and arguably already has forced) change from the incumbent.

Historically, across American sports, that has led to rule innovations and league mergers, including in American football and in both men’s and women’s basketball. The path that the Super League takes — and how it converges with the NWSL’s path — remains to be seen.

“I was incredibly impressed at the level of talent and the level of competition and competitiveness between our clubs in the first couple of weekends,” Vandervort said. “And I think that’s a testament to the talent and the pool of talent that’s out there, and it’ll only grow in the years ahead for us.”