Season of reckoning to end with worthy final
NWSL has high hopes for future as Red Stars and Spirit play for championship
A title match often represents a finish line, the closing of a chapter and the coronation for a select few.
Saturday’s NWSL final between the Chicago Red Stars and Washington Spirit will certainly feature those aspects, but there’s a bit more that comes with the territory to cap a brutal season that was so often derailed by what occurred outside of player control.
Instead, it’s become a year of player empowerment and a year when the lifeblood of the league finally became heard, though the events to make it so were heinous. They resulted in a long-overdue ousting of multiples coaches whose misdeeds and abuse were overlooked or ignored for far too long. They resulted in the resignation of a commissioner whose positive contributions on the business end were undone by neglecting player safety, the matter that should have come before all else. They resulted in a brief regular-season stoppage, with things spiralling to the point where a total reset was required.
In all, some form of scandal, controversy or reckoning has enveloped the vast majority of the league’s 10 clubs. One at the heart of it, the Spirit, will play for the title at Racing Louisville’s Lynn Family Stadium.
If the Spirit win, that means coming to terms with the fact that the owner they have very publicly tried to oust — and who is in the process of selling the team — will raise the trophy, or at the very least go down as a championship-winning owner. It’s become awfully hard to separate all the elements in play from one another and truly celebrate the sport.
The hope for the league is that in 2022 and beyond that no longer proves to be such a difficult and complicated task. The West Coast additions of Angel City (Los Angeles) and Wave (San Diego) should bring elements of glitz and class to NWSL. And Marla Messing, the league’s interim CEO, said Friday the league extended its partnership with Nike in what is the “most substantial agreement in NWSL history.” Its deal with CBS has also been extended by a year.
And then there’s Saturday’s final itself. The Spirit, and what they’ve had to overcome — the player conflict with ownership, the toxic culture that was able to permeate without consequence for so long, the record of abuse of ex-manager Richie Burke, the club’s being suspended from league governance because of the depths of the issues, the forfeits due to COVID-19 — makes for a tremendous story of resilience. They feature some of the sport’s brightest talents, from reigning rookie of the year Trinity Rodman to goalkeeper of the year Aubrey Bledsoe, to midfield star Andi Sullivan and Ashleys Hatch and Sanchez, with the latter three heading to U.S. women’s camp for two friendlies in Australia after the season.
There’s Rory Dames’s Red Stars, who have overcome injuries to stalwarts such as Julie Ertz and Alyssa Naeher as they go in search of a title that has proved to be elusive throughout the club’s existence. The Red Stars helped foster Mal Pugh’s resurgence, and they’ve been carried by the resolute play of Sarahs Woldmoe and Gorden and the midfield mastery of Morgan Gautrat.