SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jaedyn Shaw set the tone. Rose Lavelle tapped the ball at kickoff, and Shaw booted it toward the Washington Spirit’s net, which keeper Aubrey Kingsbury was helplessly far from. The shot was just off-target, but the message was clear: Gotham FC intended to score by whatever means necessary.
A second warning came shortly after, when Esther González put a slipped ball by Shaw into the back of the net, only an offside ruling saving Washington from an immediate deficit. The attempts seemed to spook the Spirit, whose nerves showed for the first 20 minutes. Gotham’s freewheeling attack ran rampant over Washington. The Spirit had no choice but to batten down the hatches and defend for their lives.
It was a Gotham team looking to roll back their glorious 2023 run, when they Cinderella’d themselves from last team in all the way to the trophy. (The field here in San Jose also seemed to want to run back that injury-addled game; players frequently wiped out without so much as a brush from an opponent.) Washington, ever the bridesmaid, was hoping to avoid a second finals loss in a row and claim the club’s first championship of the Michele Kang era. Ultimately, it was Gotham who reigned supreme, finishing off an audacious playoff run with a 1-0 victory over the team that knocked them out of the semifinals last year.
My personal MVPs from the last two finals, Midge Purce and Rosemonde Kouassi, each showed out, needling defenders with signature runs down the flanks. Indeed, Kouassi created the only slivers of hope for Washington during Gotham’s early dominance.
But Kouassi alone was never going to be enough against Gotham’s stacked back line. Washington’s recovery from its early stumbles would depend on quarterback Croix Bethune, playing in her first final, shaking off her nerves and playing more like herself—creative, consistent, connecting. Once she did, the Spirit managed to employ a bit of offense-as-defense, but rarely to any productive chances.
Washington entered the second half with more confidence than they’d shown all game. No longer flat-footed and reactionary, they were connecting actual passes in the attacking third. The Spirit’s best chance came in the 55th minute, when a combination between Kouassi, Bethune, and Leicy Santos was shut down by a full-out sacrificial block by Emily Sonnett.
The crowd in San Jose was more ambiance than 12th player; chances and tackles were met with equal oohs and ahhs no matter the team. Such is to be expected at a neutral venue, especially one in California hosting two east coast teams. But in the 57th minute, the crowd let out its loudest, longest roar yet. I didn’t need to spot her blue hair on the side of the pitch to know Trinity Rodman was about to enter.
Rodman’s presence on the pitch allowed some of Washington’s attacking efforts to run through someone other than Kouassi. She certainly wasn’t playing at 100 percent after spraining her MCL last month, but the match opened up anyway and both teams put together some solid sequences. Still scoreless, it was anyone’s match to seize when Gotham manager Juan Carlos Amorós made the decision that ultimately tipped the scales in his favor.
Kouassi had been giving Lilly Reale, 2025’s Rookie of the Year, a hard time, and just before halftime she finally drew a yellow. Amorós feared that it would happen again, and he replaced Reale with Bruninha in the 63rd minute. Bruninha was able to quiet Kouassi, subduing Washington’s most lethal weapon. She would also serve the game-winning assist.
A managerial decision from the other bench would cloud that pivotal play as well. After a flurry of Washington corner kicks came up blank, stopper Hal Hershfelt, who had been Washington’s most consistent player all game, went down. The tough-as-nails sophomore received medical attention for multiple minutes, including as play wore on, but Adrián González opted not to sub her out. She hobbled back onto the pitch in time for Sarah Schupansky to send a stunning long ball to Bruninha. The Brazilian danced through Washington’s box and served a nifty pass to Lavelle who was open at the top of the box. Hershfelt, had she not just gotten hurt, might have been able to disrupt the pass. But her limp motion toward the ball was more symbolic than fruitful. Lavelle did as she is wont to do in massive games, and buried a missile. The stadium burst into a roar louder than the jets landing at the airport next door.
González finally replaced Hershfelt with a capable Deborah Abiodun, but the damage was done. The only thing a dispirited Washington got in the last 15 minutes of the match was what looked to be a re-aggravated back injury for Rodman.
Multiple Spirit players cried in front of reporters after the match. One was Rodman, who was undoubtedly the main character of championship week. On November 15, The Athletic reported that the soon-to-be free agent had received offers from English clubs that her beloved Spirit couldn’t match due to the NWSL’s salary cap restrictions. Commissioner Jessica Berman has apparently been directly involved with the league’s efforts to keep Rodman stateside.
Before the match, I stopped by the Fan Fest, a vaguely dystopian candyland of brand activations. There, I spoke to Spirit fans about Rodman. One season-ticket holder who had flown out from the DMV compared losing Rodman to losing a limb. Her college-aged daughter emphasized how much the Spirit needs her, noting that Rodman is a household name who brings people to games. They both said she should do whatever’s best for her. Another diehard fan said the cap should be raised. Among the fans, I didn’t feel any pressure on Rodman to stay; instead, it’s pressure on the league to raise the salary cap, so that staying wouldn’t be a sacrifice.
Berman has been loudly proclaiming that the league will fight for Rodman to remain in the league. Aside from the fact that it’s weird for a commissioner to publicly commit to lobbying one player specifically, she has also committed to not doing the thing that would address the sticking point in Rodman’s negotiations: raise (or remove) the salary cap beyond the $3.5 million it’s set to reach next year, per the CBA.
Berman’s rhetorical touchstone is her assertion that the cap is what protects parity in the league. All week, she was talking about how competitive the league must be for an 8-seed to have made it to the final, and how statistics point to the NWSL being the best league in the world. What this rhetoric mostly does is feed an online debate that isn’t in touch with what players are concerned about. English internationals Esme Morgan and Jess Carter told me that players don’t discuss a hierarchy of leagues. Instead, they compare notes about what it’s like to play in them: if they enjoy it, if they receive the resources they need. American Katie Stengel, who has played in five countries, called the debate a “speculative conversation” and said, “we always just want to go to a team in an environment where we’re gonna play, feel valued, and it suits our style.”
Considering the NWSL continues to be embroiled in player-safety concerns, Berman’s insistence that the league has no peers is a sign of complacency at best, and at worst an excuse to save money. This season, the league forced players to continue playing after one of their own had to be resuscitated on the pitch. Berman threatened to fine owners for asking that their players and fans not be forced to endure extreme heat, then the league quietly changed the public-facing version of the applicable policy. A coach was investigated for creating a toxic work environment, and another was fired under a cloud of mystery. The league declared that it has “no duty of care” to former employees suing a club for abuse. Most recently, the league left its players vulnerable to transphobic and racist attacks. But no matter: Berman was just handed a three-year extension. However she’s doing her job, it’s a performance the owners at large approve of.
Berman’s claims of parity felt a little hollow this year. Each of the last four league winners made up the semifinalists this year, and Kansas City steamrolled everyone else in the regular season. The thing that has positioned several of these clubs for success is not the salary cap, but investments and smart work by front offices that care enough to do it. Gotham’s ascension is evidence enough of this. General manager Yael Averbuch constructed a team that beat Seattle to win in 2023, then poached two of their best players in Lavelle and Sonnett, assembled a bunch of other stars, and has now reclaimed its postseason prize. Acquiring Shaw this summer for a record fee was nothing less than a club putting money where its mouth is.
Throughout the week leading up to the match, where Washington players appeared relaxed at press conferences and danced during warm-ups, Gotham was military-like in comparison. They felt like a special forces crew on a mission. Purce said as much. “If you were in our locker room before the game, it is calm,” she said. “It’s not all hyped up. It’s not excited, and I think it’s just because we have total gamers and everyone’s locked in, and that’s just the identity of this team.”
Total gamers indeed. Lavelle’s goal was a knife that bifurcated the fates of the two squads, and now Gotham could finally let loose while Washington shrunk into themselves. When Purce walked out to the mixed zone, she was smoking a cigar (“a Cuban … I only smoke them after championships”). At the same time, Hershfelt walked behind reporters with her foot in a boot and eyes sore from crying.
A horde of lenses were trained on Rodman as her eyes, too, welled up. I couldn’t help but think that she tolerates life in a fishbowl because she’s had no choice. Now she has one, and it is already proving consequential for the health of the league that raised her.
Gift Monday, the rookie whose goals carried Washington through the quarterfinal and semifinal but who was kept quiet on Saturday, reflected on the match between two teams that know each other well. “It’s always emotional,” she said. “It’s always hot. It’s always like fire.” The players burn bright as ever. Now, as ever, the league has a choice: provide fuel or an extinguisher?
