The 2026 NWSL season has provided some astonishingly fun soccer, and many off-field successes too: The league has boasted some record attendances, salaries, and goal-scoring this year, not to mention a few signings from at least a couple of the big European clubs it lusts after. But recently there have been too many reminders that although the NWSL has raised its ceiling, the floor is still in hell.
On Sept. 13, Savannah DeMelo, the star Racing Louisville midfielder who suffered a cardiac arrest during a game in Seattle in September 2025, filed a lawsuit against the team’s medical provider, UofL Health, as well as two of her doctors, for negligence. The lawsuit states that the doctors should have caught the heart condition that was a substantial cause of her cardiac arrest—it was instead caught by doctors in Seattle after the fact.
The suit stated that DeMelo "has incurred medical, hospital, and other care-related expenses, and will continue to incur such expenses in the future, has lost income, has suffered a permanent impairment in her power to labor and earn money, and has experienced severe physical and mental pain and suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life, and will continue to so suffer into the future."
The good news here is that, per sources who spoke to The Guardian, the club was already planning to part with UofL Health as its medical provider during the offseason. But DeMelo’s suit was far from the first concerning headline coming from Louisville recently. The club saw an exodus of great players after its Cinderella playoff appearance last year, and none of those players were adequately replaced. The side’s results have been predictably poor, with only the Chicago Stars’ complete incompetence saving the club from the wooden spoon award as it stands. Chicago, too, is the only club guarding Louisville from the title of the league’s worst average attendance: They are drawing fewer than 6,000 fans a game. In July, Louisville’s best player Emma Sears reportedly asked to be traded. Team owner John Neace has since publicly expressed doubt that the club can continue with such low attendance, and begged for investment. The NWSL has acknowledged that the club has fallen behind the league’s rising standards, and is reportedly working on a solution. Rumors of relocation to Cincinnati are swirling.
Chicago, that perennial disappointment, has broken new ground in the field of terrible performances. With a minus-43 goal differential and a paltry 17 points from 25 games, Chicago’s fans have been treated to an astoundingly bad season, the latest of several. The midseason firing of head coach Martin Sjögren has done nothing to turn the tide. The club was sold to mega-rich owners in 2023, but their money has either been not spent or spent in all the wrong places. Several great players left in the offseason, and even more in recent months, Jameese Joseph and Manaka Hayashi being the latest. The Stars fumbled an opportunity to get in on the Chicago Fire’s new stadium, and now have resorted to staying at a temporary stadium which the club has said is inadequate for another year, with no known plan for 2028.
Even the Kansas City Current, which has seen far better results and attendance than both Louisville and Chicago, have shown worrying signs this year. Vlatko Andonovski, the beloved coach who led the team to one of the league’s all-time best seasons last year, headed into the front office in a planned move during the offseason. Instead of letting him lead the search for his replacement, the Current’s owners listened to their old friend Jesse Marsch and hired the extremely mediocre men’s coach Chris Armas. They then went on to trade away Claire Hutton and didn’t even try to replace her at the No. 6.
The Current were having a hot-and-cold season when, on Sept. 7, an offensively bare press release went out that Andonovski had left the club entirely. A series of his former players posted pointed messages on social media, and the club’s captain, Lo’eau LaBonta, suggested to reporters that the trust the players had in Andonovski and his staff was not there with the current staff.
“We’ve lost, from those two [successful] years, our head coach, our GM, our head of performance, our head scout, the list goes on,” LaBonta said. “So it hurts the players, because in women’s sports especially, it takes so long to build trust. And we had that with the group.”
Somehow, the Current’s press release about Andonovski’s departure will not go down as the worst of the season. The Houston Dash grabbed that title with aplomb when it sacked head coach Fabrice Gautrat and his assistant Twila Kilgore, with a statement titled "Houston Dash Announce Technical Staff Departures." Houston has the third-worst home attendance in the NWSL, and now has had 11 times the amount of head coaches (11) in its 13-year history than playoff appearances (one).
Even players at better-run clubs are not immune to the league’s problems. Although the NWSL has made a huge deal of slightly lessening the extent to which it artificially suppresses its players’ salaries via the High Impact Player Rule, that rule is specifically meant to increase the salaries for top players who would already be making the most money. The minimum salary for players is just $50,500 this year. For every Sophia Wilson and Trinity Rodman cracking $1 million, the low cap and floor means that too many players are making far less than anyone should. Relocation threats by Louisville and North Carolina Courage ownership—another owner begging for investment—are especially threatening to players who barely make enough to live on as it is, without having to uproot their lives. Besides, the HIP rule is actively in arbitration, as the NWSL Players Association has filed a grievance against its implementation that has yet to be resolved.
There’s no doubt that the NWSL has grown in some amazing ways in its 13 years of existence. There’s an arms race for training facilities and stadiums (although many clubs are hitting roadblocks along the way), some players are paid good salaries, many teams provide reproductive healthcare to players, and players have automatic free agency and have to consent to trades. It’s a far cry from the baseball fields and trash-can ice baths of the league’s beginnings. But there remain too many reminders of the bad old days, none more serious than the eight complaints about sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, or retaliation that the league received during the first half of this year.
Thankfully, at least one of these exhaustingly sad teams made a good recent decision. Last week, Chicago announced that Andonovski had been hired as the club’s chief soccer officer. “I get excited with projects, and Chicago will very much be a project,” Andonovski told ESPN. The league itself remains one as well.
