FootBiz newsletter #136: What Trinity Rodman's dilemma told us about the business of sports

We are at an inflection point in women’s football, as the talent drain from the United States of America to Europe threatens to grab its biggest prize yet and those Stateside urge their league to act.

The prize in question is Trinity Rodman, daughter of NBA legend Dennis, who has become one of the best (and best-known) players on the planet. Already hyped as a future star when she became the youngest player ever drafted at just 18 years old in 2021 NWSL draft, Rodman has done the hardest thing — she lived up to that hype.

Having now seen out her rookie contract with the Washington Spirit, the team that drafted her second overall, Rodman became a free agent on December 31 and had the right to pick her landing spot wherever she wished.

The problem for American WoSo (are we allowed to use that phrase?) is that the NWSL teams can’t afford to pay Rodman market value. From a $275k average salary on her rookie deal, Rodman can now expect to be paid north of $1m per year as one of the pre-eminent stars in the game. But for NWSL teams who have a salary cap of just $3.5m per franchise to pay their entire roster, those sums simply won’t work.

It has prompted a lot of soul searching and far more practical moves beyond that as the US league attempts to stop the bleeding of its best players heading to Europe.

Consider the context that, of their triumphant 2015 and 2019 World Cup squads, every single USWNT player was US-based. Now, more than half the starting line-up that secured the Olympic gold medal just 18 months ago is plying their trade in Europe.

Indeed, you can put together a pretty handy USWNT starting XI just from current Euro-based players and the fear in America is, due to salary cap limitations in the domestic league there, that Rodman will be the next to board a flight to London or Paris.

While USWNT captain Heaps announced this week that she’ll finally be returning home after five years in Europe, there are a number of young, talented players ready to take her place. Lily Yohannes is just 18, has already played for Ajax and PSG and profiles as the future of the USWNT midfield. Eva Gaetino is a 23 year-old defender who was expected to be a high draft pick out of Notre Dame university and instead signed directly for Paris Saint-Germain in 2024.

Gaetino’s path is almost as much of a concern to the league as Rodman’s potential defection. While the NWSL has profited from Rodman’s presence in D.C. and been able to market the league off the back of her star quality, Gaetino eschewing the NWSL Draft in favour of heading straight to Europe should strike fear into the hearts of American soccer.

If the conveyor belt of talent from college soccer to the professional game gets disrupted then the NWSL may struggle to recover.

So what is the league doing to try and remedy this?

Well, with regards to Rodman they have acted fairly swiftly and decisively to try and introduce a new rule, officially called the ‘High Impact Player’ or HIP rule but more commonly dubbed the Rodman Rule.

If MLS introducing the Beckham Rule transformed the league forever, Jessica Berman, the NWSL commissioner, is hoping against all hope that the Rodman equivalent can do the same as the league hopes to slow — or even reverse — the exodus but the Beckham Rule was about attracting talent. The HIP rule is about retaining it.

The good news for NWSL as a whole is that Rodman has shown a desire and willingness to stay. Indeed, she agreed to a new contract with the Spirit last month that averaged $1.1m per year but was significantly back-loaded, with the amounts increasing to a financial crescendo. The only problem is that teams don’t know for sure that the salary cap will continue to go up, nor by how much if it even does, and so the league rejected the contract as invalid. You can’t promise money you don’t know you will have.

In doing so, it appeared that the NWSL might have sealed the departure of one of their biggest stars.

The relevant parties all scrambled to try and work something out. The players’ union filed a grievance, arguing that the NWSL should simply increase the salary cap while the league cooked up its HIP rule with a wacky set of criteria to determine who would qualify, thus unlocking an extra $1m in salary cap room. That criteria has eight possible markers (only seven are possible for any player) and includes being selected as part of ESPN’s top 100 women soccer players, The Guardian’s top 50 or SportsPro Media’s top 150 most marketable athletes, as if those are unimpeachable evaluators of quality and worth. Rodman, by the way, hits seven out of seven.

"We want Trinity in our league and we will fight for her," said commissioner Berman, who is willing to come up with hoops to jump through but apparently not willing to simply raise the salary cap to try and make American teams competitive on the global stage.

Which is where the fundamental friction here lies.

NWSL franchise valuations have been soaring as revenues point upward and teams continue to be added, but now that the European clubs have also seen their revenues soar and are willing to invest, holding back as much money for franchise owners as the NWSL is currently simply isn’t going to work. 85% of NWSL GMs think the salary cap is holding the league back, but what do their owners think? Whose view matters more? Don’t answer that.

Should Rodman not be able to work out a deal to stay Stateside, Chelsea are reportedly favourites to sign her. The west London club are a juggernaut who can far outspend their transatlantic rivals and for whom Rodman’s star power would add further star power.

It’s one of sport’s eternal paradoxes that the most brazenly capitalist nation on Earth runs its major leagues with a socialist slant, while global football is about as rampant a free-market economy as you’ll find.

Living in the salary cap-free world of European football, Chelsea, Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain will continue to invest in American talent if it helps them on the pitch and in the commercial offices.

In a parallel battle between two similar systems, Major League Soccer has quite clearly lost the war with its European counterparts.

The NWSL has a stronger starting position, and the competition is far less established, but the regulatory path they choose here and the leadership of Berman is going to come under the microscope.

Late last night, Spirit owner Michele Kang announced that Rodman has agreed a new contract, presumably similar in terms to the one rejected by the NWSL. Washington D.C. may well have — after all that stress — retained its superstar, but the broader questions remain.

As the women’s game in Europe continues to grow and establishes itself at a more corporate and institutional level, the push and pull for talent will only become greater and it’s likely that a system, rather than a specific league, will end up the victor.

And while it might never happen for the NFL or MLB or NBA, there’s mounting evidence that as soon as these closed leagues face serious competition they find themselves in trouble.

Perhaps it is simply that, in the age of streaming, people have abundant ways to watch an elite version of the product (Premier League/WSL) rather than an inferior domestic equivalent (MLS/NWSL) to which they have no emotional attachment.

It’s a situation we’ll be following either way.

Table of Contents

• 90% of English clubs post annual losses

• Textor empire unravelling

• NY mayor calls for end to travel ban

• World Cup to increase VAR usage 

• UEFA and FIFA in Palestine win 

• WSL criticises FIFA for CWC timing

• United drop in Money League

• Caplehorn new chief football officer at the PL

• Juve lose Ronaldo legal battle 

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