The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  Eventually, the Vancouver Whitecaps ended up being the only MLS team to say yes—they were not only interested but were going to join the league. That meant Paulson and the Portland Timbers would join, too.

  That is, until the proverbial 11th hour, when issues with the Canadian federation made entry into the league more complicated than the Whitecaps thought. Vancouver backed out and Gulati thought the league would have to be put on hold.

  “Merritt was in as long as Vancouver was in, but once Vancouver dropped out—and that was late in the game—I thought we were in trouble,” Gulati says. “We weren’t going to start the league with only seven teams, so I thought we were out of luck.”

  Paulson wanted an MLS rival to join—Seattle or Vancouver—but continued to think about the idea anyway, even after both declined. There had never been a professional women’s soccer team in Portland, but he knew the team at the University of Portland regularly drew large crowds.

  Maybe the issue wasn’t the soccer itself—maybe the issue was the people behind the scenes running the previous failed attempts at a women’s league? Maybe the Timbers could make it work? His wife, Heather, pushed him to do it.

  He already knew what it would cost to run a team. Lodging and travel expenses could be estimated based on the Timbers. The budget cap would be low with national team players subsidized by U.S. Soccer.

  The Timbers’ more than 100 employees could work for the women’s team too, meaning the new team would instantly inherit a large, built in support staff. That offered a distinct advantage over a club like the Boston Breakers, where the club’s general manager was not only doing GM-level duties, like scouting and signing players, but was writing the game-day program and handling logistics for sponsorship signage.

  The question was whether the revenues could support the costs of running a women’s team, which hadn’t happened with the clubs in the previous two leagues.

  “If I can get comfortable financially with what a worst-case scenario is, then we can manage any negative PR if it’s not successful,” Paulson told Mike Golub, the Timbers’ head of business. “But if we do this, let’s launch this thing and not have it be a second-tier product. Let’s put our full weight of the organization behind it and give it every chance to be successful.”

  Their realistic goal was around 5,000 paying fans per game, but they also considered a worst-case scenario of around just 2,000. Financially, they thought they could make it work. After some soul-searching and number crunching, Portland was officially in. The Timbers were set to start a new women’s team: the Portland Thorns.

  The league now had eight teams. On November 21, 2012, U.S. Soccer announced it was launching the National Women’s Soccer League and play would begin in about five months.

  Now, there was officially a league—but what it didn’t have quite yet was the players of the national team.

  * * *

  Coinciding with the planning to launch the NWSL was another round of contract negotiations between the national team and the U.S. Soccer Federation.

  The national team’s collective bargaining agreement expired at the end of 2012, and now the NWSL became a key piece of the negotiations. If getting a contract done was challenging in normal circumstances, the addition of launching the NWSL added a new wrinkle.

  The national team hadn’t formally agreed to play in the NWSL—there was no contract in place and negotiations were ongoing—but because of the aggressive timeline to launch the league by spring of 2013, national team players needed to start being allocated to teams immediately. The players, who generally wanted the league and had used the same allocation system in the WUSA and WPS, agreed to start choosing their preferred destinations.

  Brian Budzinski was sitting at his desk when he noticed Becky Sauerbrunn had started following FC Kansas City on Twitter. The process of matching up players with teams for allocations was only at the beginning. Sauerbrunn, a skilled veteran centerback, would be a defensive piece the team could build around. So, he turned to his partner, Greg Likens, and said, “I think we should DM her and talk to her about Kansas City.”

  He hesitated to send the direct message at first. Teams were explicitly forbidden from contacting players and trying to influence their allocation lists. The league commissioner, Cheryl Bailey, sent out a memo warning teams not to contact players. Instead, owners were asked to send a presentation to the league, which would then be distributed to the national team players.

  But knowing that most of the players on the national team had already played, at some point, for the Western New York Flash, the Chicago Red Stars, the Boston Breakers, or Sky Blue FC, Budzinski determined that the other franchises were probably already secretly in touch with players. He had no contact information for any players, but now that Sauerbrunn and the FC Kansas City account followed each other, the direct message option was available for Budzinski.

  So, he pushed some nerves aside, knowing he was breaking the rule, and he DM’d her: “Hey Becky, this is Brian Budzinski and Greg Likens with FC Kansas City. We just wanted to see if you had any questions or had time to chat about our club.”

  A lot of players were wary of FC Kansas City—the team had a new coach no one had heard of, Vlatko Andonovski, and little was known about the team’s facilities except that home games were going to be played at a high school stadium. Some players, like Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger, listed it as their one “veto,” where they refused to go.

  But that DM started a dialogue, and through phone chats with Sauerbrunn, Budzinski and the owners behind FC Kansas City started to realize the sorts of things they needed to offer players.

  “The one thing that stood out to us was she asked a lot of questions,” Budzinski says. “Her questions and her feedback is the number one reason we had a training location for the team on grass.”

  This was the sort of minimum-standard issue the national team players would end up spending every season pushing for—an unofficial part of being an allocated player in the NWSL—and the work had already begun before the league even launched.

  The allocation process in Portland, meanwhile, went very differently. Merritt Paulson and the Portland Thorns essentially had their pick of the bunch. But it had been established well before the allocation process that the Thorns would be getting Alex Morgan, the most marketable player on the national team. Her preferred destinations included Portland and Seattle, but Paulson targeted Morgan as soon as he agreed to join the league.

  “It wasn’t a quid pro quo, but I definitely said to Sunil: If I’m going to be the one MLS team coming, I certainly want to make sure we get some terrific players to build around,” Paulson says. “We had Hope Solo last on our list. So, we had one player that we didn’t want anywhere near the team, and then Alex was the big ask for us.”

  By January 2013, U.S. Soccer had announced its list of allocated players. After taking into consideration the top choices of each player, the players were matched to clubs. The process was complicated by the fact that many players wanted to go to the same teams, with the Portland Thorns and the Seattle Reign being the two most popular choices. The Western New York Flash and FC Kansas City, meanwhile, had few takers, but lucked out that Abby Wambach, who was from Rochester, New York, agreed to go to the Flash in her hometown and Sauerbrunn, who was from Missouri, agreed to go to Kansas City.

  “Allocation was a big issue for the players,” says Gulati. “And what we ended up with in terms of the players’ preferences was pretty incredible. Around 75 percent of them got their first choice, and 20 percent got their second choice.”

  The league was moving full steam ahead. But for at least some players, it was moving too fast. They worried that they were being allocated to teams they knew nothing about and they were stuck asking to play for specific teams based on little information.

  “With all this new excitement about the NWSL, there was still massive concern amongst the players,” says Hope Solo. “We didn’t know the ownership groups, we didn’t know th
e cities, we didn’t know the venues, we didn’t know the trainers—things that are important to players. U.S. Soccer wanted us to choose what cities we want to play for without knowing the coaches and the venues. It was counting our chickens before the eggs, you know? This is our profession.”

  * * *

  Now that the NWSL had become part of collective bargaining agreement negotiations because the players would be contracted by U.S. Soccer to play in the league, there was a new sense of urgency. The players had already been allocated to play in the NWSL and they still needed a contract.

  The players needed to feel comfortable with the unknown league. The possibility loomed that they could be locked into playing for these unfamiliar clubs or risk their national team status. There was urgency, too, from the federation, which wanted a firm commitment from the players that they would play in the league.

  By the time the national team prepared to compete in the 2013 Algarve Cup in late February and early March, collective bargaining agreement negotiations had ramped up considerably. With the team’s existing contract having been expired since the end of 2012, the players were also no longer bound by the no-strike clause in their contract and a boycott was on the table.

  In February 2013, while the team was in Nashville for their final friendly match before the Algarve Cup started, discussion turned to whether they should go on strike and skip the upcoming tournament in Portugal.

  “We decided as a team that we want to go on strike to get more money for our new CBA, and we were going to go on strike until we understood everything about the NWSL, before we were forced to decide which team to play for in allocation,” says Hope Solo. “There were a few players in the room that didn’t know how to vote, but the rest of the team raised our hands and said it’s time to take a stand.”

  Everyone was on the clock, though. The NWSL’s preseason camps were set to start during the Algarve Cup, and if the national team went on strike, it could’ve cast the entire launch of the NWSL into uncertainty.

  Ultimately, the strike never happened. Some players felt, after speaking with the team’s attorney, John Langel, that striking before the Algarve Cup didn’t offer enough leverage. They were better off going to Portugal and continuing negotiations there with striking as an option after the tournament, before the start of the NWSL. They believed the launch of the new league offered the urgency that could make a strike effective.

  For Solo, who pushed for the strike, it was frustrating to see her teammates back off so quickly. Even though the Algarve Cup was a relatively minor tournament, it was the biggest national team event on the calendar until the 2015 World Cup, two and a half years away.

  The advice of the team’s longtime attorney to forgo the pre–Algarve Cup strike amounted to taking the federation’s side, as far as Solo was concerned. By that point, she had already lost faith in Langel’s ability to fight for the team and months earlier had started, on her own, looking for someone else who could represent the team.

  “It was really empowering for us. We finally were taking a huge stance against U.S. Soccer—we said, We’re putting our foot down, we’re going on strike, we mean business,” Solo says. “Well, it took about one phone call from John Langel to scare us into backing down and not going on strike.”

  “It was a moment where I realized that if we can back down that easily and we can get intimidated, then U.S. Soccer has the upper hand on us at all points in time because it didn’t take that much,” she adds. “We had the courage to say we were going to go on strike, and then, within a few days, we decided, no, we’ll get on the plane and play in Portugal.”

  During the Algarve Cup, discussions within the team continued and Langel met with U.S. Soccer for negotiations while the players were out of the country. By the time they got back, they were close to a deal with U.S. Soccer that would cover them both in the NWSL and in case the league folded.

  Striking was still on the table, but the players no longer felt it was necessary. Asked about a strike, U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati says he was never made aware that the team was considering it.

  In the end, the contract the two sides agreed to offered large increases in compensation for the national team. If the NWSL couldn’t get off the ground, salaries would go up between $13,000 and $31,000, depending on each player’s tier. But with the new league in place, salaries would stay almost the same while players would get an extra $50,000 NWSL salary. On top of their guaranteed income, more money than ever was available through performance bonuses and a $1.20 cut of every national team game ticket sold that would be put into a team pool.

  In the end, the biggest sticking point, however, wasn’t the compensation—it was locking the players into the NWSL. It became a requirement in their national team contract, and there was no backing out if the players didn’t like their club teams.

  “The issue with the NWSL was commitment,” says Langel. “The players had to make a commitment that they essentially would play in the league for two of the four years of the contract. That, in the end, was the big concern.”

  The final contract left them with one of two options: They could play abroad and then join the NWSL for the 2015 and 2016 seasons, or they could play in the NWSL immediately and have the option to play overseas in 2015 or 2016.

  For the national team players who could get offers from European teams owned by wealthy top-tier men’s clubs, like Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique Lyonnais, it could be a lucrative option. Megan Rapinoe, for example, signed a contract to play in France before joining the NWSL on a $14,000-per-month salary—far more than she could earn playing for an American club. But the players wanted to grow the game at home in the United States and committed themselves to the NWSL.

  It was a bit of a leap of faith on the players’ parts—not just to agree to play in this league that they didn’t know much about but to tie it so directly with their national team contracts. For the players, who wanted a league and saw it as vital for the growth of the women’s game, it was worth taking the chance.

  “As with most things in our team, it came down to a vote,” Becky Sauerbrunn says. “And the vote was: Let’s give this league a shot. Let’s go for it.”

  With the NWSL preseason already underway, the contract the federation and the players agreed to was a memorandum of understanding—a hasty replacement for a full collective bargaining agreement—to speed the process along. That MOU wasn’t as complete as maybe it should’ve been, but at the time, it was seen as the best the two sides could do before the launch of the NWSL. One week after the NWSL’s preseason started, the national team players signed their new contract and started to join their new NWSL clubs.

  “If we had another six months, could we have gotten more clarity on some of the points? That’s always the case,” Gulati says now. “Deadlines matter in CBAs—most deals get done in the 11th hour, and it was the case with this one.”

  As much as the players went out on a limb to help launch the league, the federation did, too. On U.S. Soccer’s part, it was a significant investment in the women’s game, and the federation spent almost $250,000 just getting the league operations started in 2013. That investment would grow year to year, and with operations and all the national team player salaries combined, U.S. Soccer eventually put $10 million into the league over the course of its first six seasons.

  The national team did its part to push the federation to want to invest. The team made back-to-back finals in the World Cup and the Olympics, winning gold in London, and the popularity of women’s soccer was on the rise. U.S. Soccer needed to keep that going. After all, the organization’s mission statement was “to make soccer, in all its forms, a preeminent sport in the United States and to continue the development of soccer at all recreational and competitive levels.”

  The league would go on to outlast its architect, Sunil Gulati, who left the federation in 2018 after the men’s team failed to qualify for the World Cup. While the WUSA and WPS had lasted just three years each, the NW
SL is going strong into its seventh season in 2019. One big reason for that has been U.S. Soccer’s investment. Clubs don’t need to pay the salaries for their biggest stars, the players of the national team.

  The federation could’ve continued to focus on hosting residency camps for the national team, but that would have benefited only a limited set of players. A league, rather, would have a wide-ranging positive impact on the growth of the women’s game—that’s why U.S. Soccer had been willing to invest as much as it did in the NWSL.

  “The benefits of residency are for a small group of players in preparation for an event. The benefits of a league, if you can make it work, are far beyond that,” Gulati says. “You’re developing markets, you’re developing coaches, you’re developing referees, you’re developing administrators, you’re developing fans across the country for the women’s game. For everything other than the short-term technical preparation of the national team for a competition, it’s a far better setup.”

  * * *

  On April 21, 2013, when the Portland Thorns prepared to host their first-ever home game, there was a big-game feel at Jeld-Wen Field.

  Fans who had experienced the passionate and vibrant supporters’ culture of the Timbers brought it to the Thorns and welcomed the players from the stands with a huge red-and-white banner display known as a tifo. They waved flags and chanted “P-T-F-C!” for a women’s team that hadn’t existed a few months ago.

  As the players stood on the field for the national anthem, some of them looked around at the crowd, astonished by how it filled all parts of the stadium. In all, 16,479 people showed up. It was almost triple the crowd of the NWSL’s debut match a couple of weeks earlier at FC Kansas City.