Sam Coffey’s Man City move is another blow for a hamstrung NWSL

Sam Coffey’s transfer from the Portland Thorns to Manchester City marks a tipping point: more than half of the USWNT’s starting lineup that secured the 2024 Olympic gold medal now play their professional soccer in Europe. If free agent Trinity Rodman signs abroad, too, that’ll leave only four players from that lineup on NWSL rosters to start the domestic season.

The distribution of where USWNT players compete has dramatically shifted under Emma Hayes . So many star players have headed to European Goliaths, including Hayes’s former club Chelsea, that last year she had to assure the NWSL board of governors she isn’t pushing her athletes to leave the league, per a report from ESPN. Hayes insists she simply supports her players’ aspirations, whatever they may be. Today, out of the seven players with the most USWNT minutes in 2025, only two of them – Emily Sonnett and Claire Hutton – are playing stateside.

Coffey’s departure is the cherry on top; the 27-year-old deep-lying midfielder and Portland captain earned more USWNT minutes than any other player in 2025. And the price tag for her transfer – reported to bearound $800,000 (£600,000) – shows that European teams are willing and able to shell out for talent in their prime up and down the American roster, not just uberfamous goalscorers. (Defender Naomi Girma’s $1.1m transfer to Chelsea from San Diego Wave beats Coffey’s, but her reputation was bigger than Coffey’s is now.)

As the US has gained strength under Hayes, observers of the NWSL have been ringing alarm bells about the state of the league. If top American players can now play wherever they want, why do so many of them want to play far from home?

That the NWSL is drifting from the center of the USWNT ecosystem is notable considering the league’s origins. The US Soccer Federation (USSF) was the engine behind its creation; when the league launched the federation had a managing role and paid the full salaries of 24 national team players. Those players soon had little choice but to play in the NWSL; Christen Press, for example, has discussed being forced by US Soccer to leave her Swedish club, Tyresö FF, to join the Chicago Red Stars, a team she did not wish to play for.

The federation’s efforts to make the USWNT stay stateside were successful for the better part of a decade. Every player on the US World Cup rosters in 2015 and 2019 played in the NWSL, save Abby Wambach, who was unattached. National team players had stints in European leagues, but they were always just that – stints – rather than multiyear moves.

That lasted until Jill Ellis left her role as USWNT head coach in 2019. From there, US Soccer changed tune, and star players, such as Lindsey Heaps and Catarina Macario, began to trickle to Europe. In 2021 – the same year US Soccer stepped away from its managerial role over the league – the shift in philosophy was made firm with the federation ending its paying of USWNT players’ NWSL salaries.

In 2023, US Soccer reaffirmed its changed course by hiring Hayes to take over for Vlatko Andonovski. In Hayes, the federation picked a head coach from England’s Women’s Super League who was known for scouting players from all over the world. Her selection for the top job proved the federation was looking to embrace the global game, no longer committed to prizing NWSL play over all else.

Since then, a more mature NWSL has been left to stand on its own, and European clubs have a few things that NWSL clubs don’t. Legacy, for one – most aspiring pros who watched club soccer growing up would probably have watched the flashiest men’s leagues, which are in Europe. Being able to wear the storied Arsenal or Manchester City badge is no doubt alluring. “For as long as I’ve kicked a ball, I’ve always dreamed of playing professional soccer in Europe, and it’s something I simply have to pursue,” Coffey said in a farewell video released by the Thorns.

With that legacy comes money. In Europe, clubs earn most of their profits from their men’s teams, and are able to spend more money on women’s salaries than NWSL clubs can, considering American teams are hamstrung by the league’s paltry salary cap. That’s not to say they always do – the seismic transfers have been mostly limited to a few top clubs. But that the most successful European clubs have started paying huge transfer fees to acquire whomever they set their sights on has been more than enough to shake the NWSL. For the Chelseas and Lyons of the world, their ambitions have caught up to their freedom, and even the most ambitious NWSL clubs can’t compete with them in the global market.

Once the NWSL flew the nest of US Soccer, the league had an opportunity to embrace some of the freedom the rest of the world enjoys. But recent events have highlighted just how much the NWSL appears unable to catch up to the reality that it is in charge of its own destiny. In December, Commissioner Jessica Berman thwarted a contract between Rodman and the Washington Spirit , which had anticipated future growth for the league’s income and back-filled a large salary. Soon after, the league announced the perplexing “High Impact Player Rule,” which raises the salary cap only for players who qualify through a list of criteria heavily biased toward European players , inadvertently endorsing Europe as the most desirable destination for players looking to up their game. The NWSL Players’ Association vehemently opposes the rule. (Hayes, for her part, said that she wasn’t informed of plans for the rule before its announcement, and won’t be changing how she operates in reaction to it.)

Essentially, NWSL clubs who may actually want to pursue Chelsea- and Barcelona-like ambitions are hampered by being in a league that at once wants to have a hand in everything and responsibility for nothing .

This is not to say that the NWSL lacks strong players. This offseason has seen countless signings of top college prospects and exciting internationals, the latter group especially spearheaded by creative additions to expansion side Boston Legacy. Heaps’s return to the NWSL – where she was named MVP in 2018 – after a long period in France is a sign that the league has appeal, even for top talent. And beyond established USWNT veterans like Heaps, the NWSL remains a critical piece to developing the national team player pool. But the league is now just one tool of many in the toolbox of the US national team, no longer the toolbox itself.

The flow of players between continents shows that increased investment in women’s soccer has become common enough around the world that instead of one league being the primary destination for the best players, as the NWSL was for a while, a more robust market is forming, with different leagues offering different benefits to players. That many players are interested in trying out different leagues shouldn’t be a shock. There are too many elite athletes in the world to make just one league worth watching. It remains to be seen, however, if the NWSL will be completely bypassed in appeal by top European leagues. Ultimately, that outcome is in its own hands.

US Soccer has moved past controlling the NWSL, but the league is acting as if its hands are still tied on key issues. The sooner the league can rid itself of its phantoms, the sooner it, too, can move into the future.

Header image: [Photograph: Nick Wass/AP]