The NWSL announced on Thursday that it will now allow intraleague loans for all teams, and that Boston and Denver franchises will have access to significantly more money to build their initial rosters as the first expansion teams to join the league since the new collective bargaining agreement eliminated drafts.
“I think it’s fair to say that we are trying more and more to align with our global counterparts,” Stephanie Lee, the NWSL’s VP of player affairs, told ESPN. “And I think in of itself, aligning with our global counterparts is part of the larger conversation of, ‘How do we be the best league in the world?'”
Boston Legacy FC and the yet-unnamed Denver expansion teams will bring the NWSL to 16 teams when they begin play next year.
The expansion teams will have access to up to $1,065,000 in allocation money beginning on July 1.
The league will fund half of that automatically, and the rest will be funded out of pocket by each team at their discretion.
It’s a significant amount for two reasons: Allocation money is effectively player salary funding that exists outside the NWSL’s hard salary cap.
It is a rare and coveted asset that the NWSL previously said would be phased out of existence. Boston and Denver will need to use all funded allocation money by the end of 2027.
Lee acknowledge that “perhaps” this could set a precedent for future expansion teams, but she said that each round of expansion since the NWSL kicked off in 2013 has featured slightly different rules.
Boston and Denver will also be allowed to have an initial transfer threshold of $968,000 more than existing NWSL teams through summer 2026, allowing Boston and Denver to make more significant transfers as they build their rosters from scratch.
By comparison, the most recent round of NWSL expansion — Bay FC and Utah Royals FC in 2024 — received $500,000 in additional transfer threshold spending but also had an expansion draft to select players from other rosters.
The NWSL, as part of its single entity system with a salary cap, has a net transfer threshold for each team that limits their spending on the open market. (Each incoming transfer adds to the threshold while each outgoing transfer lowers it.)
Lee told ESPN that the league and its sporting committee, composed of select board members, calculated the increased dollar amounts awarded to Boston and Denver by analyzing past expansion drafts and looking at the value of picks that were traded, the salaries for those players, and what a comparable player might cost on the open market.
Intraleague loans will allow all 16 teams including Boston and Denver, which begin play in 2026 to loan players to other NWSL teams, which is common practice in other leagues globally.
It was not previously allowed in the NWSL. All players being loaned must consent to the move, which falls in line with the new CBA requirements that players must consent to all trades.
The new CBA also grants players full free agency. Lee worked for multiple NWSL clubs before joining the league full-time in 2022. She said she was unsure of why intraleague loans were not previously allowed, but that it was always a point of discussion.
Expansion served as “a catalyst” to implementing intra-league loans, Lee said. Multiple general managers in last year’s ESPN Anonymous GM Survey brought up the need for intraleague loans.
The NWSL’s most prominent and awkward workaround for the lack of intraleague loans happened around a previous round of expansion.
World Cup-winning American centerback Abby Dahlkemper was traded from the North Carolina Courage to the Houston Dash in August 2021 for what North Carolina officials called “a loan.”
Dahlkemper then joined incoming expansion side San Diego Wave FC three months later for what the NWSL classified as “a three-team trade.”
Houston even said in its November 2021 news release that the initial trade included a stipulation that Dahlkemper would join the Wave after the 2021 season — a complicated way of saying she was on loan.
The introduction of intraleague loans could, in addition to a forthcoming second division, help solve a longstanding NWSL problem around player development and a lack of opportunities.
Intraleague loans will also allow Boston and Denver to start signing players on July 1 in the crucial summer window in Europe and loan them out in the NWSL immediately.
Lee said one other thing the league considered was allowing Boston and Denver to sign players earlier than other NWSL teams, but they ultimately decided that it wasn’t much of an advantage.
