Own the Pathway, Not Just the Team

The women’s game is being repriced in real time. In the rest of the world, the transfer fees that flow back into the youth clubs that developed the player create sustainable ecosystems and financial incentives for reinvestment into low-cost development programs. The player development system in the United States breaks down because of this missing piece. That is the critical void.

Let’s understand and solve that systematically.

Start with what the market is now saying. In 2025, the transfer record in women’s soccer was broken, and then broken again. Lizbeth Ovalle’s reported $1.5 million move from Tigres to the Orlando Pride, in August, did not even last the year as the high-water mark. The record fell several times over twelve months.

According to FIFA’s Global Transfer Report, global spending on international transfers in the women’s game reached $28.6 million in 2025 — up roughly 85% in a single year, from $6.1 million two seasons earlier. Reported fees for players like Naomi Girma and Olivia Smith cleared seven figures and held for only months before the next deal surpassed them.

The market trend is clear: a developed female player is an appreciating asset, and the appreciation is accelerating. Outside of the United States, that fact funds the next generation of players. In the United States, almost none of it flows back to the clubs that develop them — and understanding why is the first step to fixing the system.

A New Way Forward

Before anything else: look at what the NWSL has built. Two top-flight women’s professional leagues came before it — the WUSA, built as a single entity, and the WPS, built on independently owned franchises — and each lasted only three seasons. The NWSL, launched in 2013, has become one of the most successful and widely respected professional women’s leagues in the world — deep, competitive, and commercially thriving. It is part of a global rise in the women’s game, alongside leagues like the Women’s Super League in England, Liga F in Spain, the Première Ligue in France, and the Frauen-Bundesliga in Germany.

It made sense to launch the NWSL as a single-entity league. Most of all, women’s pro soccer in the United States could not fail a third time. Building at the league level — holding player rights and economics centrally — gave the league a durable foundation, and it has grown into the force it is now. That success is the foundation everything else is built on, and continuing to build the NWSL is, and should remain, the priority.

Now, as the NWSL looks to build a player development pathway beneath it — an even stronger foundation — we can look to global and domestic models as starting points. Not blueprints. We have a historic opportunity to build a system that prioritizes the holistic player and isn’t constrained by the past. It’s time to create our new way forward.

Development has no economics in the U.S.

Everywhere else in the world, player development pays for itself. When a player who came up through a club moves on, a share of the fee flows back to the clubs that trained her in the form of training compensation and solidarity payments.  These mechanisms are written into the global game precisely so that developing talent is a financially sustainable business model, not a system dependent on family resources to foot the bill.

For most of its history, the United States stood outside this system. Citing antitrust exposure and child-labor law, the U.S. game was slow to take part, and the country’s youth clubs saw little of the money the global mechanism sends to the clubs that develop players. That is beginning to change — Major League Soccer has adopted training compensation and solidarity payments — but the mechanism triggers only on international transfers, the infrastructure to track and claim it is immature, and almost none of it has reached the women’s and girls’ game.

Inside the country, then, development still does not pay — and why comes down to a distinction that decides everything: the difference between player rights and player contract rights. A single-entity league always holds player rights — the league, not the club, has the final say, and no transfer happens without league approval. Player contract rights are something else: the contractual, economic value of the player, the part a transfer fee actually pays for. Those can sit with the league or with the club, and that is the lever that determines whether developing talent pays. In a single-entity league like the NWSL, both sit with the league. Beneath the pro game, meanwhile, the grassroots runs on families paying to play.

The league that pushed the game forward

Here the USL Super League deserves real credit. Launched in 2024, it has had a tremendous impact on the structure and economics of player development for women in this country. It was purpose-built to import the business and player development model the rest of the world runs on: the FIFA international calendar, and club-owned player rights and contract rights, so that a club — not the league — holds both its players and the value it develops and sells. (The broader USL structure works this way on the men’s side too.)

Its real contribution was the push. By putting the international model on the table — the way clubs are built and rewarded across most of the world’s football — it helped move the U.S. women’s game toward that global framework. That is a meaningful contribution to how the women’s game can develop here, and the USL Super League deserves credit for it.

Sustaining that model at scale, though, is its own challenge. As a young national first division, the USL Super League is still working toward a sustainable footing: it has announced a shift off the FIFA calendar to a spring-to-fall season aligned with the NWSL, and this year it lost one of its founding clubs, Spokane Zephyr FC, on the West Coast. That is not just a headline — it is structural. US Soccer Federation standards require a first-division women’s league to field teams across at least two time zones from its first year, and across the Eastern, Central, and Pacific zones by its sixth. A national first division is therefore committed to coast-to-coast travel — one of the largest costs a club carries. An eight-team league stretched across the country is expensive by design. The economic structure was sound; the challenge was scale.

A useful precedent from the men’s game

The men’s game offers one useful structural lesson here — not a model to copy wholesale, but a mechanism worth studying.

For years, Major League Soccer held both player rights and the contract value that went with them. Then, in 2007, it began requiring its clubs to build youth academies, expanding the mandate over the following years to full under-14, under-16, and under-18 setups. Crucially, it also shifted player contract rights to the clubs — so the value of a developed player, and the fee a transfer commands, now returns to the club that produced him, even though the single-entity league still approves every deal. Once clubs could keep what they developed, the incentive flipped, and the homegrown pipeline that now defines U.S. men’s soccer followed — along with clubs like the Philadelphia Union, whose academy, built alongside its own school, turned homegrown players into transfer revenue and ultimately into the club’s identity.

Abroad, the same logic runs at full maturity on the men’s side. FC Nordsjælland, in Denmark, built its men’s program around developing and selling academy talent — reportedly around €190 million in transfer revenue — because the system rewards the clubs that develop. The women’s game has no equivalent at anything like that scale — yet.

The lesson is simple: a mandate creates academies; an incentive makes them pay. You need both. And crucially, neither requires changing what the NWSL is.

The next evolution

Here is where the women’s game stands. The NWSL is thriving and world-class; the USL Super League has shown that the international model belongs here, even as it works toward a sustainable footing. The piece that has not been built — anywhere, for the girls’ and women’s game — is a financially sustainable development system: the academies, the education alongside them, and a club-owned professional layer where young players turn pro and the value they create returns to the clubs that develop them.

That does not compete with the NWSL. It is built alongside it, and in service of it. And it does not require a second expensive national first division. It requires a financially sustainable second division built regionally — so travel costs come down and club-owned rights have room to work — feeding talent upward and, along the way, disrupting the pay-to-play model that currently lets a family’s ability to pay decide which girls get developed. Within the next few years, that route is arriving.

Own the pathway, not just the team

Everyone wants to own the first team. The first team is the trophy, the logo, the stadium, the photograph. It is what money chases.

But the first team is only ever as good as the pathway beneath it. The durable asset is not the team — it is the engine that produces players: the academy, the education alongside it, the second-division club where young players turn professional, and the facilities that hold all of it. A first team is a result. The pathway is the thing that produces results, year after year, and holds its value regardless of any single season.

Own only the first team, and you are a buyer in a market that reprices talent upward every year — paying more and more for players other people developed. Own the pathway, and development pays for itself, compounds over time, and becomes part of the club’s identity. One of those positions gets more expensive every year. The other gets more valuable.

And the girls’ game is a greenfield

The talent is already here, in enormous supply. What is missing is the system built to identify young female players, keep them, develop them, and let the people who do that work share in what they create — and to do it without asking families to pay for the privilege. No one has built that at scale for the girls’ game. That makes it a greenfield, the rarest thing in a maturing sport. Whoever builds it first will not be competing for territory that is already claimed. They will be defining the category.

I spend my days building inside this system, which is why I can say the following with some confidence: the constraint on U.S. women’s soccer has never been talent, and it has never been the top of the pyramid — the NWSL and our USWNT have proven how good the American game can be. The missing piece is underneath: who owns the pathway that develops the talent, and therefore who keeps what that talent becomes worth.

The transfer market is now telling us, in rising numbers every season, exactly what a developed player is worth. The question is who in this country will own the pathway that develops her — and build it in a way that widens the door instead of narrowing it.

Own the pathway, not just the team.

— Jami Dansingburg, Founder, Love City Football Group