Jessica Berman looked around her suite with delight. The setting—the NWSL championship in November—was one that would have been difficult to imagine when she became commissioner of the league in the spring of 2022. Start with the basics: This was a prime-time game on national television. If that feels like the norm for any major professional championship, that was very much not the case until recently for the NWSL, which spent years slating its final match for the middle of the afternoon to squeeze onto broadcast schedules. For a prime-time championship to finally be an established league norm was a major step.
Then consider the location. The championship was held in Kansas City at CPKC Stadium, a brand-new, state-of-the-art, 11,500-seat venue that is something incredibly rare in professional sports: It was planned, financed and built specifically for a women’s team. (The new home field of the Current, it sold out every game this season.) The stadium represents a new kind of vision (and a new kind of investment) for the league.
Almost everything about the championship felt meaningfully larger than it had been even just a few years prior. “It’s gone from something that felt small to something that feels really big,” says Berman, who took over as commissioner ahead of the 2022 season. The uptick in media coverage was impossible to miss: CBS Mornings brought its set to do its show live on location from Kansas City. Melissa Etheridge sang the national anthem. Google was the presenting sponsor. But what struck the commissioner most was who was watching the game alongside her.
Her suite held some of the biggest stars from the women’s game. Megan Rapinoe. Alex Morgan. Christine Sinclair. Kelley O’Hara. All of them had recently retired—some just a few weeks earlier—and it was fun to see them cheering like any other fan. But it was mostly striking as a sign of goodwill. For the group to join the commissioner in her box represented an increased level of trust between players and leadership. That was something new here.
Berman joined the league in a moment of crisis. The NWSL was roiled by a series of abuse scandals: Five of the 10 head coaches in the league were fired or stepped down after facing allegations of misconduct in 2021. Previous commissioner Lisa Baird was ousted that October. U.S. Soccer hired former acting U.S. attorney general Sally Yates to lead an investigation into the claims. The league had only just started to negotiate its first collective bargaining agreement with its players’ association.
While interviewing with the league that winter, Berman kept thinking about a social media post from Rapinoe, the veteran national team star: “Let. It. Burn.” The forward was talking about the NWSL leadership. Berman had a long career in professional sports, but she had never worked in soccer. It was daunting to consider taking on a situation where trust was that broken. And the league’s place in the sports landscape was tenuous.
The NWSL had endured longer than any previous women’s soccer league in the U.S. While past attempts folded after just a few years, it was on the brink of completing its first decade. But it just entered a new chapter: The NWSL was no longer being managed by U.S. Soccer, as it had been since play began in 2013. Yet there were major questions about what the league would do with that independence. It needed to grow in order to survive.
The NWSL did that over the last two years. And the moves it pulled off to keep building momentum this season have made Berman Sports Illustrated’s 2024 Innovator of the Year. The commissioner has steered the league to record growth with continued expansion, a landmark media deal and new highs in attendance and viewership. That has allowed for an enormous shift in some foundational ideals. The NWSL announced a CBA with the NWSLPA this summer that did something unheard of in American professional sports: It eliminated the player draft and created full, unrestricted free agency. That has been key in building trust and enthusiasm among players in a league where both had long been in question.
These bold moves have been oriented toward growth. But the commissioner also points to another guiding principle that has guided the league as it sought to repair the damage of the last few years.
“Our objective was to make the NWSL a place where the players were proud to play,” Berman says. “That was going to be our singular focus.”
Berman spent 13 years in the NHL and three in the Premier Lacrosse League, where her role as deputy commissioner made her the highest-ranking woman in a male professional league. That meant Berman, 47, was familiar with a very traditional organization and one more akin to a startup. But neither quite offered the experience of the last few years in the NWSL.
“It required a mindset shift around risk tolerance,” says Berman.
Eliminating the draft may seem unthinkable to an American fan. It’s perhaps the one experience that is consistent across U.S. pro sports: The draft is a yearly rite in every league, the only accepted model for distributing new talent, offering the same photo opportunities of players holding up their fresh jerseys. But it was an idea that had been percolating among players for years. And it’s rooted in two factors that make the NWSL different from any other professional league in the U.S.
“The marks we’re shooting for—it’s like they went from nonexistent to Everest.”Jessica Berman
The first is specific to soccer. The NWSL competes with other leagues for talent. No league sent more players to the Olympics last summer than the NWSL, but its status as arguably the best league in the world is no guarantee that it will attract the best players. Stars can (and regularly do) choose to play in Europe. That differentiates the NWSL from the NFL or MLB or NHL, where status as the best league in the world can be assumed, or from MLS, where status as not the best league in the world can be assumed.
The second is specific to women’s sports. There is no official tie with a men’s league, though some teams do share ownership or facilities with MLS. And now there is no management by U.S. Soccer, either. That makes it very different from the WNBA, which is largely owned by the NBA, or the Women’s Super League in England, which is run by the Football Association.
That independence can be a critical advantage. It means there is no obligation to mimic the structures that are entrenched in men’s sports. The NWSL is a younger, smaller league, but it can be a nimbler one, too, in a way that is not true for other women’s leagues. It can make radical moves without needing approval from a male partner group.
“That’s not a consideration for us, other than the fact that men’s sports are an important stakeholder in our broader ecosystem, just like you would consider others in the marketplace in any industry,” Berman says. “Their interests aren’t driving what we invest in and how we make business decisions.”
That gave the league the space to make a bold step like getting rid of the draft. As established as the process is in the U.S., it’s completely foreign to pro sports in Europe, and soccer’s international culture made the draft a huge outlier in MLS and the NWSL. If the league wanted to attract the best players in the world by creating an environment that fit the highest levels of the sport globally, it had to ditch the draft. It also had to change its rules around player movement: The NWSL wanted to more closely align with the European concept of transfers rather than the American idea of straightforward trades. All of that brought negotiations to a radical place.
Under the new agreement, players can no longer be traded without their consent.
“I think history will prove this is the most significant paradigm shift in the history of professional sports,” Meghann Burke, executive director of the NWSLPA, told the Wall Street Journal when the change was announced in August. “I don’t think that’s hyperbole. This has never been accomplished in American sports.”
The league hopes to demonstrate that parity can exist without a draft. (The NWSL still has a salary cap, for one thing, Berman points out.) In abolishing the draft, the league has also effectively gotten rid of tanking, and clubs will now have to compete for young players largely based on their environment. That would not have been as feasible with the front offices of even just a few years ago. But as the league has grown, it has attracted wealthier ownership, including several groups who have poured into their clubs as serious investments. The NWSL does not look quite like anything else in the country anymore. It believes that can be a good thing.
There was one more groundbreaking element about how this model came together. The NWSL and NWSLPA were not expected to negotiate a new CBA for a couple more years.
The league’s first CBA was agreed to in 2022 and set to run through ’26. But the last two years saw the NWSL’s financial landscape shift dramatically and everyone involved agreed they needed a new deal. Viewership was up. Attendance was up. Investment was up. And the biggest turning point was a major media deal announced in November 2023. The previous one was paltry: $4.5 million over three years with CBS. The new one brought in $240 million over four years with CBS, ESPN, Amazon and Scripps Sports. The NWSL multiplied its annual intake from media rights by 40.
“The marks that we’re shooting for—it’s like they went from non-existent to Everest,” says Berman. “The things we did well in 2022 to get us to 2023 are not the same things we had to do in ’23 to get us to ’24, and the things we did this past year in 2024 are not the same things we’re going to have to do in 2025.”
She knew that meant a different arrangement with the players. And so it was Berman who approached the players—an unorthodox move for a commissioner who had just landed a big new check—with an invitation to come back to the table for a new CBA in late ’23. In addition to eliminating the draft and altering trade rules, the agreement tied the salary cap to revenue sharing, which gives the players a window to reap the benefits as the league continues to grow.
There is one more significant mark of progress here: The NWSL has finally been around long enough to have players retire after full careers. Many of those who left over the last year are those who fought the hardest for the league to evolve and raise its standards, including Rapinoe, Morgan and Sinclair. The effect is bittersweet.
“The players who built this league, many of them who have been waiting for this moment, are transitioning out of the league right now,” Berman says. “I feel a particular kinship with them in wanting to make sure that they feel part of what we’re going to be doing.”
It’s why she cleared her suite to invite those players to watch the championship with her in November. The recent changes may have officially come from the commissioner, but she realizes they couldn’t have happened without the advocacy from the women on the pitch.
“We really can’t take credit for it,” Berman says. “It’s the players, you know?”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jessica Berman Is SI’s 2024 Innovator of the Year.