SAN JOSE, Calif. — NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman said “our ecosystem is on notice” about the league potentially flipping its calendar to being in late summer and end in late spring.
MLS, which also currently runs its season from early in the calendar year through December, recently announced that it will flip its season beginning in 2027 to align with the rest of the world.
The NWSL’s Board of Governors has debated a calendar change extensively for years. Multiple sources confirmed to ESPN that a change to the calendar was voted down in fall 2024.
“There are certainly opportunities that can be created with us not overlapping Major League Soccer, in that the schedule congestion for our summer calendar will be mitigated,” Berman said on Thursday, answering ESPN’s question after her State of the League address at San Jose Civic. “On the other hand, there will of course be other challenges that it creates in terms of understanding and knowing stadium availability.”
MLS’ decision to change the structure of its season could force the NWSL into action.
The NWSL already struggles with venue availability due to teams being second or third tenants in their shared stadiums. One source with insight into the challenges pointed out that while MLS shifting away from playing in the summer would, in theory, allow the NWSL to schedule games more easily during that period, the opposite might be true.
MLS places a hold on dates for venues during its playoffs, which will now shift to May — the early part of the traditional NWSL season. That will make it difficult for the NWSL to plan the early part of its schedule. Compounding the issue, MLS won’t start scheduling its games for its next season, which will begin in late July, until closer to the summer. That could effectively leave the NWSL in a holding pattern for the entire year at several venues.
Twelve of 16 NWSL teams will play in a venue shared with an MLS team next year.
Advocates for changing the NWSL calendar believe that aligning with other global leagues will make it easier for the league to complete bigger transfers. Those sources frequently refer to the difficulty in trying to sign European players who are halfway through their season.
In last year’s ESPN NWSL Anonymous GM Survey, one general manager said the calendar was “actually the biggest question facing the league.” Still, GMs were divided on the best solution going forward, which generally mirrored division in the league’s boardroom, where any such change would need approval.
In this year’s ESPN NWSL Anonymous GM Survey, one general manager named flipping the calendar as the one rule that they would change.
“If I only see my job — I think if we move the schedule, most of the teams are not in [warm weather] so it would be complicated,” this league GM said. “If we want to keep the quality of the game — if I just talk about my role, we work worldwide. Soccer is global.
“But it’s always tricky to be one of the only countries working with this schedule. I don’t think that helps the league to be one of the best. We need to change the schedule in order to become one of the best. I don’t think it’s priority, but I think in the long term, if we want to be the best league in the world, it’s something we have to think about.”
Washington Spirit defender Esme Morgan, an England international who began her career at Manchester City, told ESPN that the NWSL’s current schedule appeals to her
“It was something that I saw as a positive coming here, to be honest,” Morgan said. “I feel like going into international tournaments in the summer, you’re peaking midway through the season, and that’s something that’s really positive. I also appreciated the thought of having good weather throughout the spring to autumn league. So, yeah, it was something that, coming from Europe, I saw as a really positive thing. I think it’s interesting that MLS has changed.”
Morgan was part of the England team that finished runners-up at the 2023 World Cup and the squad that won the 2025 European Championship this summer.
Winters in many northern U.S. markets are much harsher than those in England, Morgan said.
“It’s not fun; it’s not nice playing in the cold,” she said. “I think the cold is much more extreme here than it is back home. I think even just for viewership, like, no one wants to bring their children to catch hypothermia watching the game, do they? I feel like it suits this league well, to be honest, the way it is just now, but we’ll see.”
Many league sources in the calendar debate have described the issue as a Catch-22, because extreme heat is also a problem across the U.S. in the summer. In August, an NWSL game in Kansas City was delayed for over three hours due to extreme heat for a game that was scheduled to kick off in the afternoon.
Another GM in the league said: “A big challenge that would help with talent acquisition and attraction would be aligning the calendar with the main leagues in the world. However, this is a very big country with huge challenges in weather, so I’ll let MLS go first on that, see how they figure it out, and if they figure it out, maybe that will be a good thing for us to follow.
“When those leagues are in the middle of their season and we’re at the end, and the other way around, it does not help bring certain talent over. It’s a smaller boundary than financials, but it is still a boundary sometimes.”
MLS’ announcement gives that league only a year and a half to make the change to its schedule. Berman was noncommittal on Thursday about how much time would be needed for the NWSL to make such a change.
“I think it will depend,” Berman said. “Certainly, our ecosystem is on notice that this has been a conversation and will continue to be a conversation, so we will make sure that we have the appropriate runway to be able to transition effectively, and that will be really important. We’ll be analyzing that in the context of the overall decision.”
