Scrapping the High Impact Player criteria is the right fix for the NWSL

Key takeaways

• The NWSL's High Impact Player rule lets clubs pay selected players beyond the standard salary cap, and it is widely called the Rodman rule.
• According to the Guardian, the eight qualifying criteria are gone, so clubs can now use the extra spending on any player they choose.
• Fixed eligibility criteria favoured clubs that already had recognised stars and did little for clubs trying to develop or recruit their own.
• The strongest objection is that an unrestricted allowance may let the wealthiest owners pull further ahead of the rest of the league.

Removing the checklist puts spending judgement where it belongs

The NWSL operates under a salary cap, which limits how much each club can spend on player wages. A cap keeps competition balanced and stops any one owner buying the league. It also causes a problem a domestic league cannot avoid: rival clubs elsewhere may face no comparable limit, so when a star player's contract comes up for renewal, a capped club can find itself unable to match an outside offer.

The High Impact Player mechanism was the league's response. It gave clubs an extra spending allowance on top of the cap, reserved for players judged to be of exceptional value. Its informal name comes from Trinity Rodman of Washington Spirit, whose contract situation became the case most associated with the rule. In its first form, a player only qualified for the extra money if they met at least one of eight criteria set by the league.

The Guardian reports that those criteria have now been removed. Clubs can direct the allowance to whichever player they want. The Guardian's writer argues that this makes sense, and this article agrees. The underlying issue is that a club needs to keep players others want to sign. A league-defined list of qualifications was always going to be an imperfect proxy for that. The club negotiating the contract knows far better than the list which players it is at risk of losing and what keeping them is worth.

Even with the change, a club still has to decide how to spend a finite allowance, and the salary cap still applies to everyone else on the roster. What the revision removes is the gatekeeping step, not the overall limit on spending.

Fixed criteria rewarded clubs that were already strong

The first piece of evidence comes from how the original rule actually worked. Criteria of this kind usually measure recognition: international selection, individual awards and similar markers that a player has already reached the top level. The Guardian points to Washington Spirit as an example. It describes a squad full of players who met the initial criteria, Rodman among them. It also notes that the club has an accessible stadium in a large city and a committed fanbase that puts it near the top of the league's attendance figures.

A club in that position benefits twice under a criteria-based system. It already has the commercial base to pay well, and its players are the ones most likely to meet the qualifying tests, so it gains the most room to spend above the cap. A club with a younger squad, or one whose best players have not yet earned the honours the criteria recognised, gains little or nothing from the mechanism, even if a rival is trying to sign one of its players.

The source text is cut off at the point where it begins to describe what the change will mean for every Spirit player from next season. The exact consequences it sets out are therefore not known here. The broader point holds regardless: when eligibility depends on past recognition, the extra money goes to the clubs that have already collected recognised players. Removing the criteria lets every club use the allowance on its own most at-risk player, whether that player is an established international or someone attracting interest for the first time.

A capped league competes with uncapped buyers

The second piece of evidence is the market the NWSL competes in. Players in women's football can move between leagues, and the leading clubs in some European competitions do not work under a salary cap like the NWSL's. When one of those clubs makes an offer, the NWSL club cannot raise its own bid freely. It has to fit any counter-offer within its cap.

In that setting, an extra allowance is a retention tool. It works only if the club can use it at the moment the threat appears. Under the original criteria, a club could have a player receiving serious foreign interest and still be unable to use the allowance because that player had not met any of the qualifying conditions. The threat was real, but the rule did not recognise it.

Foreign clubs do not check a league's internal criteria before making an approach. They sign the players they want. A retention mechanism that only covers certain categories of player leaves the rest exposed. Letting clubs choose whom to protect brings the rule into line with how the risk actually arises.

The rule now fits a market built on player movement

The third piece of evidence is the structure of the NWSL's player market. In recent years the league has moved away from mechanisms that tied players to clubs, including the college draft, and towards a system with much wider free agency. Players reaching the end of their contracts can increasingly choose their next club, at home or abroad.

In a market like that, a club's main tool for keeping a player is the contract offer: wage, length and terms. A criteria-based allowance sat awkwardly in this system. The league had given players more freedom to move, yet the spending power clubs could use to keep them still depended on a centrally defined list. The revised rule removes that inconsistency. If players are free to weigh offers, clubs should be equally free to decide which offers to improve.

This also brings the NWSL closer to how designated or marquee player systems work in other capped leagues. Such systems typically give clubs a limited number of slots or a fixed amount of extra spending and leave the choice of player to the club. The exact details of the revised NWSL rule beyond the removal of the criteria, such as any cap on the allowance itself, are not set out in the material available here.

The strongest case against: an open allowance can widen inequality

The best argument against the change is about competitive balance, and it should be taken seriously. A salary cap exists to stop financial strength turning straight into results. Any spending allowance above the cap weakens that principle. The criteria limited the weakening by confining the extra money to a narrow group of players.

Without the criteria, every club can in principle use the allowance. Not every club can afford to. Owners with deeper pockets or larger commercial revenues can use the full allowance every season, while clubs with smaller crowds, less favourable stadium arrangements or more cautious ownership may use little of it. The result could be a two-tier league in which the allowance becomes a standard feature of wealthy clubs' payrolls rather than an emergency retention tool. The gap the cap was meant to close would then reopen through a side door.

A second concern follows. The criteria at least ensured the money went to players with a clear claim to elite status, which matched the rule's stated purpose of keeping stars in the league. With the criteria removed, the allowance could fund recruitment rather than retention. A club could use it to sign a player from a domestic rival, which moves talent around the league without keeping any extra talent in it. An unrestricted allowance could also raise wage expectations across the league without increasing its overall quality.

Supporters of the criteria could also argue that clear, public rules are fairer to players. A checklist tells every player exactly what they have to achieve to become eligible for higher pay. Club discretion removes that transparency, and a player's earning potential may depend on how their club reads the market rather than on anything the player controls.

These objections are fair. They do not show that the criteria were the right solution. They show that the allowance needs other safeguards, such as a limit on its total size, rules on whether it can be used for incoming signings, or mechanisms that help smaller clubs. Whether the revised rule includes any of these is not known from the source material.

Evidence that would change the conclusion

The judgement here rests on the claim that club discretion protects stars better than fixed criteria while doing only modest harm to competitive balance. Several kinds of evidence would weaken it.

If clubs mainly use the allowance to sign players from domestic rivals rather than to keep their own, the rule would be redistributing talent within the league instead of keeping it there, and the case for discretion would fall away.

If spending under the allowance becomes concentrated among a small group of wealthy clubs while the rest barely use it, the competitive balance objection would carry more weight than the retention benefit.

If players keep leaving for uncapped leagues at a similar rate, the problem would not be who qualified for the extra money but whether the amount is enough. In that case removing the criteria would be a sideshow to the real question of the allowance's size.

If players report that discretionary spending has made pay less predictable or less fair, the transparency argument for criteria would deserve another look. Evidence pointing the other way, with clubs of different financial sizes using the allowance to keep players who would otherwise have left, would strengthen the conclusion.

Sources and further reading

• The Guardian, Moving the Goalposts column on the revision of the NWSL High Impact Player rule
• National Women's Soccer League, official competition rules and roster regulations
• NWSL Players Association, published material on the collective bargaining agreement and player movement
• General reference works on salary caps and designated player systems in North American professional sport