Title match helps NWSL end year on positive note
To call the Washington Spirit’s season turbulent would be an understatement.
The team’s coach was fired after being accused of verbally abusing his female players. A handful of employees, mostly women, quit amid reports of a toxic workplace culture. Two of the team’s owners feuded publicly, leading one to pledge to sell his stake — but only after players released a statement urging him to sell. Oh, and two games were forfeited because of a coronavirus outbreak among players.
By comparison, competing in a playoff semifinal last weekend on a waterlogged converted baseball field was just another day at work.
“We’re good,” defender Emily Sonnett said after the Spirit got past the OL Reign 2-1 on Sunday. “Aside from star power and international talent, I don’t think the Spirit get enough credit.”
The Spirit will get that credit, and a satisfying conclusion to a nightmare National Women’s Soccer League season, if they can defeat the Chicago Red Stars in Saturday’s championship game in Louisville, Ky.
Afterward, the Spirit and the rest of the NWSL will look toward a future that remains murky as it grapples with several serious problems.
The league’s first eight seasons were dominated by questions about whether it could
survive after previous attempts at women’s professional soccer had failed. The ninth tested whether the league could survive an abuse scandal.
Four NWSL head coaches were fired or departed quietly in the past year after various accusations of abusive behavior. One, Paul Riley, was accused by a player of coercing her into a sexual relationship. Eight of the league’s 10 teams have changed coaches since the beginning of the season, and the furor over the mishandling of reports of abuse led to the ouster of the league’s commissioner, Lisa Baird; the postponement of a weekend of games; and weeks of on-field protests and off-field soul-searching.
As it crowns its champion Saturday, the NWSL is being
led by an interim commissioner, Marla Messing, and it remains the subject of a number of overlapping investigations into the conduct of the league office and several teams. There is neither a timetable for when the investigations might conclude nor even a hint of what they will find and the changes that might result.
Still, a string of overtly positive developments has offered the NWSL and its players hope that better days are ahead.
Two new teams, Angel City FC and the San Diego Wave FC, will join next season, expanding the league to 12 teams and into Southern California. Angel City, based in Los Angeles, is backed by high-wattage investors such as Natalie Portman and Mia Hamm. Billionaire
investor Ron Burkle owns San Diego, which hired former U.S. coach Jill Ellis as its first president.
Not to be outdone, the owners of the league’s team in Kansas City have announced plans for a $70 million stadium on the city’s waterfront. When finished, it will be the country’s first soccer stadium built primarily for a women’s professional team. And soon the league and its players are expected to approve their first collective bargaining agreement, an important step in formalizing the playing and working conditions for players.
Washington’s Ashley Hatch and Trinity Rodman, the league’s Rookie of the Year, and Chicago defender Sarah Gorden all were named among the league’s best 11 this season.
But as the confetti is cleared from Louisville’s Lynn Family Stadium after the final Saturday afternoon, players will step away from the field for months, and the NWSL will enter the most consequential offseason in its history.
There will be an expansion draft to conduct, a team to sell, coaches to hire and allegations to investigate.