Drafted and shafted: Life in the NWSL
Photography: Carmen Jaspersen/DPA/PA Images
If you’re a European football fan, it’s easy to assume that players have a lot of power. In the men’s game, in particular, players can dictate who they sign for and even get managers sacked. Although on a far smaller scale in the women’s game, it’s not necessarily the norm worldwide. “When I was growing up, kids wanted to score goals not stop them. Like lots of goalkeepers, I took up the role almost by chance. I was playing with a friend for a boy’s team and they were short of goalkeepers one day, so I stepped up. I’ve been playing in goal ever since.
Drafting
If you skip across the pond, the US system is completely different. Maybe it’s because of the heavy focus on playing sports at university level, with huge consumer interest in collegiate sports that feeds into the first professional steps athletes make when graduating: the [entry] draft.
Unlike elsewhere in the world, American leagues (American football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey and of course, soccer) were founded with ideas of parity and the order of the draft is usually dictated by who performed worst over the previous season; those who finished bottom will usually be top of the draft order.
During entry drafts, teams will take turns picking players to sign – like an expanded and nightmarish version of picking out teams for a game of tag on the playground – although, not every draftee will get a contract. For the players leaving university, never having played professionally before, there is little say to be had: they will go where they’re drafted.
For Brianna Visalli, going through the rollercoaster of the draft was just the beginning of a tumultuous time in the NWSL (National Women’s Soccer League). The midfielder failed to make the grade at the Chicago Red Stars but instead of being waived by the team, she was kept on as a reserve. As the Red Stars drafted Visalli, they owned her domestic rights.
Brianna Visalli and Arnim Whisler during the 2018 NWSL College Draft
Photographer: Jose L. Argueta/Zuma Press/PA Images
“There would have to be a trade for me but you’re not really worth anything when you’re a reserve so, you’re kind of barred from going to any other club,” Visalli said. “That’s just a reality and I’m not saying it in a negative way; I wasn’t a tradable asset and I knew that I couldn’t compete for other teams so had to leave the country.”
The only other way Visalli could have found another club in NWSL is if the Red Stars had opted to waive her before the roster freeze date, which is the point from which no changes can be made until after the NWSL Championship. As it was, the young player found herself in limbo, working three jobs to keep her hopes of turning pro a reality.
Trading
To Americans, trades are a normal part of their sports league structures and they can occur at any time, there’s no need for a ‘transfer window’. As defender Amanda Frisbie explains, trades can happen at any time of day, even during a match!
“If you take the NBA, there are times where players are trading during a game that they're playing, and they find out they've been traded after the game now I'm like, ‘Yeah it sucks, but they're also getting paid millions.’”
But NWSL is a world away from the NBA. In NWSL, players can play full-time but the sums they earn are paltry with the minimum salary ($16,538) in the league just a third of the average annual income in the USA. Even the maximum salary, that most will not be on, is only around the current median wage for the USA ($46,200).
The reality is that players will stay with host families or in shared accommodation sourced by their clubs, unlike athletes in the NFL, for instance, who will make enough to set themselves up.
Mentality
For Frisbie, a journeywoman who has been involved in her fair share of rough trades, the trading system fosters a dog-eat-dog atmosphere and she’s been left feeling like she’s playing for her own survival during spells in the NWSL.
Of her time in America the native Texan said: “When you play NWSL, every day is like you're playing for survival. You gotta perform, you gotta because you might get traded or you might get waived and you're terrified.”
“And it may not be for every player because there are players who are pretty much guaranteed to play no matter what and are probably comfortable and knowing that they're always going to have a spot,” she continues. “But players like myself, who've bounced around, they know the feeling of just playing scared all the time; I always say playing in the US, it’s just a more selfish kind of environment.”
“When you play NWSL, every day is like you’re playing for survival. You gotta perform, you gotta because you might get traded or you might get waived and you’re terrified”
Having balanced her time in NWSL with stints in Europe and Australia, the defender much prefers the culture she has found outside of the American league. As a player contracted to a team for a season, there is a natural camaraderie, as she explains.
“You're not going to get dropped or traded at any moment, so you're really able to play for the organisation that you're playing for,” she explains. “It's like more of a family culture; you're playing for the person next to you, you're not playing for yourself or worrying about this and that: you want to win for the club.”
For Tiffany Weimer, playing for survival is a good way to explain the feeling for some in the league, but for the veteran of two US pro leagues, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“This is also why it’s likely one of the most competitive leagues in the world,” she explains. “When you have training sessions every day within each club where you’re playing for not only a spot in the starting 11 but for a spot on the team, it makes the environment a spicy one.”
However, Weimer also admits: “You really wake up every morning not knowing if you will have a job or not.” It’s a sentiment echoed by Canadian international, Janine Beckie, “I know that there’s a lot of players that do go game to game with the worry that they're going to get traded and that's not that's not any way to play, that's an unnecessary pressure.”
Blockbusters
Drafted to the Seattle Reign (now Reign FC) out of university, Frisbie said she was left ‘blindsided’ after being traded to Western New York Flash (now North Carolina Courage). As Laura Harvey, her coach at the time, was trying to facilitate a move for Abby Wambach, with Sydney Leroux going in the other direction, the trade expanded to include both Amber Brooks and Frisbie as well as a draft pick. In the end, Leroux and Frisbie went to the Flash as Wambach and Brooks moved to Seattle, taking a first-round 2016 draft pick with them for the Reign. The Seattle coach admitted to Frisbie that the idea of throwing the defender into the trade wasn’t a plan she had from the outset but rather came up organically during the negotiations. As everything happened and changed around her, Frisbie didn’t have time to dwell and less than 24 hours later, she was already at her new team, unboxing her hastily packed belongings.
Beckie tells a similar story, the attacker thrown into the deal that saw Carli Lloyd return to her native New Jersey to play for Sky Blue. One of the more confusing trades to follow in NWSL in recent times, Lloyd and Beckie both left the Houston Dash to join Sky Blue as Sam Kerr and Nikki Stanton moved from Sky Blue to the Red Stars, with the Chicago team sending Christen Press to Houston and Jen Hoy to New Jersey.
Janine Beckie playing for Sky Blue FC vs Chicago Red Stars, July 2018.
Photographer: Howard C. Smith/Zuma Press/PA Images
A move that should have benefited all teams, but not all players involved agreed. The US national team player was in no mood to move to a Dash team that had a less than pristine reputation around the league, the attacker eventually using her clout to move to the Utah Royals.
But for Beckie, who was happy in Texas, the trade and the specifics of how it was handled left her with a sour taste.
“It didn’t make me feel very valued as a player and I think that anyone that saw what happened and anyone that knows me, very much understood me feeling that way. I don't think it was handled very well: the communication behind my trade wasn’t at all professional and if I’m honest, I don't think that it was that necessary. But, you know, it's professional sports.”
Having left NWSL in 2018 and now into her second season with Manchester City, there is still a clear frustration in Beckie’s voice as she recounts her story.
“It's, unfortunately, the way that the league works, I think anyone that's been traded, whether they wanted to be traded or not, would agree with the fact that players' rights, the wages and the way NWSL functions from a player's rights standpoint, it needs to change. I don't think it's fair to the player.”
Just like for Frisbie and Weimer, a move to Europe has opened the Canadian’s eyes considerably.
“Now being in England and understanding how it works over here, I can see the NWSL players really don't have any of their own rights and that's not good enough. We want to push the game forward and I think there’s a lot of work off the field that needs to happen in order for players to want to come and play in NWSL. When I come over here and people hear my story, it doesn't really make them want to go over there.”
Like Beckie when she shares her cautionary tale, Frisbie doesn’t pull any punches if she talks to players who’ve never played in the NWSL if and when they enquire about the league.
“It definitely plays with your head,” she said. “When I talk to players, the one thing that I tell them – if I were to give advice – is that it’s going to be an emotional rollercoaster all the time. You could wake up on Monday, go to training, in the training be like, ‘Hell yeah I killed that! I’m going to be fine.’ And then Tuesday you have a bad practice and it’s like, ‘I’m not going to be playing next weekend,’ and you’re not because you had one bad practice. So, one week you could be on cloud nine and the next it could be like, ‘I’m not going to be here’.” She concluded, “Overseas it’s just not like that at all.”
On the road again
Managing just four appearances in 2015 for the Flash, Frisbie, like a lot of her teammates, wasn’t happy with then coach Aaran Lines and at the end of the season, asked to be traded. The defender got her wish and moved to Kansas City (now Utah Royals) but she failed to hit her stride and opted to try her hand in Europe.
A half-season move to Stjarnan was a profitable one for Frisbie who won her first senior silverware as the Icelandic club claimed the Úrvalsdeild title for the fourth time in their history. All too soon the season wound to a close and the Texan was calling her agent to facilitate a move back to the NWSL. Happy after a season with the Boston Breakers, Frisbie opted to spend the NWSL offseason, as many of her compatriots do, in the Australian W-League and it was whilst she was in Perth that she found out the Breakers were folding. Already yearning to be back in the States, she decided against trying to go back to Europe and opted instead to go into the dispersal draft with her fellow Breakers.
Amanda Frisbie, Sky Blue FC vs North Carolina Courage July 2018.
Photographer: Howard C. Smith/Zuma Press/PA Images
Frisbie recalls the experience as a similar one to the college draft, with the exception that she was sat in bed, almost 10,000 miles from home. Anxiously waiting to see if she would get picked up, the defender admits Sky Blue was the last place she wanted to go. When the New Jersey side picked her up, not only she did she almost not join up with the team, but at 25, she was all but ready to call time on her career.
“I honestly thought about retiring, I guess at that point too because my career had just been a rollercoaster of not being in great situations. It had been a lot so I got to the point of being like, ‘Okay… should I keep doing this? Like, is it worth it? Really?’”
Ultimately, like Beckie, Frisbie made the best of the hand dealt to her and made her way to Sky Blue.
Elsewhere, Lotta Ökvist tells a similar cautionary tale. Opting to leave Damallsvenskan in her native Sweden for the first time around her 21st birthday, she thought she was heading to Boston to play for Matt Beard but, like all the Breakers, was given the news about the team and was left with 24 hours to decide on her next move. Having already passed on the Swedish clubs who were interested in signing her, Ökvist felt her options were limited and having made the decision to play in the NWSL, decided to take the plunge and agreed to go through the dispersal draft.
Picked up by the Dash, the young Swede lasted two weeks in Houston before she was informed that she had been traded to the Orlando Pride. Having surrendered their 2019 third round college draft pick for Ökvist – a pick Houston would go on to use on Jazmin Jackmon, a defender who made the bench five times in the 2019 season but didn’t play a single minute – the Pride were looking for depth but ultimately found the Swede surplus to requirements. Returning to Sweden that summer, the Boston/Houston/Orlando player who hadn’t managed a minute during her stint in NWSL remained grateful for the chance and with the help of Pride coach, Tom Sermanni, found a team to move to for the second half of the season.
Lotta Okvist now plays for Manchester Utd in the English WSL. Photographer: Andrew Yates/Sportimage/PA Images
Control
If playing scared wasn’t enough, there is also the feeling of a lack of control over your own life when you play in NWSL. For Beckie, who was comfortable at the Dash, she never had any worries of being traded until she got wind that her future wasn’t as stable as she thought it was. She then tried, and failed, to find out just what was happening.
“I called the general manager,” she started. “He was as honest with me as he could be and hinted to me that something was in the works, but he couldn't share what it was. And that kind of rubbed me the wrong way, because I'm like, it’s my life that you're talking about here. I felt I should have some knowledge about it. I understand why he couldn't tell me but again, that just shouldn't be a thing for a player to call up asking about their own future and get no information.”
But it’s not just the active players in the American league that fall foul of the rules around the ownership of rights as Frisbie discovered during her first spell outside of America. Planning a return to NWSL, the defender realised it wouldn’t be as straightforward as she first thought after an article was published about her wanting to return. Her last club, Kansas, no longer had her rights and after the article came out, someone laid claim to her as a Discovery Player. As per the league’s rules, a discovery player is simply any player [domestic or international] who isn’t currently under contract in the NWSL: Frisbie, just like Ada Hegerberg or Jenna Schillaci or literally anyone, is eligible to be a discovery player.
Just like getting drafted or traded, players have little say in their destination should a team lay claim through their discovery list. Frisbie succinctly describes the discovery process as: “A crazy thing.” Still in Iceland at the time, she and her agent were informed that someone had acquired her rights as a discovery player but not who and to what end. The defender did eventually find out who had claimed her and that they had done so with the plan to trade her, all whilst she was playing for Stjarnan. For Frisbie there was no control as she conceded, “You’re being used like a pawn.”
Relax
Weimer, like Ökvist and Frisbie was another player who found herself involved in the Boston Breakers dispersal draft in 2018. Picked up by the Washington Spirit but traded to the Dash, Weimer returned to Europe to ply her trade at her sixth club outside of America, her 14th and final in total in 12 years as a pro. Heading to a country she’d never played in before, there was still comfort in the contractual safety of Nordsjælland despite the lack of familiarity, as she said about her time abroad.
“Most of my pro career was played overseas. As you can imagine, it was comforting to know that once I signed a contract, I had a job for the whole season. That once I moved into an apartment and tried to make it a home, that I would not be moved to another city at the drop of a dime. And if I didn’t want to stay at that club, I could leave anytime. Life overseas for me was much less stressful than playing in the US.”
Tiffany Weimer, Washington Spirit. Photographer: Howard C. Smith/Zuma Press/PA Images
With a rapidly deteriorating situation at Sky Blue, players in New Jersey were reaching breaking point and after one season Frisbie was desperate for an out.
“Mentally it was a lot and I just needed to get out, that was the most toxic situation in the league I’d been in – and that’s saying a lot because New York was pretty bad. Yet in every way: from the top down from the owners, to all the way down just to the quality of facilities and all that stuff. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sick of this, I need to get out, I need a mental break from this league,’” she explained
But the defender knew that no one had come out of the 2018 season smelling of roses. The team had managed just one win in 24 matches and even that had come on the last day of the season. With the help of her agent, she managed to manufacture a move to Klepp, the [then] Norwegian runners-up, and spent the entirety of the 2019 Toppserien season with the Tractor Girls, playing every minute of their league campaign. For Frisbie, there is no better move she could have made for her career or her sanity.
“You really do regain your confidence when you go overseas because you’re playing more relaxed. I wouldn’t say Norway or Iceland is at the level of the NWSL but when you go overseas… you find the love of the game again. Every time I go overseas, I’m like, ‘That's why I love playing this game. That’s fun; this is fun.’” She finished, “And I genuinely enjoyed playing again.”
For the much-travelled Weimer, stability and safety are paramount for players. Change in the NWSL is needed. “I think the league has room to grow as every women’s league in the world does. I think the league here could benefit from some more stable rules that allow for a better player experience. I would love to see players have contracts with their teams for the entire season and coaches have to win with the players they have. I just feel for my friends who put in so much for the sport and don’t always get rewarded with simple pleasures.”
Words: Sophie Lawson
First published 23 December 2019