Lower-division women’s soccer eyes international investment, raised standards

WPSL. UWS. USL W. WISL. It’s easy to get lost in the scattered acronyms of the lower leagues of women’s soccer in the United States, leagues that have existed in various states off and on for decades now. Some of them resemble loose confederations of regional rivals, like WPSL. Some of them, like WISL, don’t even exist yet. What they all have in common is a desire to strengthen the footholds women’s soccer has in the U.S., and all on comparatively meager budgets. 

According to conversations with top executives at four of the biggest lower-division women’s soccer leagues in the U.S., these leagues are also attracting international teams interested in operating teams of their own. 

On first glance, the reasoning makes sense. NWSL only has so many slots available for expansion, and the cost of buying and running a team at that level is rapidly ballooning. But for a modest six figures, perhaps low seven in a D-II league, rich or even modestly successful European women’s teams might be able to establish feeder teams that have access to one of the best and biggest player pools in the world, with thousands of current and former NCAA Division-I athletes and elite high schoolers all also looking for a place to land that isn’t NWSL. 

“I’d say Europe, they’re looking at it very seriously,” said WISL managing director Lynn Berling-Manuel, who confirmed she’d had conversations, albeit on a casual level, with European teams interested in establishing a lower-league foothold in the U.S. “Quite frankly, I’ve been surprised by the interest out of Europe – everybody’s intrigued, just like they’ve been on the men’s side. We are all intrigued (by) the amount of talent in this country. And quite honestly, there are very, very, very few outlets for that talent.”

WPSL president Sean Jones speculated a D-III league might be more appetizing, but agreed that there was potential for a team that wanted to get a big return on a relatively small investment, given the budgets of some of the operators in Europe. “It could literally be an incubator for clubs to say, well, we’re ready to make the jump from amateur but we’re not ready to go to tier two…. My guess is honestly it’s two-and-a-half, three million, your budget.”

“I think we’ve been really forthright about our interest in competing in the global game and the global market,” said USL Super League president Amanda Vandervort. “Even to the point that we’ve made our calendar on the international match calendar. So that opens opportunities for us, not only on the international transfer market, which we know is growing at an exponential rate, but for opportunities with organizations and Federation’s leagues and clubs around the world.”

These aren’t the only new developments in these lower levels of the women’s soccer pyramid. At least two groups are assembling Division-II outdoor women’s leagues; given USSF requirements for D-II sanctioning, these leagues could represent an exciting step forward on multiple fronts.

For this article, The Athletic spoke to staff at four different women’s soccer leagues, each with their own unique challenges and goals, to get an idea of what the lower-division picture looks like in U.S. women’s soccer at the start of 2023. 

WPSL

The venerable Women’s Premier Soccer League, which initially broke away from the original USL W-League in 1998, currently lists 107 teams across over 30 states on its website and rosters around 4,000 players total. The league encompasses different kinds of teams; some sit at the top of a larger youth system and give an opportunity to aged-out players. Some are aimed at giving college players or players out of NCAA eligibility a place to keep playing, or even keep developing in anticipation of finding a pro contract either in NWSL or overseas. There’s also room for post-professional players who want an organized league with more resources than just your local rec league, where they stay in a relatively high-level training environment comparable to what they were used to as pros. 

It is, though, still women’s soccer on a tight budget.

“I would say on the low end our lowest operators are maybe (spending) $15 to $20 (thousand per season),” said league president Sean Jones on a call with The Athletic. “The high end is probably around $100K.”

“What’s interesting, though,” he added, “Is that budget doesn’t necessarily translate to how good of a job they do, either on the field or off the field. We’ve got some clubs with low budgets, they do a fantastic job because they have such a great volunteer base and everyone is pulling on the same rope, but they’re trying to do it for the right reason. So they do a really good job of game day atmosphere, really good job of taking care of their players.”

Going low-budget can also be a mid- to long-term strategy.

“If we can get teams close to breakeven, to where they’re stable and you have the same clubs for five, six, seven, eight years,” said Jones of what he wants to see, “Then in their market, they can go find new sponsorship, because they’ve been around for seven or eight years, which is just more money that they can put into the program.”

Jones agreed that the majority of clubs in WPSL aren’t in it primarily for a profit, but he did say that the ultimate goal was longevity, and for longevity, clubs need stability from season to season.

WPSL is also trying to balance understanding the need for low budgets with players’ needs for good environments and facilities. 

“You can’t set the standards so high that only 20 teams would qualify,” Jones said. “But you also can’t swing so low that it’s any kind of risk to players.” 

There are league minimum standards requiring things like having an athletic trainer or physician present before a game can be played, mandatory background checks for coaches, playable field conditions, minimum seating capacity, and locker rooms for both teams. “We don’t want players out in the parking lot changing,” said Jones.

The costs can quickly add up. Mandating a certain number of seats in stadiums means going from a $500-a-game venue to one costing $1000 per game or more. That extra $500 a game over a 12-game season doesn’t sound like much until you remember many of these teams have an operating budget well under $100k.  

Jones said that what WPSL really focused on in the 2022 season was more on promotion and figuring out how to amplify what the clubs are already doing on their own. “How can we help our clubs promote themselves? How can we get their message out? Most of our clubs have very small staffs. So what can we do? Can we hire folks to help instead of just retweeting and reposting the articles that they’re writing? Can we hire staff writers that can cover that conference and they can do feature stories for them?” 

WPSL also has a growing contingent of U-21 teams, which Jones said was a way for more players to get meaningful minutes in games, since some teams may have as many as 40 players available to train, but only 20-22 will ever get to play. Jones wants to add more U21 teams – a lot more. 

“I would love for our U-21 league to have 150 teams,” he said. “That’s another 3,000, 4,000 players that are getting to experience this level and experience WPSL…. From my perspective, I would be really happy if we did that.”

UWS

United Women’s Soccer currently lists 49 teams on its website, for a league that rosters about 1,000 players total. They just saw a former UWS player, Santa Clarita Blue Heat’s Alyssa Thompson, go #1 overall in the 2023 NWSL draft. Five other first round picks also had stints in UWS or UWS League Two teams. But while league commissioner Joe Ferrara Jr. said in a call with The Athletic that while there was some discussion of UWS becoming a Division-III pro league, for now they will continue as an amateur league that nevertheless is committed to providing a professional atmosphere for its players. That means mandating a certain quality of playing surfaces and providing locker rooms, showers, and livestreamed games.

Like WPSL, UWS isn’t hyperfocused on expansion. 

“We don’t want to water down the league. We don’t have ambitions of trying to be the largest league in the world,” said Ferrara. What he does want to see in the future is being able to play in different windows during the year to continue accommodating collegiate seasons, while also being able to have a longer season overall.  

League executive director Stephanie Cleaves, also a co-owner of the Lancaster Inferno in Pennsylvania, said that they’re better able to oversee teams and ensure that they meet the league’s standards because they’re smaller than WPSL, and that if UWS offers a certain quality, it forces other leagues to be able to match those standards in order to remain enticing to players.

Cleaves pointed out that UWS has added teams since 2020, despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. When everything shut down in 2020, she said, they used that year to work on expansion. “Usually it’s just teams coming to us and then connections that we have,” she said. “But actually doing our research and seeking out teams that would be a good fit, we really used that time to do that.” 

“Our vision is to be the preeminent pro-am league in North America,” said Cleaves. 

UWS won’t be pursuing D-III sanctioning yet, with Cleaves pointing out that the requirement for each club to have a 35% principal owner worth at least $5M presents a big roadblock. The roadblock is compounded by investors historically being dismissive of choosing women’s sports over men’s, although that is certainly changing now. 

“It can’t always be about the bottom line, how much money you’ll make right away,” Cleaves said of growing local women’s soccer. “It’s about investing, and then it takes time to grow it. So finding investors that understand that it takes $40,000 to probably $100,000 to operate a team at this level. And then at the D-III level that we’re exploring it’s like $800,000 to $1.2 million.” 

You can see this growth-over-profit thinking reflected in UWS League Two, which was launched in 2020 for U-20 and U-23 players. Cleaves called it a great entry point for teams to get their feet wet and understand how to operate a team and what it takes to fulfill UWS’ standards, but with less travel required. 

WISL

The Women’s Independent Soccer League is a Division-II pro league scheduled to start play in 2024. WISL is a development of the men’s National Independent Soccer Association (NISA), which originally tried partnering with UWS to establish a pro women’s league before the leagues parted ways in March 2021. That led to the current iteration of WISL, headed by managing director Lynn Berling-Manuel, who also spent seven years as CEO of United Soccer Coaches. 

A primary differentiator between WISL and other leagues is its pending Division-II sanctioning, which carries certain minimum standards from the U.S. Soccer Federation. 

To meet those requirements, an outdoor women’s league must have:

• At least six teams to initially apply
• At least eight teams by year three
• A majority of markets with a population of 500,000 or more
• Minimum seating capacity of 2,000 in every stadium
• Every team secures a lease on its home stadium for the season at least 120 days before the season starts
• Every team has at least $50,000 to operate each season
• Ownership groups must have the financial capacity to operate their team for three years
• One principle owner per team with at least a 35% controlling interest and an individual net worth of at least $7.5M, not including the value of the team

“U.S. Soccer, to its credit, does not want to see organizations of any kind fail,” said Berling-Manuel. “So the sanctioning process, it’s tough. Our application is very deep.” 

Berling-Manuel said that includes extensive due diligence on owners and site visits to facilities, among other hurdles. 

At the moment, WISL intends to apply with eight initial teams, though Berling-Manuel said that wasn’t a guaranteed number at this stage. Berling-Manuel said that she has been having conversations with multiple clubs in multiple situations, from amateur clubs ready to make the leap to clubs outside of the U.S. looking to invest in a lower division team as a way to feed talent to their top division home teams. They’re considering things like being able to cluster teams geographically, but being realistic that sometimes the right investor won’t be perfect in terms of travel logistics.

She pointed to the current WPSL champions California Storm (now competing in USL W as well as WPSL) as an example of a nominally amateur team that nevertheless has what she characterized as a “very sophisticated” operation, given things like their staff and ability to travel. The Storm have, in the past, counted players like Leslie Osborne, Sissi, and a young Alex Morgan among their ranks. “(The Storm) have created deep community partnerships with nonprofit organizations, the city. They think in a very businesslike way, but are doing it not for profit, basically. And that’s pretty amazing,” she said. 

And, she said, WISL wants to emphasize the power of community sports, with teams hopefully drawing heavily from local talent. 

“American soccer has become very much a club-based sport from bottom to top,” she said. “And yet, we don’t tend to embrace it – the way I would like to see (it) is, say, high school soccer, high school sports. When we talk about community sports, high school is a little sports engine in every community in America.” Another comparison she made was to AAA baseball, with teams that are deeply community-based and widespread across many markets that aren’t necessarily big metropolitan centers. 

Berling-Manuel also said that WISL wants to provide opportunities for off the field as well, mandating that every position have two qualified female or BIPOC candidates included in the interview process at both the team and league levels.

“We would love to see all of our coaches be women. There are far too few women coaches at a high level in this country,” she said. “They’ve made it daunting in terms of its expense. There’s a lot of barriers that are very significant. They’ve tried to fix that, but I think that’s really tough. And so we would be hopeful that if not head coaches, we want to make sure that you coaches and specialty coaches, other positions, are as much women-focused as possible.” 

USL W/Super League

USL W played its first season in 2022. The league comprises approximately 1500 players in 44 teams across 20 states. 71% of those players were NCAA Division-I players, mostly sophomores. Nineteen of those players ended up signing pro contracts, including Racing Louisville’s Emily Madril for BK Häcken FF in Sweden, Minnesota Aurora’s Morgan Turner for SCU Torreense in Portugal, Flint City AFC’s Zoe Hudson for Valadares Gaia FC, also in Portugal, and Chattanooga Red Wolves’ Hannah Tillett for KR Reykjavik in Iceland. USL W plans to expand to 65 clubs in 2023, and is targeting 100 clubs by 2026.

USL is also preparing to launch its own Division-II women’s league, the Super League, set to kick off in August 2024 (pushed back from August 2023), as well as implementing a girls’ academy similar to the one on the boys’ side. Critically, the girls’ academy will not use age banding as part of an effort to make the academies truly integral in the development pathway, with the Super League team at the top. “If you’re old enough, you’re good enough,” said Super League president Amanda Vandervort.

Vandervort told The Athletic that USL W teams carried about 130 coaches and assistant coaches and that their season provided 1100 referee assignments. 

The referee piece was something she didn’t want overlooked. “I genuinely think referees is one of the key issues that we as a collective soccer community really need to address in the coming year, much less the coming five to 10 years,” she said. 

According to USL’s research, most referees tend to quit around college and into their early twenties, dropping off before they can truly enter the pipeline of the Professional Referees Organization (PRO), which assigns officials for MLS, NWSL, USL, and FIFA competitions. 

“Part of our efforts with W League is thinking about how can we engage the pre-professional landscape here at the USL to give them opportunities to get a license, give them opportunities to get exposure or even recognize that being a referee is a career path coming out of their playing,” said Vandervort.

Player satisfaction is also high in the W, according to Vandervort, with 97% of players and coaches the W surveyed saying they would return next season and that they would recommend the W league to a friend. 

“That’s huge,” she said. “That’s a huge data point for us to say they’re in an environment that’s going to attract future talent.”

Vandervort said that there has been “significant” interest from ownership groups for Super League, particularly since NWSL currently only carries 12 teams. 

“We believe there’s a vast opportunity for both players and fans in many, many other cities across the country,” she said. “For us, our corporate partnerships, (any) future media deal, the quality of our ownership groups, those are key things that we’re thinking about in building this league for the long term…I think you’ll see expansion for our first couple of years. You’ll start with these clubs really building regional rivalries.”

Vandervort pointed out that USL already has a lot of existing infrastructure, with over 100 employees at the league office in Florida administering the Championship, League One and League Two in the men’s side and the Super Y league in the youth space along with USL W. That’s something that other leagues don’t really have at the moment – a big, centralized league office to keep things coordinated.

But as Ferrara and Cleaves pointed out, more resources means more barriers to entry, and less individual owner control over their teams. 

Open Cup

Last, but certainly not least, everyone is interested in establishing a women’s Open Cup, although to varying degrees and with different reservations due to the complications that come from having to schedule around college players, with their unavailability from February through May, and again from September to November.

“An Open Cup would be fantastic,” said Jones, “If we could figure out a way for it to happen during the summer.” Without the right scheduling, Jones didn’t see a way for WPSL to realistically compete, given that they already only have a roughly 12-week window and wouldn’t have many squads who could be available in February through March due to the NCAA spring season, since so many of them are heavily college-dependent for their rosters.

“If you could do it May through early August, we could participate right. But if it’s this long, extended thing, it just just can’t happen,” Jones said. “I just don’t see it happening until those (scheduling) issues are overcome.”

“I think there’s a formula there,” said Ferrara. “The college component for many of us, puts a little wrinkle in it. But we had to do it here on the men’s side, and we accomplished it. So I don’t see why we couldn’t accomplish the same thing on a woman’s side.”

“We also fully expect to participate in U.S. Open Cup,” said Vandervort. “I think we want and expect U.S. Open Cup to happen in this country.”

“There’s other gaps too, you know,” Vandervort added. “Let’s look at areas like a Club World Cup that doesn’t exist today. Let’s look at a CONCACAF Champions League for women.”

“I think anytime there’s competition leaguewide I think it’s good because it makes us step up our game,” said Jones. Not just with Open Cup, but with the standards each league sets to provide for its staff, players, and fans. “It makes us do a better job. It makes us listen to our teams and try to be more help because we’re competing with another league now for those teams.”

(Photo: Jeremy Olson/ISI Photos/Getty Images)