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.”