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Jeff Kassouf
The NWSL Players Association has expressed opposition to the NWSL’s proposal to create a new rule to pay star players outside of the salary cap, further clouding the league’s next steps in competing with top European clubs for elite players, including United States forward Trinity Rodman.
ESPN reported last week that the NWSL’s Board of Governors voted to approve what has been referred to internally as the «High Impact Player» rule (HIP), which would allow teams to spend up to $1 million outside of the salary cap on star players who meet certain criteria.
The proposal still required consultation with the NWSL Players Association, who responded this week with its concerns. NWSL Players Association executive director Meghann Burke told ESPN that the creation of any such rule requires collective bargaining.
«The league is trying to control and interfere by trying to dictate which players get paid what with this pot of funds,» Burke said. «Our position is that teams — GMs, soccer ops, business folks at the team level — are uniquely positioned to make judgment calls about how to structure their rosters, how to negotiate deals.
«We genuinely believe that how you measure a player’s value, both in terms of sporting merit and business criteria, is nuanced. It is more complicated than a handful of bullet points. It is within the purview of the teams to make those judgement calls, and in a system of free agency like we all agreed to, that’s how it works. It’s a free market.»
Instead, Burke said, the PA has proposed the NWSL raise the salary cap by $1 million beginning in 2026, which is the same amount of money that the league is proposing each team could spend through the HIP rule.
In that scenario, teams would still be free to spend up to that much more without any need to restrict who can be paid — there is no maximum salary laid out in the CBA — and the teams that don’t want to spend more don’t have to, which is also the case for the HIP proposal.
The NWSL’s base salary cap in 2026 is $3.5 million before additions for revenue sharing. The final cap number in 2025 was $3.5 million after $200,000 in addition for revenue sharing.
Burke said that the NWSL Players Association received the proposal from the league in the past week and, after engaging with most of the 400-plus players, the widespread, prevailing opinion from is that they do not feel the rule as proposed is a good idea.
«We feel this is a significant decision that doesn’t just solve a short-term problem, but it affects our long-term future,» Burke told ESPN.
«The permanence that it will have with regard to how the market is structured, to how rosters are structured, the locker-room dynamics. We just don’t feel that it delivers anything of value that simply increasing the team salary cap wouldn’t, without having negative consequences.»
A holdup to the High Impact Player rule — or any new mechanism or team funds — could further delay a potential solution to Rodman’s future.
The HIP rule was created by the NWSL’s board with the long term in mind but the urgent need to approve it directly correlates to the Washington Spirit’s need to pay Rodman — arguably the face of the league — fair market value or risk losing her to Europe.
Rodman’s contract expires in less than two weeks.
The NWSL’s proposed new rule is meant to prevent further losses of top talent, including Americans, following the departures of USWNT defender Naomi Girma and forward Alyssa Thompson to Chelsea earlier this year.
The NWSL Players Association’s rejection of the proposed High Impact Player rule comes at a time when a separate, unrelated grievance around Rodman’s future also remains unsolved. The NWSL recently rejected a proposed contract between the Spirit and Rodman, alleging that the deal violated the «spirit» of the rules and accusing Rodman of preemptive «salary cap circumvention.»
The NWSL Players Association then filed a grievance on behalf of Rodman against the league on Dec. 3. In the grievance, the PA said that the contract was legal and that the league’s veto of the deal violated at least five points of the collective bargaining agreement.
Per the CBA, any grievance requires the served party to sustain or deny the claim in writing within 14 days, which would have been Wednesday.
Sources confirmed to ESPN that the parties agreed to an extension for the league’s response. The filed grievance is a separate issue from the proposed High Impact Player rule, other than that both could individually affect Rodman’s future.
Burke said that the Players Association doesn’t believe the HIP proposal is «fully baked» and that the «cleanest most efficient solution» is simply raising the cap by $1 million.
«Part of my assessment of the league’s handling of this matter is that, if they had not rejected the original deal that Trinity struck, which we continue to contend complied with the league rules and the collective bargaining agreement, we still would have had two more years to assess if there were other mechanisms available to teams to retain top-end talent that’s commanding high wages,» Burke told ESPN.
«And we continue to be open to those conversations, but it is disappointing that there could have been a deal struck to retain Trinity without her contract negotiations driving the league’s decisions on this issue.»
What happens next with the proposed High Impact Player rule is unclear. The NWSL Board of Governors met on Tuesday and Wednesday in Miami in their regularly scheduled quarterly meeting.
They had already voted to approve the rule last week ahead of the meeting.
Section 8.16 of the CBA says, «NWSL may in its discretion, after consultation with the NWSLPA, reduce or eliminate the salary cap charge for certain roster classifications.»
What «consultation» should entail is not further defined, but Burke said that the PA does not view the HIP rule as a roster classification.
«This is not that,» Burke said. «This is creating a whole new, separate pot of funds which only a few players are going to be able to access if they meet unilaterally created criteria that, by the way, we believe is all conceived.»
The premise of the High Impact Player rule, as ESPN first reported last week, is that each of the NWSL’s teams can spend up to $1 million above the cap on a player provided that their cap charge meets a certain threshold — expected to be 12% of the total team cap, according to one source — and that the player meets certain criteria.
Criteria explored by the board, according to sources, includes both sporting and commercial benchmarks that included Ballon d’Or rankings and USWNT minutes played in recent years.
The board also discussed the commercial profiles of players and, at least at one point, even considered the idea of third-party media outlet rankings of top world players.
The proposed mechanism differs from MLS’ Designated Player rule in that it would not allow teams to spend unlimited funds on top players.
The High Impact Player idea is more akin to MLS’ Targeted Allocation Money or, even more proximate, the NWSL’s old form of allocation money, which it introduced in late 2019 but had planned to phase out over the next year.
HIP funds, as proposed, would effectively be a more targeted version of allocation money with only certain players eligible.
ESPN has reached out to both the NWSL and the Washington Spirit for comment.
