Young players are impressing across the country following the American league\u2019s very un-American move<\/p>\n
For the first time in its history, the National Women\u2019s Soccer League (NWSL) commenced a regular season this spring with no draft. A quintessentially American event, defined by hopes and dreams being on public display while teams trade players into the professional leagues without their explicit input, was scrapped by a collective bargaining agreement negotiated between the NWSL and the NWSL Players Association in August.<\/p>\n
In so doing, a league unafraid of reinvention became the first major professional sports league in the United States to forgo the draft. That\u2019s a seismic shift by any measure, and while the move puts the NWSL in line with global football standards the long-term implications will take much longer to assess. After all, the draft was not simply an entertaining way to distribute talent while introducing them to the public on a celebratory stage; it was also a useful means of ensuring parity in a league proud of its competitiveness. In the words of the NWSL\u2019s commissioner, Jessica Berman: \u201cThere actually is nothing to point to as a case study of how to make this transition, because there is no league that has gone from a world of a draft and having years of service, to being able to earn free agency and just having that melt away overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is an extract from our free weekly email, Moving the Goalposts. To get the full edition, visit this page and follow the instructions<\/a>. Moving the Goalposts is back in to its twice-weekly format, delivered to your inboxes every Tuesday and Thursday<\/strong><\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Young players are impressing across the country following the American league\u2019s very un-American move For the first time in its history, the National Women\u2019s Soccer League (NWSL) commenced a regular season this spring with no draft. A quintessentially American event, defined by hopes and dreams being on public display while teams trade players into the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}