Long before professional soccer broke through in the American landscape, the sport was a staple of summertime.
For decades, soccer has been among the United States’ three biggest draws for youth participation, just behind basketball and the combined pull of baseball and softball. Broadcasters and marketers caught on, making “the summer of soccer” a now-trite bit of branding whenever major tournaments or events occupy a smattering of weeks in the hottest months of the year. Those days have also been popular for domestic professional leagues, a chance to bring in families while school is out, with special ticketing packages and Fourth of July matches among their biggest draws.
The marketers may need to refresh their pitch decks soon. No professional league seems to want to play soccer in the summer any more.
Major League Soccer announced a seismic shift late last year, “flipping” its calendar in 2027 from its long-established spring-to-fall/winter cadence to adopt the fall-to-spring slate customary in most major men’s leagues. Before that, the women’s USL Gainbridge Super League became the first active circuit to operate without any midsummer games, kicking off with first-division sanctioning in 2024.
Suddenly, the rest of the professional landscape is reheating old conversations about following suit. The men’s USL has flirted with a similar flip. The announcement of its impending first-division league, with an expected launch in 2027/28, seemed to reaffirm that interest. Given its intention to enact a promotion/relegation model linking the new division to the second-tier Championship and third-tier League One, the expectation is that the USL will want one unified calendar.
Not wanting to be left out of this great American flip-off, the National Women’s Soccer League plans to vote on the merits of forging its own summer vacation.
On 16 April, ESPN reported that the NWSL’s board of governors is expected to vote on flipping the league’s calendar by month’s end. Never mind that the board voted down a similar motion as recently as autumn 2024. Once again, the league will grapple with whether it should operate within the same range of dates as budding rivals such as England’s Women’s Super League, Spain’s Liga F and France’s Première Ligue.
The first question is whether the NWSL is constructed to operate on this timeline. Soccer-specific stadiums within any North American league have been designed and built with summer dates in mind.
As of 2026, all of the NWSL’s 16 teams play in open-air venues. In instances where an NWSL team shares a stadium with an MLS club, the men’s team has historically received scheduling priority as the nominal owners of the venue.
Summer games present their own challenges. Last season, a marquee NWSL match between title favorites Kansas City and Orlando was delayed for more than three hours due to dangerous heat. The Athletic reported that the league threatened to fine Kansas City, as the match was scheduled to be broadcast nationally on CBS. The schedule-makers seemed to learn from this: the Current won’t host a daytime match from late May until late September, and cooling breaks are utilized to help get players through dog-day matches.
That said, a fall-to-spring slate would pose different weather concerns.
Using MLS’s impending dates as a guide, the NWSL could realistically expect to hold games in early December and resume in early-to-mid February after a midwinter break. That was a necessary component for MLS, whose 30-team footprint includes cold-climate locations (such as Canada and Minnesota) that haven’t yet been incorporated into the NWSL.
Roughly half of the NWSL’s current competitors operate in markets with dependable snowfall, with the recently announced launch in Columbus adding to that list. Stadiums would need to be retrofitted, and training centers would need to be winterized to help players find midseason form. It’s a variable for which many MLS organizations are still working to solve.
The players seem skeptical the NWSL could pull off a switch for those reasons. After last week’s report, the NWSL Players Association said a majority of its membership was opposed to the flip. “The right question is not whether the league should flip the calendar, but whether the right conditions exist to do so responsibly,” the union wrote in a statement. “Right now, they do not.”
Say the league’s owners throw enough money at those conditions to insulate accordingly. Whether the NWSL should make the switch is less obvious to answer than it was for MLS.
Much of the case laid out by the men’s league was rooted in its sporting status. MLS is rated as the 14th-best league in the world. Any league below the sport’s highest echelon grapples with how it can stay competitive and not cede further relevance. Having the best players possible is the surest solution, and by flipping its calendar, MLS believes it stands a better chance to bring elite talent to North America more regularly and earlier in their careers.
The NWSL, at present, remains arguably the best league in the women’s game. While the WSL continues to improve beyond its top two or three teams, its lower-table rosters seldom stack up to the NWSL’s fringe playoff hopefuls. The NWSL also draws from the world’s deepest player pool in women’s soccer, benefiting from that culture of orange slice-fueled summer youth soccer and a pathway from amateur ball to the pro ranks.
There would be sporting arguments to back the NWSL’s case for a switch. Contract alignment could avoid some recent scenarios where a player or coach arrives half a year after being announced, such as Lindsey Heaps’s impending move this year to Denver or Jonatan Giráldez’s 2024 appointment by Washington. Nonetheless, major European players (such as Spain striker Esther González, Germany goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger and England defender Jess Carter) have made the move without seeming disoriented by the inverted calendar.
When USWNT stars Naomi Girma, Alyssa Thompson and Emily Fox left the NWSL for the WSL, anxiety increased among NWSL fans about whether the league can continue keeping its best players as Europe’s collective standing in the women’s game improves. In truth, the calendar isn’t the biggest reason that it’s easier for players to yearn for new challenges. It’s the same rules that have propped up the competitive floor of the league.
The Women’s Champions League is the most marketable women’s soccer tournament beyond the quadrennial World Cup. Teams who qualify for it and make deep runs can benefit from broadcast payments and competitive bonuses that enable further investments in the roster. That means higher wages than the NWSL can offer, even as the league tinkers with its rules to allow teams a little leverage to exceed the salary cap. Until those limitations are relaxed further, its best players will stand to earn more outside the league than within it.
The supplemental arguments against a flip aren’t insignificant, either. MLS’s move would leave the NWSL as the only first-division soccer for fans to attend in the summer. That’s more than just a golden opportunity to catch new audiences. Commissioner Jessica Berman has admitted it would eliminate many conflicts as NWSL teams in shared venues look to book optimal dates and times for their games.
Its current place also allows it to open a new season before the WNBA – currently the most popular women’s sports league in North America – while holding its championship after the basketball concludes in mid-October. In the event of a flip, its season would kick off just before the WNBA playoffs, and the NWSL postseason would run into the start of a new basketball season.
All of these points will be bandied about. Realistically, whether it’s good for the owners’ bottom lines will make or break the motion.
Berman rejuvenated the discourse after MLS’s vote, saying “our ecosystem is on notice” about whether it should follow suit. It comes at a time when US Soccer has never worked harder to ensure its women’s teams aren’t run as carbon-copies of the men, led by Emma Hayes’s WNT way. It could also prove shortsighted: There are growing arguments for the WSL to shift its schedule to mine similar benefits from a less-congested summer slate.
The question shouldn’t be whether the NWSL needs to get in line with the rest of American soccer. It’s whether such a change will ultimately be best for all stakeholders, fans and players included.
