NWSL "will fight" to keep Trinity Rodman as clubs from Europe, USL Super League vie for her signature

NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman said the league "will fight" to keep Trinity Rodman as a bidding war of sorts emerges for the U.S. women's national team star, who will be out of contract after Saturday's NWSL Championship (8 p.m. ET on CBS and Paramount+). 

Rodman's deal with the Washington Spirit, who will face Gotham FC on Saturday, expires upon the conclusion of the 2025 season with her future currently unclear. The Spirit remain in the mix to re-sign her but three clubs out of England's Women's Super League are interested, as are the USL Super League side D.C. Power, according to The Athletic.

Most of the contenders for Rodman's signature, including the Power, are reportedly currently able to offer higher wages than the Spirit are because of the restraints of the NWSL's salary cap. The cap will sit at $3.3 million in 2026 and will rise incrementally each year until it reaches $5.1 million in 2030 but Rodman's contract status has raised concerns about the current structure, which Berman tried to dispel in a press conference on Thursday.

"Specifically, as it relates to Trinity and candidly, any other top player in the world, we want those top players here in the NWSL and particularly, we want Trinity in the NWSL and we will fight for her and we are excited to see her compete in the championship on Saturday," Berman said.

Berman said she believes the NWSL's selling points are greater than just compensation.

"We really believe that there is a holistic picture that players evaluate and the reason we believe this is because we hear it from players in our league and around the world," she continued. "I go and sit with the players on every single team in the NWSL every season and they tell me that yes, compensation matters but they also think about compensation not just from the perspective of what their club is paying them … We also know that our market here in the U.S. has more interest in supporting female athletes and women sports than any other market in the world and then there's all the other components outside of compensation, which I referenced earlier, the other three Css, which is the competition, the club and the coaching and we believe on a holistic basis If you're a player who wants to be performing at your best and wants to be valued and supported and feel like you have the opportunity to train in a best-in-class environment with the best-in-class league, that the NWSL is the place for you."

The salary cap will grow as dictated by the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the NWSL Players Association, the most recent version ratified in 2024. The CBA does include the ability to raise the cap outside of the scheduled yearly increases but Berman did not signal that changes to the current structure were imminent.

"We do not believe that NWSL is a charity," Berman said. "We believe it's a business and in order to treat it like a business, it means that the amount that our teams are investing has to have a rational relationship to revenue and so when we go through that process of reviewing the overall ecosystem and the value proposition that we're offering to top talent and to our players and we're looking at the amount being invested in training facilities, in stadiums, in compensation for players, we have to look at it in the context of where our business is at and of course, as I said earlier, we've made incredible strides in a very short period of time to drive commercial growth, both at the league level and our clubs, but that is the lens that we consistently look at it through."

Should Rodman leave the NWSL, she would join a growing list of USWNT players who recently moved to Europe like Alyssa Thompson and Naomi Girma, though she would easily be the most high-profile to do so. The prospect of Rodman leaving for the Power is a unique one, though – like the NWSL, the USL Super League has been sanctioned by U.S. Soccer as a Division I league, but the clubs' means and budgets are generally more modest than the NWSL's. In its short history, it has acted more as a developmental tool for NWSL clubs, who have sent players on loan to counterparts in the USL Super League, rather than as a destination for top-tier players.