An NWSL spokesperson said the Summer Cup final was awarded to San Antonio after the league put out a request for proposals (RFP), a common bidding process for events. The final, like the rest of the tournament, operated in the shadow of international play. Friday’s game also fell in an international window and kicked off 24 hours after the United States women’s national team defeated Iceland about 80 miles north in Austin.
This meant the Summer Cup had to compete for both attention and players. While Kansas City started most of its usual lineup on Friday, Gotham was without a handful of players due to injuries and international duty during the FIFA window. Some of their replacement players have not regularly trained with the team and have other jobs.
Signing players to temporary contracts is even more difficult now that the USL Super League, which is also sanctioned as a first division, kicked off in August. Players who were once fighting for these spots on the fringes of NWSL rosters now have contracts and important roles in the USL.
Annual stops and starts
Many NWSL general managers expressed in ESPN’s recent anonymous survey the need to have a competition for player development, but the league has not yet found a sustainable solution with its cup competitions.
The NWSL has neither a formal academy system nor reserve league. A cup competition provides teams with games that coaches generally seek out, anyway, to test out tactics and evaluate players further down the roster. The Summer Cup — and, previously, the Challenge Cup — filled that void.
“I’m very thankful to play in this tournament, because it came at a time when we as an organization, as staff, were trying to figure out what we were going to do with the summer,” Andonovski said last week. “So, for us, it made it a little bit easier that we could play a meaningful competition.”
The Challenge Cup started as a tournament to salvage the 2020 season during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it morphed into a preseason tournament in 2021 and 2022 before becoming a season-long cup competition last year. But last year’s Challenge Cup faced issues like this year’s Summer Cup: Rosters were hard to fill when international players were gone, regular starters were fatigued and the games were difficult to market to fans to make them commercial successes.
So, the Challenge Cup was reduced to a single game this year and it was played on opening weekend between the league champions, Gotham, and last years’ Shield winners, San Diego Wave FC. Sources previously confirmed to ESPN that the Challenge Cup only avoided complete elimination this year because of sponsor obligations.
The NWSL added two expansion teams this year, which increased the regular season by four games. Two more teams are expected to join the league in 2026, which will likely add four more games to the schedule. Multiple NWSL teams will also compete in Concacaf’s new club competition each year.
“There’s a balance,” said Gotham goalkeeper Abby Smith, who is one of the team’s player representatives with the NWSLPA. “We need to make sure that we are paying for players for more games, but also having the staffing to support the players and making sure that we’re doing the right things for recovery.”
Smith subbed on for the final moments of Friday’s final to earn her first appearance in 433 days due to injury. It was a “special” moment both for the emotional toll of the comeback and for the fact that it took place in San Antonio, where she and her husband used to live. It also further illustrated the value of having a cup competition to give more players game minutes.
How to optimize a cup competition going forward — if at all — remains a work in progress for the NWSL. One option could be to give teams time in the schedule and autonomy to book friendlies that suit them on the field and commercially. The arrival of the USL Super League also legitimizes calls for a women’s version of a U.S. Open Cup.
Still, there are also numerous elephants in the room for any plan going forward.
The calendar, and whether to stick with the current framework or flip it to a fall-to-spring model, remains one of the most divisive topics in the league, even if a drastic change is unlikely right now.
And then there is the 2026 Men’s World Cup in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The NWSL will almost certainly have to pause play, too. Multiple NWSL teams have applied to have their facilities used as base camps for World Cup teams, and several more NWSL teams won’t have access to their home stadiums or facilities for much of the summer.
Those conflicts will affect the NWSL’s regular season first and foremost, and they also illustrate how difficult it is to add competitions to the schedule.
Conceptually, the Summer Cup has merit. The NWSL and Liga MX Femenil are both growing on and off the field and could mutually benefit from more collaboration; Gotham and Kansas City players unanimously agreed that exposure to new teams was a positive.
“I don’t get international play,” LaBonta said after her team’s triumph on Friday. “That was really fun for us because being in the NWSL for so long, you play the same teams over and over.”
Better execution is needed, however, as is more balance with Liga MX Femenil as a partner. Kansas City played in the only group that had two NWSL teams and two Liga MX Femenil teams.
At minimum, more games should be played in Mexico, where teams like Tigres and Rayadas in Monterrey, and Club America in Mexico City, have shown that fans will turn up for big games. NWSL players would experience a completely different kind of pressure in some of those scenarios.
Whether the opportunity to improve the Summer Cup even exists next year, however, is the bigger issue.
