Late last summer, women’s soccer in the United States was at a turning point. The country’s famed national team had just finished its worst World Cup result ever, the clearest sign yet that its unprecedented dominance was over. New heavyweights had emerged – most notably Spain, which won last year’s World Cup, and England, winners of Euro 2022. Both countries had become centers of the sport, with domestic leagues that produce and attract some of the best female soccer players in the world.

This has not gone unnoticed by officials at the National Women’s Soccer League, where most of the US women’s national team players play. In August of last year, the league invited the NWSL Players Association, the union that represents the players, to begin negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement. The two sides had already agreed to a contract the year before that would not expire until 2026, but the outcome of the World Cup accelerated the desire for a new contract.

“What we learned from the World Cup is that there is a global talent pool that we want to address and attract,” said NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman. “It was a kind of compulsion for us to look in the mirror and decide what artificial obstacles and barriers there are in our system within the NWSL that make it difficult for us to attract the best talent.”

Meghan Burke, The executive director of the NWSL Players Association said the U.S. team’s early exit from the tournament caused “a kind of existential crisis within the American soccer system.”

“I think after the World Cup, the league realized: Hey, there’s something here. The world is passing us by. The window of opportunity to maintain our competitive advantage is closing and we need to act quickly,” Burke said. “We don’t have time to wait until the end of the current collective bargaining agreement to make really substantive changes.”

After the first round of negotiations last September, the league and union spent the next 10 months in confidential negotiations. Those efforts culminated in a new contract, formalized at a meeting in Philadelphia last month and unveiled Thursday morning, that will usher in a series of groundbreaking reforms. Under the new CBA, which runs through 2030, the NWSL will become the first major American professional sports league to eliminate its draft and give players the ability to choose which team they join. The agreement will also prohibit transfers without the player’s consent, guarantee each contract and ensure that all players become free agents when their contract expires, eliminating the five-year service period required to become a free agent.

“These are tectonic shifts in the American sports landscape,” Burke said.

The new collective bargaining agreement addresses workload management by requiring teams to charter flights for certain midweek games and implementing a midseason break for players. It also creates a new compensation structure by tying divisible revenue from the league’s sponsorship deals and media rights contracts to salary caps, with teams required to meet a “minimum spend” to ensure that revenue is spent on players’ salaries. The NWSL Players Association expects the agreement will increase teams’ salary caps by $200,000 to $1 million each year the agreement is in effect, raising the salary cap from the current $2.75 million to $3.3 million next year and $5.1 million by 2030.

The new CBA gives the NWSL and women’s soccer in the U.S. another boost. Earlier this month, the U.S. women’s national team won Olympic gold in Paris against Brazil in a match that featured 26 NWSL players on both teams. The league plans to expand its field from 14 to 16 teams by 2026 as club valuations — buoyed by a four-year, $240 million media rights deal struck last fall with ESPN, CBS, Amazon and Scripps — have soared. Disney CEO Robert Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, acquired a majority stake in Angel City FC last month, valuing the club at $250 million and making the Los Angeles-based club the most valuable women’s sports team in the world.

Berman gave credit to the union, saying the league had a “willing and interested partner” in the negotiations. Both sides, she said, worked “quietly and feverishly” from last September until the early hours of July 11, when an agreement was officially reached: “I think it’s fair to say, especially in hindsight, knowing that it was kept secret by both sides, that we were both really there and motivated to make the game the best it could be and to make our league the best it could be.”

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to realizing this vision was the process that made it difficult for new players to join the league.

Burke said the NWSL is at a disadvantage compared to other women’s leagues such as the Super League in England, Liga F in Spain and the Women’s Bundesliga in Germany, which do not have drafts. “We are losing players to those leagues,” Burke said. “This was an opportunity to rethink the paradigm so we can compete on a global level.”