National Women’s Soccer League
The National Women’s Soccer League appears in Planet Money vs. the NBA’s tanking problem as the U.S. sports league that abolished its draft in 2024. The episode uses the NWSL to show a more radical alternative to lottery reform: incoming players negotiate directly with interested teams while the league still maintains a salary cap.
The NWSL case reframes anti-tanking reform as a labor-market design problem. It removes the direct reward for losing, but it also raises questions about whether wealthy or highly committed owners can compound advantage over time.
EP 12: Insightful Conversation with a Football Analytics Professional adds the NWSL through Anna D’Souza’s work at EA. The source says Anna worked as a data reviewer and data producer connected to the NWSL side of the game, making the league part of the wiki’s Sports Analytics and women’s-football representation branch as well as its labor-market branch.
Connections
- Sam Uys - commentator interviewed about the no-draft system.
- No-Draft Player Market and Sports Player Autonomy - concepts illustrated by the NWSL case.
- Sports Competitive Balance, Sports Draft Incentive Design, and League Stakeholder Alignment - broader tradeoffs the source draws from the example.
- Anna D’Souza, Electronic Arts, Sports Analytics, and Football Analytics Modernization - analytics and game-data branch added by EP12.