LAST week, the National Women’s Soccer League Players Association (NWSLPA) announced a landmark collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that made professional leagues and player unions across US sports sit up and take note.

It will see the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) become the first major US professional sports league to get rid of the entry draft, in which a league’s teams line up to choose amateur players, mostly emerging from the college system, to sign for them.

Among numerous improvements on the previous deal, the new CBA also introduced free agency for all players when their contracts expire, rather than players needing to play a certain number of NWSL seasons before being granted full free agency, and abolished the practice of players having no say in which team they are traded to and when.

Unions are especially vital in US sports due to the existence of things like drafts, trades, and salary caps.

In theory, a draft allows the worst teams from the previous season to have the first picks of the players coming through from the college system. The idea is that this then makes them stronger going into the next season, allowing them to catch up with the other teams.

Salary caps, meanwhile, limit spending, so no team can be miles ahead of others when it comes to the amount spent on wages.

Parity and healthy competition are the reasons given for the existence of such mechanisms but, when it comes to the relationship between the worker and the employer, these measures heavily favour team owners and the leagues.

They keep spending on player wages at an artificially capped level, which means only a limited amount of income is passed on to the players.

They also leave players with contract and salary restrictions and little say in their career paths from the moment they are drafted to where and when they are traded in the future.

“The draft is an antiquated model that treats people as property to be bought and sold,” the NWSLPA said in a statement.

“The new terms will empower players to decide which team environment is the best fit for their needs and their development.”

When it comes to trades, US sports often leave the players with little choice in where they play.

There are many stories of players happily going about their business before suddenly being informed that they are being traded to another team.

This can involve a player having to move across a continent-sized country and can be even more disruptive for a player’s family.

In football, especially in the high-profile men’s league, Major League Soccer (MLS), international players used to a different system are left bemused as they are informed they are being traded within the league with no say in the matter.

“They can have a family, come home from training one day, and they get told they’re moving to the west coast, the east coast,” Former DC United player and head coach Wayne Rooney told the Athletic’s Pablo Maurer in 2019.

“For a family, it’s really difficult to just up and leave like that without any real notice.”

It is this kind of practice that this landmark CBA has removed altogether.

The NWSLPA and the league itself are challenging the established fabric of US sports, shifting the balance of power towards the workers and away from a system that treats them as assets to be owned or traded.

Though most conservative owner-oriented US sports leagues wouldn’t even think of entertaining such ideas, the steps taken by the NWSL on the back of tireless work from the NWSLPA and its players could see a benefit.

It will align the league with the way the rest of the football world operates, and open it up to becoming even more of a global competition than it already is.

“Given our vision to be the best league in the world, we determined that this was the right time to align with global standards and achieve long-term labour peace,” NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman said in a statement.

“This CBA gives us agency over our business and gives the players agency over their careers.

“Our new agreement revolutionises the game, raises standards, and innovates the business.”

The new CBA also comes at an exciting time in US women’s football. The introduction of a new women’s professional league — the USL Super League — this year has also altered the landscape of the sport in the country.

It will see two separate leagues with Division I status running side by side, which creates additional avenues for college and amateur players to turn professional.

In US football, the league pyramid is not linked, as is the case in most other countries. Leagues are closed, consisting of various franchises, and in the case of the NWSL and MLS are single-entity structures in which all teams (franchises) are owned by the league and owner-operators of the franchises are more like shareholders.

The NWSL CBA could have knock-on effects on MLS further down the line. The Major League Soccer Player Association (MLSPA) released a strongly worded statement in support of what the NWSLPA have achieved, commenting that it “marks a historic shift in the careers, livelihoods and working conditions of female professional football players in the United States.

“More choice, more freedom, more benefits and more protection at each stage of a player’s career is not only what’s best for players, it’s what’s best for the continued growth of our sport in North America.

“By listening to and collaborating with its players, the NWSL has taken substantial steps toward creating a system that functions more like the rest of international football.

“This system will better allow the league to compete with other leagues around the world.”

As well as showing solidarity with the NWSLPA, this statement is obviously targeted at MLS, but the MLSPA will have to wait until 2027 to open new negotiations as per the terms of their most recent CBA in 2021.

Not only was this NWSL CBA significant for its own players, staff, and women’s professional football generally, but it also encouraged wider conversation across the sporting media around workers’ rights in professional sports.

Its groundbreaking moves see women’s football lead the way in challenging the status quo in US sport, giving players more of a say, and putting the league on a more global footing.