By the end of last summer, women’s soccer in the United States was at an inflection point. The country’s illustrious national team had just suffered its worst finish ever at a World Cup, the clearest sign to date that its reign of peerless dominance was over. New powerhouses had emerged––chief among them Spain, which won last year’s World Cup, and England, winner of the 2022 Euros. Both of these countries had become hubs of the sport, boasting domestic leagues that produce and attract some of the best women’s soccer players in the world.

None of this was lost on leaders of the National Women’s Soccer League, the organization in which most members of the US women’s national team ply their trade. In August of last year, the league invited the NWSL Players Association, the labor union representing its players, to enter negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement. The two sides had already agreed to a contract the year prior that wasn’t set to expire until 2026, but the outcome of the World Cup hastened the desire for a new one.

“What we learned from the World Cup is that there’s a global talent pool that we want to engage and attract,” said NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman. “It served as a forcing function for us to look in the mirror and decide what are the artificial obstacles and barriers that exist in our system within the NWSL that make it harder for us to attract top talent.”

Meghann Burke, the executive director of the NWSL Players Association, said that the US team’s early exit from the tournament caused “sort of an existential crisis within the American soccer system.”

“I think, coming out of the World Cup, the league recognized, Hey, there’s something to this. The world is passing us by. The window of opportunity we have to maintain our competitive advantage is closing, and we need to move quickly,” said Burke. “We don’t have time to wait until the end of this current collective bargaining agreement to make a really substantial transformational change.”

After holding their first bargaining session last September, the league and union would spend the next 10 months engaged in confidential negotiations. Those efforts culminated with a new contract, formalized at a meeting in Philadelphia last month and unveiled Thursday morning, that will usher in a host of landmark reforms. Under the new CBA, which runs through 2030, the NWSL will become the first major American professional sports league to eliminate its draft, empowering players to choose which team they join. The agreement will also bar any trades without a player’s consent, make every contract guaranteed, and ensure that all players become free agents at the expiration of their contracts, eliminating the five-year service requirement to attain free agency.

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

The new CBA addresses workload management, requiring teams to charter flights for certain midweek games, and establishes a midseason break for players. It also creates a new compensation structure by tying shareable revenues from the league’s sponsorship pacts and media rights deals to salary caps, with teams required to adhere to a “minimum spend” in order to ensure that those revenues are spent on player salaries. The NWSL Players Association projects that the agreement will add between $200,000 to $1 million to team salary caps each year that the agreement is in effect, raising the salary cap from its current level of $2.75 million to $3.3 million next year and $5.1 million by 2030.

The new CBA provides yet another jolt of momentum for the NWSL and women’s soccer in the United States. Earlier this month, in Paris, the US women’s national team won Olympic gold over Brazil in a match that featured 26 NWSL players between both squads. The league has plans to expand from 14 teams to 16 by 2026, as club valuations––buttressed by a four-year media rights deal worth $240 million that was struck last fall with ESPN, CBS, Amazon, and Scripps––have surged. Disney CEO Bob Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, last month acquired a controlling stake in Angel City FC that valued the club at $250 million, making the Los Angeles–based club the most valuable women’s sports team in the world.

Berman credited the union, saying the league had a “willing and interested partner” in the negotiations. The two sides, she said, “worked quietly and feverishly” from last September until the wee hours of July 11, when a deal was officially struck: “I think it’s fair to say, particularly, in hindsight, knowing that it was kept quiet by both sides, that we were genuinely both there and motivated by making the game the best it could be and making our league the best it could be.”

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to achieving that vision was the process by which new players join the league.

Burke said that the NWSL was at a disadvantage relative to other women’s leagues, such as the Super League in England, Liga F in Spain, and Frauen-Bundesliga in Germany, in which drafts are nonexistent. “We’re losing players to those leagues,” Burke said. “This was an opportunity to rethink the paradigm so that we are competing on a global stage.”

In order to make the NWSL resemble the rest of the soccer-playing world, the new CBA will make the league look a lot less American. Under the terms of the agreement, the NWSL will eliminate its draft no later than before the 2026 season. (The change also helps the NWSL position itself against the USL Super League, a fledgling women’s soccer league in the US that does not have a draft, although Berman said that wasn’t a factor in the discussions.)

Gabe Feldman, a professor at Tulane University Law School and the director of its sports law program, said that, in abolishing the draft, NWSL players “have achieved significant freedom and leverage in their ability to determine their careers and their compensation.”

“I think it’s hard to overstate how significant this development is,” Feldman said.

From the NFL to the WNBA, the draft has turned into an annual holiday for fans and an outright spectacle for broadcasters, drawing intense interest and massive TV audiences. It has also spawned an industry of experts and scouts dedicated to analyzing collegiate players before they turn pro.

But the draft is largely a feature of American sports and, as Berman put it, “outside the bounds of what the culture of soccer expects.” In the world of club soccer outside the US, players have the power to approve or decline a transfer to another team.

“To put the agency back in players’ hands and they’re able to choose where they want to play––it’s not something that happens in American sports,” said NWSL Players Association president Tori Huster, who played 11 years in the league for the Washington Spirit. “The draft is something that’s celebrated, and it’s something that we fucking hate.”

Brianna Pinto’s career might have gotten off to a better start had the new CBA been in place when she joined the NWSL. After being drafted third overall that year by NJ/NY Gotham FC, Pinto struggled for match time in what was a veteran-laden squad.

“If I had the choice of where I would play, I don’t know that I would’ve gone to the same team that I went to, because they were super experienced,” said Pinto, who was on the bargaining committee for the NWSL Players Association and who now plays for the North Carolina Courage. “Maybe there were other opportunities to get on the field right away.”

The pomp and circumstance surrounding the draft process in the US belies its thorny history. Players have previously challenged its legality, and it has been criticized as both exploitative and dehumanizing. Former NFL player James “Yazoo” Smith sued the league in 1970, arguing that its draft violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. Smith won in court, landing $276,000 in damages and forcing the league to adjust accordingly. Despite the clear antitrust issues at play in the draft process, the NFL and other leagues are able to legally continue the practice because it is covered under their collective bargaining agreements.

That has not, however, shielded the draft from harsh appraisals.

“You’re not forced to really think about what the draft is when you’re watching. There’s so much celebration,” said Burke. “People are so happy and there’s tears of joy, and you don’t actually think about [how] this is the modern-day auction block. You are buying and selling humans, and this player has no agency over their career.”

Leagues use drafts to promote parity by giving the worst teams the highest picks, and an opportunity to replenish their talent with the top players. But Berman said that scrapping it was necessary for the NWSL to compete “in the global labor market for talent.”

“I think we obviously recognized and ultimately made the decision that the benefits of the draft don’t outweigh the consequences,” Berman said.

Burke argues that the new structure could foster an even more competitive environment within the NWSL. Instead of waiting for a top prospect to fall to them in the draft, teams will be forced to entice the best players. “They’re gonna have to make it an attractive option,” she said. “They’re gonna have to make their case to players in order to be competitive.”

Burke said that the NWSL’s new CBA builds on the work of other athletes who have fought for labor rights, pointing to the US women’s soccer team’s successful equal-pay efforts as well as the WNBA’s recent agreement to implement full-time charter flight service.

She also cited Curt Flood, the late former baseball player who, in 1970, filed a lawsuit challenging MLB’s “reserve clause,” which effectively confined a player to one team for the duration of his career. Flood’s case eventually paved the way for free agency.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of decades of work and advocacy,” Burke said. In that spirit, Burke hopes that the NWSL’s new agreement inspires athletes in other leagues to rethink how business is done. “It’s ultimately gonna be up to the athletes themselves [to decide] what’s important to them,” she said, “but this should serve as a blueprint for how it can be done.”