Thorns, NWSL will no longer draft players

Last month, the National Women’s Soccer League announced it’s getting rid of the draft. This winter, promising college players will instead choose among their favorite teams and negotiate a contract. The NWSL will still have roster limits and a salary cap, but under its new collective bargaining agreement, no player may be traded without her consent. The league is the first in the U.S. to grant unrestricted free agency to all players. Rachel Bachman, reporter for the Wall Street Journal, tells us how this change will impact the players, the league and possibly other sports.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Last month, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) became a pioneer in professional American sports. It announced it’s getting rid of its draft. The NWSL is the first league in the US to grant unrestricted free agency to all players, meaning that this winter instead of being drafted onto teams, promising college players will be, instead, able to choose among their favorite teams and negotiate contracts. Wall Street Journal sports reporter, and former and longtime Oregonian Rachel Bachman joins us now to talk about this change. Welcome back to the show.

Rachel Bachman:  It’s great to be here, Dave.

Miller:  The head of the Players Association, Meghaan Burke had an almost comically grandiose way of describing this news. She said, “I think history will prove this is the most significant paradigm shift in the history of professional sports.” What was she getting at?

Bachman:  What she was getting at is just simply how unprecedented this is for an American league. And that’s an important distinction. Because drafts are largely an American invention and practice. But I think what she was hinting at is that others could follow. Much bigger and better established leagues might consider following the NWSL’s lead.

Miller:  I want to talk about that. But first, for folks who aren’t too familiar with how this works, how has the draft worked in the National Women’s Soccer League?

Bachman:  It’s generally worked like other drafts that people are familiar with [like] the NFL draft or the NBA draft, where promising college players throw their names in the hat and basically make themselves eligible. The teams have a draft order, determined by a number of factors. And then they get to pick the players they want and players essentially have no say. You could be the best player in college and if Louisville wants you, that’s where you’re gonna go. So it really has historically been something to keep the power in owners hands, in one respect. Because they get to determine where these great players start their careers.

Miller:  And a tool for parity as well, which we can get to. So maybe you answered this just now, but just to dig deeper – why is it that players push for this? This was a part of collective bargaining, just a labor and management struggle. The players asked for this. Why?

Bachman:  If you think about this in a larger context, say you’re studying accounting in college. The 30 biggest accounting firms don’t get together and decide, OK, you pick first and then you pick, and then dictate to college graduates where they’re going to work for the next three or four years.

Miller:  “We did really poorly at accounting last year so we will get the best future accountant next year,” right?

Bachman:  Exactly. You essentially get rewarded. So again, the employee doesn’t get any say in where he or she ends up. So in the broader context of free market capital, it’s kind of bizarre. It’s just developed, as you mentioned, as a way to try to maintain parity, which is of high value in leagues because they like close games. Those tend to make television broadcasts more attractive. And that’s really the coin of the realm when we’re talking about selling sports, ultimately.

Miller:  So why did the League teams agree to this?

Bachman:  An interesting footnote to this is that the League actually instigated this conversation, which is even more unusual. This collective bargaining agreement was not expired. And I think that gives you a hint as to their motivation. This League, unlike the NFL or NBA or even Major League Baseball, is competing with the globally dominant leagues of Europe, who generally have the top handful of players in the world.

Partly, they have the best players because they can pay the most. There is no draft there. They also don’t have salary caps. So the NWSL really has to compete globally for talent. And they felt like this was a disadvantage, that college players coming out could decide to say, “Hey, you know what, I don’t like the team that drafted me. I don’t want to live in Seattle or North Carolina. I want to go to Lyon in France or I want to go to Barcelona and play with one of the storied clubs of Europe. And so I’m just going to say no, go over there and sign a free agent contract.”

Miller:  That seems like a really important piece of this if we’re talking about what this might mean for the NFL, or the NBA, or Major League Baseball. Because if you’re a college football player, especially for football, which is the most fully American of those sports and the least internationalized, it’s preposterous to imagine that you’re going to go to Lyon. You’re not going to go to France or Lithuania if you’re a Duck right now and you’re wondering which NFL team you might play for next year.

There is no other option that’s going to give you millions. Does that mean that this is less likely to be a game changer for other professional American sports leagues?

Bachman:  I would say in the short term, yes, for all the reasons you mentioned. The U.S. leagues generally are the dominant ones in the world. That being said, across sports, player power is growing partly because salaries are growing, partly because broadcast rights deals are growing. So it all comes down to player priorities. If some players decide this is really important to us and they decide to negotiate something for it, they could start it in the conversation.

For instance, I’ll give you an example. In Major League Baseball, there’s no salary cap. So those players have decided, and they’ve sacrificed with strikes and other labor strife, to insist that they keep that salary cap away from their sport. And they’ve succeeded at it. Whereas, other sports have not. That’s because baseball players decided this is their highest priority. Whether a draft will rise to that level in other sports remains to be seen. But athletes have made fairly big stands and succeeded in other leagues.

Miller:  So as we talked about briefly, drafts in professional sports, you did describe it and some people see it as just a kind of power grab on the part of teams. But it’s also talked about in a more positive way as a way to even the playing field, so that the teams that do worse, and there are various versions of this in different sports, but the basic idea is the same. If you don’t perform very well this year, the next year you have a better chance of getting the crop of the best new players. And sometimes it works out for a team. Sometimes it doesn’t because you never know how someone’s gonna do. But how is a team that is a perennial loser in the National Women’s Soccer League ever going to attract players?

Bachman:  I think one answer is spending. Investment. And there are few ways that various teams have done that. In Kansas City, for instance, those owners have spent tens of millions of dollars on building a practice facility and then building the first standalone women’s professional stadium of its kind. And players have gone there. And they’re doing very well this season. And that team has not always done well.

So, I think what the elimination of the draft does, in one sense, is it really puts more onus on owners to create attractive environments through coaching, staffing, support staffs for instance. Training facilities are becoming a very big topic of conversation, of reality, in women’s sports, rather than encouraging owners to sit back and cross their fingers that once the season starts to look bad, they’ll finish poorly enough to get the top pick.

Miller:  The NFL and the NBA have both turned this way of picking their young players into media and TV spectacles, in their own right. Do you think they’d want to give even that up? I mean, you can’t make a television spectacle out of 100 GMs talking to college seniors all over the country, in these private conversations. That is just all behind the scenes?

Bachman:  Right, if that’s what you would televise, certainly, it’s not nearly as exciting as the suspense of seeing who the Arizona Cardinals are going to pick. But you’re absolutely right. The fact that the Leagues themselves have turned these into commodities and most pointedly, the NFL, which has turned its draft into a road show, where it literally takes over a city’s downtown for several days. You saw, in Detroit, hundreds of thousands of people came out to watch that draft. So that does make it more difficult to part with.

What that might turn into I don’t know. I think the teams in Europe, which again generally don’t have drafts, find exciting ways on their own to announce a player signing. [They] have a big event the day he shows up to a stadium. Sometimes they invite fans. You know, things like that. So it might not be a League-wide thing, but certainly at the team level, fans have found a way to celebrate the signing of big players.

Miller:  The other piece of this is the increasing power, in this case, for young female soccer players. But it’s interesting to see how that fits into a broad across-sports across-gender movement in collegiate sports in recent years. Giving more power and more money to these athletes. I’m thinking about both the transfer portal but especially the name, image, and likeness deals where unheard of things, of college athletes, making their own deals and making their own money, based on their own sports performances. That’s now the new reality. How does this fit into that change that we’re still in the middle of?

Bachman:  In one sense, you’re seeing younger athletes and people at younger ages gaining more power. Partly because of social media, they’re able to demonstrate their popularity in very measurable ways. There are, for instance, women’s college basketball players who were already famous when they got to their colleges because they had Instagram accounts and TikTok accounts and so on. So that is one way that college athletes are building their following.

And a few of those players, Catarina Macario on the U.S. women’s national team, for instance, have just simply skipped the NWSL. She was already a fantastic player. She went to Europe and has been thriving there although she’s had some injuries. I think it may embolden some players and also maybe even give them a cushion to say, ‘hey,

even if I don’t have the perfect situation right now, I might have a financial cushion to start out with.’

I think that’s true more in basketball which is very popular in college than in soccer. But it has just completely changed the landscape, particularly for female stars whose value is just very difficult to quantify and impossible to monetize really, in college, before those NIL rules changed in 2021.

Miller:  Rachel, thanks very much.

Bachman:  Thank you.

Miller:  Rachel Bachman is Senior sports reporter at ‘The Wall Street Journal.’ She joined us to talk about the news that the National Women’s Soccer League is getting rid of its draft, meaning that all players, including prospective ones, are going to be able to negotiate contracts with whichever team they want.

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