The NWSL salary cap was once a shield. Today, it’s a cage.
For 2025, the cap sits at $3.3 million, with revenue sharing bumping it slightly higher to $3.5 million. Minimum salary is $48,500, and by 2030 the numbers will climb—$5.1 million per team, $82,500 minimum. On paper, it looks like steady progress. In reality, it’s a structure that prevents the league from growing into what it claims to want to be: the top destination for the best players in the world.
To international readers, the very concept of a salary cap might sound foreign. In most of global football, clubs are free to spend as much as they can afford, restrained only by UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules or domestic licensing requirements. Wealthy clubs buy the best players; smaller clubs rely on development and strategy. That is the accepted order of the sport.
American sports are different. The National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), and others use salary caps—league-imposed limits on what teams can spend on player wages—as a way to enforce competitive balance and control costs. The idea is that no team can simply outspend the others to guarantee dominance, and owners are protected from themselves in case they overspend and bankrupt their clubs. Parity and cost-control are the twin justifications.
When the NWSL launched in 2013, it adopted the same model. At the time, it made sense. Two previous professional women’s leagues in the United States (WUSA and WPS) had collapsed in part due to financial mismanagement. The NWSL’s survival strategy was to keep spending under tight control, keep every team on roughly equal footing, and avoid the boom-and-bust cycle that had plagued women’s football in the country.
That survival model worked. The NWSL is now the longest-running professional women’s league in U.S. history. But what was once a shield has become a barrier.
Alyssa Thompson’s transfer makes this point better than any abstract debate. A 20-year-old star, marketed as the future of Angel City and U.S. Soccer, left for Chelsea in a deal worth $1.3–1.5 million. That transfer fee alone equals nearly half of an entire NWSL roster’s annual budget. Chelsea can pay her what she’s worth. Angel City cannot—not because they don’t have the money, but because the rules don’t allow them to spend it.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the NWSL. Owners are told to sell ambition, growth, and global stature, yet they are shackled to a wage model built on fear—fear of overspending, fear of collapse, fear of becoming another WUSA or WPS. That fear is outdated. The league is now backed by billionaires, private equity, and unprecedented commercial interest. It doesn’t need protection from itself anymore. It needs freedom to compete.
Look at what Major League Soccer did when it faced the same problem. MLS also has a salary cap. In 2007, when David Beckham arrived at LA Galaxy, the league created a new mechanism: the Designated Player Rule, now nicknamed “the Beckham Rule.” It allowed clubs to sign up to three players whose salaries exceeded the cap, with only a portion of each contract counting against the team budget. That single change transformed MLS. It opened the door for global stars, boosted the league’s visibility, and gave ambitious clubs a way to compete internationally while keeping the core cap in place for everyone else.
The clearest proof of why this matters came in 2023. Without the Beckham Rule, Lionel Messi’s transfer to Inter Miami would have been structurally impossible. The MLS team salary cap that year was about $5.2 million. Messi’s base salary alone was reported between $12 and $20 million per season—several times larger than an entire team budget. The Designated Player Rule made it possible by capping only a fraction of his wages against the salary budget, while the rest was paid outside the cap and supplemented by unique revenue-sharing deals with Apple and Adidas. Without that mechanism, Messi would never have come to MLS. He’d have stayed in Europe, gone to Saudi Arabia, or retired.
That is the difference between MLS and the NWSL. On the men’s side, the league saw that its strict salary cap model would prevent transformational signings and adjusted the rules. On the women’s side, the NWSL has made no such adjustment. It has no Beckham Rule, no designated player mechanism, no flexibility to pay a Thompson, a Sam Kerr, or an Alexia Putellas at their true market value.
Chelsea’s women’s budget is estimated at three times that of any NWSL team. Barcelona and Lyon operate on another financial planet altogether. These clubs are not capped by artificial limits; they’re fueled by ambition, market forces, and the desire to win. Meanwhile, the NWSL caps its clubs at a level that ensures they will always operate from a position of weakness in the global transfer market.
The result is predictable: the league loses stars. Not fringe players, not veterans at the tail end of their careers, but generational talents. Thompson’s departure isn’t just about one player moving abroad. It’s a signal that the league’s financial structure cannot hold onto its own future.
Defenders of the cap will say it protects parity and prevents reckless spending. But parity doesn’t matter if your best players are gone. And reckless spending isn’t what’s happening in women’s football—underspending is. The NWSL is in danger of becoming a developmental league for Europe, feeding stars to Chelsea, Barcelona, and Lyon, then selling itself as “competitive” because all of its underfunded rosters are equally limited.
There are solutions. The simplest is to borrow directly from MLS. A women’s version of the Beckham Rule—three designated players whose wages can exceed the cap—would immediately change the competitive landscape. It would allow Angel City to keep Thompson, or Portland to sign global talent, without forcing the entire league into an arms race. More radical solutions include revenue-based caps or abolishing the ceiling altogether, replaced with spending safeguards to prevent insolvency.
The Thompson transfer should be treated as a warning shot, not just a headline. Angel City didn’t lose her because they lacked ambition or resources. They lost her because the league forced them to operate in a financial system designed for 2013, not 2025.
If the NWSL wants to be more than a feeder league, it must stop pretending the salary cap is a solution. Right now, it’s the problem.