It happens every season: the exodus of mid-level players from NWSL, citing a need to spend time with their families or get on with their post-soccer careers. You know, because they strung together a life while they played soccer but it’s not going to pay the bills forever, so it’s time for a real world job that pays a livable wage.

One of the latest non-WNT retirees from NWSL is Leigh Ann Brown nee Robinson. Brown is 29, so it’s not entirely unexpected that she would retire now. But her decision wasn’t necessarily about physically coming to the end of her shelf life as a pro baller, but, as per the press release from FC Kansas City, wanting “to start the next chapter of my life and let some of the younger players get the same chance I got seven years ago when I started playing professionally.”

There’s also players like Nikki Marshall, who retired at 26 before the 2015 season. Marshall was already working on the side part-time, but with her retirement was able to go full-time at a job that pays her all year round. There’s Nikki Washington, who also retired at 26 in 2015. Kate Deines, yet another 26-year-old at retirement, said “I have recently been presented with a job opportunity that will jump-start the next phase of my professional life outside of soccer.” Don’t forget 22-year-old Jazmine Reeves, who retired after a great rookie season in 2014 at the age of 22 in order to take a job with Amazon, or 24-year-old Courtney Jones who wanted to start her own business, or the latest, 25-year-old midfielder Amy Barczuk.

What are the main driving forces behind non-WNT players leaving the league while they’re still physically able to play? Look at what players say when they retire – it’s time for what’s next, I want a family, there was another job that was too good to pass up. Sometimes that better job may be the conduit towards starting a family as well since babies come with a range of expenses that would eat the league minimum salary of $6,842 in a single bite.

SEE MORE NWSL CONTENT:

• Should fans worry about the rich club poor club divide?
• Is the league ready for more expansion?
• How far can the USSF-league partnership go?
• Interview with NWSL Commissioner Jeff Plush.

On the job front, this current generation of players is doggedly putting one foot in front of the other while they claw towards a living wage. There’s been plenty of discussion about how to make NWSL more professional and profitable, tapping in to the national team zeitgeist and working its marketing and sales opportunities. But the league is fighting against the kind of climate where it’s not even politically expedient to back equal pay for female athletes, despite such support costing absolutely nothing. Getting more money into the league is going to be a long, hard slog short of Oprah deciding she’s suddenly a fan of women’s soccer.

Teams tend to do their best to supplement their players’ income, connecting them with private coaching sessions or placing them within their academy structure if the team has one. Players themselves hustle for extra work, especially in the offseason, running their own camps and creating their own brands.

Teams could go further, though, by implementing education programs for players who want to remain in soccer either as coaches or administrators. They could offer coaching certification or try to partner with US Soccer to at least subsidize the cost of classes. There could be work placement in the offseason to give players experience in soccer admin and help them network for job opportunities.

NWSL should also seriously consider an official partnership with Australia’s W-League, which has an offset calendar to NWSL and would basically allow a player to compete year-round, with a small gap between the end of W-League and NWSL preseason. Making it official and streamlining the process by which players can move between leagues by connecting with teams and obtaining work visas would give more players a chance to have income all year and avoid an very long offseason.

On the family front, there may be things that the league can do to help erode one of the larger barriers to women staying in the workplace. Family assistance by employers has much bigger implications for women due to a combination of pregnancy and the expectations in heterosexual couples for women to be the primary care giver, while the husband is the primary wage earner. Which is not to say that this is the reality of all female soccer players, but it is certainly a legitimate concern that mostly impacts women.

Let’s start with pregnancy, which will take a player out of a portion of the NWSL season no matter how well-timed. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which applies to employers with 15 or more employees, “forbids discrimination based on pregnancy when it comes to any aspect of employment.” That includes making assumptions about someone due to their pregnancy, such as they won’t be returning to work after the child is born, and prohibiting discrimination just because a woman might get pregnant.

According to NWSL spokesperson Patrick Donnelly, in terms of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act “we do comply with and follow all laws to which we are subject.” The league is also working to formalize its previously-informal policy on pregnancy and maternity leave. Donnelly could not comment on how long the league has been working to formalize this policy, but one might assume that the near-simultaneous announced pregnancies of two players on one team in Amy Rodriguez and Sydney Leroux might have given them a bit more momentum.

NWSL teams are certainly not typical employers in that the majority of their employees are female and pregnancy does legitimately impact their ability to perform their jobs, so compliance with the PDA more likely takes the form of not being able to terminate a player’s contract due to pregnancy, as well as giving the player a mandatory tryout once they return from pregnancy.

Then, once a player returns from pregnancy, teams can offer family-based incentives such as child care. Some teams do provide such incentives, such as Sky Blue FC. While not having a written policy about children of players, SBFC has provided child care services while players train and play. According to Vice President of Communications John Archibald, SBFC has also used programs that bring a player’s partner in market during the season so they can provide additional care for the child.

Players clearly understand that putting a part of their lives on hold and living paycheck to paycheck is currently a reality of being a pro female athlete. In an interview with Ella Masar, who was with the Houston Dash at the time, much of her discussion of helping NWSL grow was based on sacrifice. “If we want our kids to be able to play, then this is what we have to do,” she said. “We will bite the bullet so kids in five, ten years can actually get paid a wage where they’re not worried about stuff in the offseason.”

There are no easy solutions for making a three-year-old women’s sports league financially viable. Consider that it took 15 years for a single WNBA team to show a profit, and that was with the backing of then-NBA commissioner David Stern. Of course, the popularity of women’s basketball and women’s soccer have varied over the years, and the WNBA only has the Olympics, while NWSL gets the Olympics and the World Cup to help boost their image. But without a sudden influx of cash (seriously, has anyone called Oprah), high turnover among non-subsidized players is just the tough reality of being a pro women’s soccer player. Workaround measures will have to suffice in helping smooth over players’ lives while the league builds a more sustainable future.

You might have heard, Abby Wambach is retiring today. So that means one last media circus. One last round of interviews. One last word cloud of sound bites.

Wambach deleted her Twitter account as part of a Gatorade campaign. She was on Bill Simmons’ podcast. US Soccer busted out one last T-shirt to grab that cash. She had one last pre-game press conference.

She’s certainly going out talking. You could probably push her off a cliff and it would be nothing but words all the way down. That has always been one of Wambach’s strengths — she will say what she wants, when she wants, to achieve the goal she wants — but it has also been one of her drawbacks.

Just look at the World Cup this past summer. She called herself clairvoyant, a seer; she suggested her teammates Lauren Holiday and Megan Rapinoe were intentionally carded out; she said her teammates might be scared compared to her; she referred to herself as “one of the most decorated goal scorers in the world.”

On Simmons’ show, she said Jurgen Klinsmann should get fired, said there are too many big egos in the men’s program right now, doesn’t think a bunch of “foreign guys” should have been brought in to the men’s national team as opposed to youth development, and made her peace with the idea of permanent injury from repeated concussions as the price of her fantastic career.

But on the flipside, she has been tirelessly pushing her latest raison d’etre: gender equality in the game. She was relentless on the topic on Simmons’ podcast, lamenting the fact that women have to go where the money is in order to just make a living, blasting FIFA and federations for not having the guts to decide that women deserve equal consideration, citing an article that tries to link field turf to cancer in young goalkeepers, and calling playing the World Cup on turf “pathetic.”

SEE MORE: Sunil Gulati had a bad 2015; 2016 needs to be better.

At one point, she lamented losing the 2011 World Cup, telling Simmons that after the epic quarterfinal against Brazil she had envisioned herself becoming player of the tournament, then player of the year. The kind of single-minded self-aggrandizing visualization that the greatest athletes have to use to achieve, or just a regular fantasy that anyone would indulge in based on their hopes and dreams? Maybe a bit of both, because Abby Wambach is both a pinnacle athlete and a regular human woman with regular human emotions.

They talked about her coming out, her biggest disappointments and her most cherished professional memories, her family and her hopes for other young athletes out there. She was game for any topic at all.

So today has been Abby as usual, just with the volume turned up. She’s retiring and doesn’t have to keep such a tight hold on her tongue anymore. She does have to stay on #brand, because even though President Obama himself singled her out as the GOAT, she’s still a female athlete in a world that doesn’t quite value female athletes like it should. She has to hustle pretty hard to make sure she’s set financially.

But other than that, she obviously feels free to ramble as she sees fit. She’s not someone’s iconic cash cow. She’s not the hype machine who has to absorb media scrutiny and do her best to amplify it for the sake of her team and her sport. She’s not the big game pressure player carrying the burden of being the focal point of all the goalscoring. She’s retiring. She’s just Abby now.

SEE MORE: Why now’s the right time for Abby Wambach to retire.

Can you say that someone whose impact will echo down the line for at least a couple of generations is ever “just” anything? Can you separate Abby Wambach from her legacy? Maybe she might prefer that you did. Everything she’s done this year has been placed under a magnifying lens of speculation and opinion, turning this Victory Tour into a spectacle that US Soccer has been determined to mine for every last drop of nostalgia (and cash).

At some point, you have to imagine that she would like it to be about 11 players against 11 players. But that’s not the reality of her life, or of women’s soccer. So for one more day she picks up the microphone and smiles into the camera. After all, she’s pretty good at talking.

There’s a new team in town, and their name is the Orlando Pride. Major League Soccer franchise Orlando City SC bought in to the National Women’s Soccer League, announcing they would field a women’s side starting in 2016. They’re now the third MLS team to do so, after the Portland Timbers started the Thorns and the Houston Dynamo established the Dash.

Three out of 10 teams in NWSL are now MLS-backed. That means MLS money, MLS facilities, MLS support staff. It might, theoretically, mean crossover from MLS audiences. In Portland, approximately one-third of Thorns season ticket holders are also Timbers STHs. The Orlando Pride announced they already have 2,000 season ticket holders signed up, which is approaching Sky Blue FC’s entire average attendance for 2015. In fact, is better than their average attendance in 2014 of 1,656 and approaches league champion FC Kansas City’s 2014 average of 2,018.

Teams like Orlando, Portland and Houston have the benefit of already having laid the groundwork for a portion of their ticket sales. They can turn towards a pre-existing audience and offer them more of what they want, but for cheaper, and with some World Cup-winners thrown in.

Other teams like Boston, Seattle, Washington, Chicago and Kansas City also have MLS teams nearby but aren’t part of the same organization, leaving them to forge unofficial partnerships or do their best to try to capture some of those audiences. It’s not ideal and definitely doesn’t carry the same benefits as official MLS partnerships, like getting to use their facilities and front office staff, but they make do.

NWSL QUESTIONS: 1. Ready to expand? | 2. How to grow the viewership?

Then you have teams like Western New York and Sky Blue, who kind-of-sort-of have MLS teams around but are essentially on their own in isolated geographical pockets (WNY plays in Rochester, New York; Sky Blue plays in Piscataway, New Jersey). Sky Blue has suffered from the lowest average attendance in the league every season, and the Flash’s numbers are steadily declining despite every other team (including Sky Blue) enjoying a bump in average attendance in 2015 due to the World Cup effect.

With rich MLS partners slowly but surely making up a larger and larger part of NWSL, could we see a money-based gap open up between teams?

There’s one primary barrier to the eventual division of the league into two tiers, and that’s the salary cap. Currently teams are limited to $265,000 spread over their non-allocated players. There are also rules in place requiring teams with extra allocated players to provide salary relief to teams with fewer. So in 2015, a team like FC Kansas City, with allocated players Nicole Barnhart, Lauren Holiday, Heather O’Reilly, Amy Rodriguez, and Becky Sauerbrunn, might have been required to pay back into the league to the benefit of a team like the Western New York Flash, who had only Whitney Engen and Sydney Leroux.

So the league is definitely concerned not just with keeping budgets manageable but also making sure no team can run away with a stacked roster. Of course, the salary cap hasn’t prevented some teams from signing top internationals, like the Seattle Reign pulling in Scotland’s Kim Little or, most recently, Manon Melis from the Netherlands. Even with a maximum salary per player of $37,800, NWSL is an attractive and competitive league, and an international who does well enough could find it a boost to their profile.

The flipside of the salary cap is that it artificially depresses the wages of players whose true value may be far beyond the league’s means. Without US Soccer paying the wages of allocated players, many top Americans would no doubt be seeking paychecks in Europe. Instead, national team players tend to get paid anywhere in the mid-five figures to low-six figures – but even 50 grand a year makes the average NWSL salary look like a struggle.

Teams with more money to burn and a hankering to stir interest by bringing in big names could lobby the league and US Soccer to increase that salary cap or institute a designated player rule. Or they might want increased roster sizes, increased minimum standards for travel, more international slots, revised stadium standards, and other development issues the league has so far had to keep in slowly-but-surely mode.

At the moment, those richer teams are outnumbered, but with MLS commissioner Don Garber on the record saying he’d “like to see every MLS team own a women’s team at some point,” it’s possible one day the league could be majority-MLS owned.” What happens when the majority of team owners want the league to go in a certain direction? Do smaller teams get pushed out? Replaced? Supplemented by other teams as a condition of changing the status quo?

Right now, allowing richer teams to ask for a standard that smaller teams can’t meet would be shortsightedly foolish, and it would probably not play very well in the media. It could also signal the loss of independence that some fans fear. At that point, the NWSL would no longer be a league of its own (as much as it is its own league while mostly operated by US Soccer) but an arm of MLS.

NWSL QUESTIONS: 3. How far can the USSF partnership go?

There’s also the fear that MLS ownership would cut its women’s teams should times get tough, because in a financial pinch, the women’s side is usually the first to go. Hopefully any MLS buy-in comes with financial due diligence and conditions that assure the security of a women’s team for at least a period of years; on the MLS side, surely they of all organizations are aware just how long it takes to get a return on an investment. Hopefully they won’t cut and run if things get bleak.

Supplementing the poorer teams seems most likely in the event that there is some kind of financial expansion. It would also act as a control, like the salary cap – if you want to spend more money, you have to pay into the system, to make sure other teams can keep up. The league is still at a point where unity and parity have to take precedence over teeth-baring capitalistic impulses. Live together. Die alone.

We’re not there yet, though.  The league won’t expand again until after the Olympics (at least), and enthusiasm for expanding with an NWSL team may wane in the years between Olympics and the next World Cup (2019). Then again, those off years are the perfect time to get a team established with far fewer interruptions, and by now there some best practices have been discovered for smoothing over the whole process.

For now, MLS involvement remains in the NWSL’s best interest. But the league should just be careful with how and when it welcomes in the bigger names with bigger money.

MORE NWSL:

• Four must-knows from the biggest day of the NWSL offseason.
• Morgan to Orlando: Be careful with assumption about married athletes.
• Morgan’s Orlando trade made her the NWSL’s Hershel Walker.

The National Women’s Soccer League rang in its offseason on Monday with four significant trades, finalizing the previously reported Alex Morgan deal while seeing other U.S. internationals land in Seattle and Orlando. Along with announce the upcoming expansion draft’s protected/unprotected lists, it will likely be the busiest day of the league’s third offseason.

Here’s what you need to know about today’s NWSL trades:

1. Yes, Orlando now has Alex Morgan (and Sarah Hagen and Kaylyn Kyle)

The Orlando Pride officially confirmed the worst-kept secret in the offseason so far, unveiling the start of its roster with superstar Alex Morgan and Canadian international midfielder Kaylyn Kyle from the Portland Thorns, as well as forward Sarah Hagen from FC Kansas City. In return, Portland received Orlando’s first pick in the expansion draft, their first pick in the 2016 college draft, and international spots for the 2016 and 2017 season.

MORE MORGAN: NWSL’s Herschel Walker | Be careful about marriage and motivations.

FC Kansas City also sent a second-round draft pick to Orlando, and in exchange received Orlando’s second-round college draft pick in 2017, which seems like kind of a raw deal until you take into consideration the theory that Orlando has also promised not to take one of FCKC’s exposed players in November’s expansion draft. And indeed, FCKC has left national team allocation Heather O’Reilly on their unprotected list, a player Tom Sermanni would no doubt jump at the chance to recruit.

2. Orlando is hungry for more, aka Tom Sermanni is still coming for your favs

Orlando can pick up to 10 players from the full list of unprotected players (see, below) and can take two players from any club (or just one US allocated player).

Sermanni’s international coaching career creates deep ties with both Australia and Canada, so his international slots could fill up pretty quickly. In Morgan and Hagen, he’s got two starting strikers already, so he might be looking further down the spine of his team, starting with center backs. Kyle shifts between attacking and defensive mid but she’s not a 10, so Sermanni has a need there as well.

Some names that jump off the unprotected list that might make sense joining Sermanni: Canadian attacker Adriana Leon (Chicago Red Stars); fullback Leigh Ann Brown (FCKC); ball-winner Jen Buczkowski (FCKC); center back Amy LePeilbet (FCKC); England international Lianne Sanderson (Portland Thorns); Canadian forward Jonelle Filigno (Sky Blue FC); goalkeeper Hayley Kopmeyer (Seattle Reign); young fullback  Elli Reid (Seattle Reign); 2015 draftee Whitney Church (Washington Spirit); 21-year-old Australian Hayley Raso (Washington Spirit); Canadian goalkeeper Sabrina D’Angelo (WNY Flash); versatile Australian Michelle Heyman (WNY Flash).

3. But a lot of backroom/handshake/gentlecoaches’ deals went on before these trades were announced, so “unprotected” might not actually mean unprotected for some players

As mentioned above, Heather O’Reilly is probably protected from poaching. The Spirit left both Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger unprotected, but Orlando can only have one of them, and it’s a safe bet they’re going to take Orlando-native Harris to be their starting keeper.

Harris as a foregone conclusion for the Pride also means players like Houston goalkeeper Erin McLeod can hang out on an unprotected list fairly certain they’re in the clear. Any keeper has to straddle the line between acting as Harris’ backup and being prepared to start in case Harris gets called up for Olympic duty come the summer.

NWSL OFFSEASON Qs: 1. Ready to expand? | 2. More eyes on games | 3. USSF partnership

4. Portland might be today’s winner

Thanks to their trade with Orlando, Portland now has the No. 1 pick in the 2016 College Draft and controls the No. 1 expansion draft pick. Thanks to a separate trade, they now have the rights to one of the top internationals interested in NWSL, Iceland’s Dagny Brynjarsdottir, who Portland received along with Boston’s first (second overall) and second round draft picks. In return, the Breakers got veteran midfielders McCall Zerboni and Sinead Farrelly along with Portland’s second and fourth round picks..

Orlando’s first expansion pick will reportedly be Meghan Klingenberg, who went from Houston to Seattle. Seattle has agreed to leave Klingenberg unprotected in the expansion draft as part of the labyrinthine maneuverings to get Alex Morgan to Orlando but also allowed Seattle and Houston to get some added value out of a side deal. If the Dash had to leave Klingenberg unprotected anyway, they might as well trade her ahead of time and get something instead of having Orlando just take Klingenberg off their hands.

First pick in the college draft is likely to be Notre Dame defender Cari Roccaro or Virgina center back Emily Sonnet, both decent defensive options who could help complete Portland’s back line.

In total, Portland got Klingenberg, Brynjarsdottir, the No. 1 and No. 2 college draft picks, and an extra international roster spot over the next two seasons. They gave up midfielders McCall Zerboni and Sinead Farrelly and a fourth-round pick. Their unprotected list is quite short and the only name off of it that looks possible to go is Lianne Sanderson. Sanderson, Zerboni, and Farrelly were all solid for the Thorns, but not really outstanding.

The NWSL’s full expansion draft lists, via NWSLSoccer.com:

Boston Breakers
Protected
Sinead Farrelly
Kassey Kallman
Julie King
Stephanie McCaffrey
Kirstie Mewis
Alysa Naeher (USA)
Mollie Pathman
Kathryn Schoepfer
Kyah Simon
McCall Zerboni

Unprotected
Andressa Alves da Silva
Amy Barczuk
Maddy Evans
Nkem Ezurike (CAN)
Jami-Ann Kranich
Lauren Lazo
Francielle Manuel Alberto
Morgan Marlborough
Bianca Sierra (MEX)
Stephanie Verdoia
Rachel Wood

Chicago Red Stars
Protected
Danielle Colaprico
Vanessa DiBernardo
Arin Gilliland
Jennifer Hoy
Sofia Huerta
Samantha Johnson
Julie Johnston (USA)
Alyssa Mautz
Christen Press (USA)

Unprotected
Brittany Bock
Hayley Brock
Zakiya Bywaters
Lori Chalupny
Michelle Dalton
Abby Erceg
Taryn Hemmings
Adriana Leon (CAN)
Michelle Lomnicki
Mary Luba
Kecia Morway
Rachel Quon (CAN)
Melissa Tancredi (CAN)
Cara Walls

Houston Dash
Protected
Morgan Brian (USA)
Amber Brooks
Ellie Brush
Allysha Chapman (CAN)
Bianca Henninger
Carli Lloyd (USA)
Andressa Cavalari Machry
Jessica McDonald
Stephanie Ochs
Kealia Ohai

Unprotected
Rachael Axon
Poliana Barbosa
Rosana dos Santos Augusto
Jen LaPonte
Camila Martins Pereira
Tiffany McCarty
Erin McLeod (CAN)
Toni Pressley
Lauren Sesselmann (CAN)

FC Kansas City
Protected
Yael Averbuch
Nicole Barnhart
Shea Groom
Amanda Laddish
Rebecca Moros
Amy Rodriguez (USA)
Katelyn Rowland
Becky Sauerbrunn (USA)
Erika Tymrak

Unprotected
Liz Bogus
Leigh Ann Brown
Jen Buczkowski
Kaysie Clark
Katrina Gorry
Caroline Kastor
Sara Keane
Amy LePeilbet
Meghan Lisenby
Heather O’Reilly (USA)
Nikki Phillips
Jenna Richmond
Frances Silva

Portland Thorns FC
Protected
Michelle Betos
Dagny Brynjarsdottir
Stephanie Catley
Tobin Heath (USA)
Kendall Johnson
Allie Long
Emily Menges
Christie Sinclair (CAN)
Jodie Taylor
Kat Williamson

Unprotected
Alyssa Kleiner
Clare Polkinghorne
Lianne Sanderson
Meleana Shim
Rhian Wilkinson (CAN)

Sky Blue FC
Protected
Brittany Cameron
Caitlin Foord
Katy Freels
Kristin Grubka
Samantha Kerr
Sarah Killion
Lindsi Lisonbee-Cutshall
Nadia Nadim
Kelley O’Hara (USA)
Christie Rampone (USA)

Unprotected
Aubrey Bledsoe
Kim DeCesare
Jonelle Filigno (CAN)
Courtney Goodson
Shawna Gordon
Hayley Haagsma
Maya Hayes
Cami Levin
Taylor Lytle
Monica Ocampo (MEX)
Nikki Stanton

Seattle Reign FC
Protected
Lauren Barnes
Rachel Corsie
Jessica Fishlock
Kendall Fletcher
Kim Little
Megan Rapinoe (USA)
Hope Solo (USA)
Keelin Winters
Beverly Yanez

Unprotected
Michelle Cruz
Kiersten Dallstream
Danielle Foxhoven
Meghan Klingenberg (USA)
Hayley Kopmeyer
Merritt Mathias
Elli Reed
Havana Solaun
Caroline Stanley
Katrine Veje
Abby Wambach*
* = Allocation Status TBD

Washington Spirit
Protected
Estefania Banini
Crystal Dunn (USA)
Victoria Huster
Estelle Johnson
Diana Matheson (CAN)
Christine Nairn
Francisca Ordega
Megan Oyster
Katherine Reynolds

Unprotected
Josephine Chukwunonye
Whitney Church
Amanda DaCosta
Laura Del Rio
Caprice Dydasco
Natasha Harding
Ashlyn Harris (USA)
Ali Krieger (USA)
Joanna Lohman
Ngozi Okobi
Veronica Perez (MEX)
Hayley Raso
Arianna Romero (MEX)
Angela Salem
Tiffany Weimer
Kelsey Wys

Western New York Flash
Protected
Lady Andrade
Halimatu Ayinde
Abby Dahlkemper
Becky Edwards
Whitney Engen (USA)
Jaelene Hinkle
Sydney Leroux (USA)
Samantha Mewis
Brittany Taylor
Lynn Williams

Unprotected
Tatiana Coleman
Sabrina D’Angelo
Elizabeth Eddy
Kristen Edmonds
Jamia Fields
Amanda Frisbie
Kristen Hamilton
Michelle Heyman
Chantel Jones
Ashley Nick
Haley Palmer
Jasmyne Spencer
India Trotter

It’s completely unprecedented: a women’s professional soccer league in the United States reaching a fourth season. Not only that, the National Women’s Soccer League hasn’t lost a single founding club in three years and has successfully added an expansion team, with a second on the way. By the time the league begins its fourth season this spring, it will have grown from its original eight clubs to 10. Its two predecessors were closing up shop come year four.

Credit can be attributed to several factors. Fans would probably like to hear that the league’s comparative stability comes from the increasing enjoyment of women’s soccer, and that is definitely part of it. The sport is currently on an upswing, enjoying the benefits of two well-executed, accessible, high-profile World Cups in a row.

But therein lies the problem. The women’s national team is the one moving the needle. NWSL clubs still market heavily around national team players, and with good reason. It’s never been a secret that national teamers would be centerpieces, with both teams and the league hoping fans would then get sucked in and enjoy the rest of the product. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with using that as a strategy; it would be foolish to ignore the star power on hand.

NWSL OFFSEASON QUESTIONS: Time to expand? | How to spark growth?

It the strategy does prompt a few questions: What does the league do if that power diminishes? What if US Soccer decides the NWSL is no longer a suitable partner, stops paying the salaries of most national team players, and stops providing administrative support? Could the NWSL survive without that allocation money? Isn’t that the ultimate goal of the league, to be self-sustaining? Just how long can this partnership between USSF and NWSL last, and how and when should it change?

Considering that national team players in the lowest US women’s salary tier probably still make high five figures while the NWSL’s salary cap per player is $37,800, the league can’t compete with what the federation has established as the players’ value. Fortunately, neither can many other leagues. There are a few clubs in the world that can afford these players; most of them are backed by men’s sides, like Lyon or Paris Saint-Germain. Salaries are decent for top players in Germany, Sweden and (now) England, as well. So without US Soccer in the picture, players who stay in stateside are almost certainly going to accept less money, even if they still get paid by the federation for national team duty. Without US Soccer and Jill Ellis not-so-subtly reminding players that it’s much easier to evaluate talent in NWSL, you could reasonably expect a handful of national teamers like Christen Press to leave for destinations more easterly, settling in Europe and perhaps even Russia or Japan. US Soccer’s involvement keeps these players in the domestic league.

The league could probably withstand losing a few national team players, as long as each club kept at least one. Some of NWSL’s legitimacy as a league stems from the fact that it’s where national teamers play. Is that fair to non-national team players who work just as hard and, in some cases, are just as worthy of a callup? No, But that’s the current reality of NWSL.

What’s more, the NWSL almost could not survive without the agreement that keeps those players in the league. In a world without allocation money—and the rules that spread salary cap relief amongst teams who have fewer allocations—teams wouldn’t just struggle to retain national players; they wouldn’t be able to afford the rest of their roster. Players who are barely making do with $7-10 thousand salaries over six months can’t survive on less.

USSF’s support — and, to a lesser extent, Canada Soccer’s — is crucial. So it behooves the league to keep US Soccer as happy as possible. What does US Soccer want out of NWSL, though? Probably, they’d eventually like it to make some money, but they also want the league to feed back into the national team in terms of player talent and audiences. In an interview with St. Louis United FC, USSF chief executive officer Dan Flynn made it clear that the national team player pool is one of their concerns:

“[Jill Ellis] is bullish. She sees the value. She thinks that we’ve broadened our pool, even in the short term, even in a three-year window.”

Flynn also put a number on just how long-term USSF is willing to be in its support of NWSL.

“We’re not looking for an owner to come in just for three years because they can afford it and they have daughters that play. That’s great if that happens but we want owners that actually believe in what our vision is. I often use the term we’re building a runway for a seven- to ten-year window where that league at the end of that seven to ten years clearly looks a lot different than it does today across all facets of it, from pay scale to TV.”

So USSF has, at least verbally, bought in for at least one more cycle, which will probably carry the league through until after the 2020 Olympics. At that point, NWSL absolutely must transition to the next stage of operation as measured by several growth points.

Consider some basic, useful metrics for NWSL growth: attendance and season ticket holder numbers, the latter an important measure of a club’s core fanbase (in addition to providing often key money upfront). When asked for comment, several NWSL clubs were optimistic about their STHs. The Portland Thorns have already reached a 90% renewal rate, while the Chicago Red Stars have seen incremental increases every season. Even Sky Blue FC, who are perpetually bottom of the league in attendance, expect “momentum will lead to a significant increase in season ticket holders for the upcoming NWSL season,” as per their president and general manager Tony Novo.

Overall attendance has definitely grown, holding fairly steady across seasons one and two and then enjoying a large bump in season three from the World Cup.

We can also look at YouTube viewing numbers, with the league using the platform to stream almost every game over its first three seasons. As per NWSL, here are the total views since the league’s inception:

Views definitely took a dip in the second season but skyrocketed 71.7% in the third season. This mirrors what we saw with attendance and what we can probably expect to see once again after the Olympics. Numbers will gradually level off, only to spike again when the next big tournament arrives.

As part of its next stage of growth, the league needs to retain some of the audience from peak years so that, if numbers do regress after the Olympics, there’s still long-term growth. After that, the goal should be holding steady across seasons, even in non-event years. And finally, the NWSL can target increases from one non-event season to the next, non-event season. At each stage, USSF’s involvement with the league would step down, until NWSL was finally financially independent.

This is not different from what the Women’s United Soccer Association and Women’s Professional Soccer (the NWSL’s two predecessors) probably wanted to see for their numbers. What is unique to NWSL is that, leaving season three, there’s no air of quiet desperation. With USSF’s commitment, a successful World Cup, and the right team owners, the league seems to be laying a solid foundation. We may have to wait until the years after the Olympics to truly see what progress NWSL has made over its predecessors, but it’s telling that there is little doubt we will see those years.

That in and of itself is a brand new benchmark that should change the discussion. I’ts no long whether NWSL will survive. Now it’s about how the league can survive in better, more profitable ways, and how the partnership between the USSF and the NWSL plays its part.

It’s a question that has plagued every women’s soccer league in the United States since the Women’s United Soccer Association collapsed: How do you get people to come to games, and keep coming to games? How do you grab people’s attention, then turn that into loyalty?

On the surface, it may seem like a fairly straightforward business question, but it’s complicated by the long slog women’s sports have endured just to get to this point, which is still no shining beacon of fairness and equality. The gap between what sports fans want and what the National Women’s Soccer League can provide is already partially filled with presumptions about women, women’s sports and who sports fan are.

You only have to peruse a female athlete’s twitter mentions to see how women in sports are perceived by many: overstepping their boundaries, subversively intruding on what should be a male sphere, abandoning the correct way to be a woman. That is part of the context when discussing why NWSL is a small-time operation and what might be hampering its growth.

SEE MORE: NWSL offseason question no. 1: Is the league ready to expand?

On a purely technical business level, there are two basic arenas: attendance at games and television coverage.

Television coverage can be tricky. Thus far NWSL has not had the best deals with either ESPN or Fox Sports 1; they’ve never managed to get more than 10 games, including playoffs, out of the entire season on air. Out of the parties involved, you have to imagine that between a minnow of a league like NWSL and a cable giant like ESPN or FS1, the balance of power is pretty heavily skewed towards one side.

But NWSL also needs to step up its game, probably by getting parent federation US Soccer involved to try and squeeze a little more blood out of the networks. If US Soccer can tie an NWSL rider to its national team broadcast deals, that might be the leverage the league needs get a few more games on air. At this point asking for the entire season — or even the majority of the season — to get broadcast is unrealistic, but an increase to a mere 20 percent of games would more than double the league’s broadcast exposure.

There’s also that above-mentioned context to consider. It’s an age-old excuse for not putting women on the air: “No one cares about women’s sports.” And yet low ratings don’t stop them from airing men’s soccer games, both foreign and domestic. Over time, with regular exposure and promotion, those ratings are creeping up towards respectable. Just airing women’s sports on a regular schedule, with no fanfare but the same production value as other events, would plant the seeds for growth. Of course, there will be complaints from fragile sports fans who don’t like change, but the more audiences see these games, the more they accept that their presence is normal, the more they watch.

The other part of the equation is actual physical attendance at games. The onus to drive attendance falls more on each club than the league overall by virtue of their diverse geographical locations and markets, but there are certainly top-down strategies NWSL can employ. Earlier this month, league commissioner Jeff Plush mentioned that NWSL would be looking more national marketing and some “salesmanship 101” tactics to be shared as part of best practices for every club.

Plush also mentioned that the league would soon have access to demographic data, examining who NWSL fans are and enabling the league to better target them. Demographic data also tells you who your fans aren’t, which can help you decipher what your fans get out of your league and what you might be missing.

Without specific demographic data, though, we can probably create some general categories for NWSL fans. At the top level, there’s the casual/hardcore divide. Casual fans are there for a variety of reasons: family experience; curious about their local women’s professional league; saw a national team game and wanted another taste of that hype.

Hardcore fans tend to be either big-time fans of certain players (usually national team players) and will follow them to any team in any league, or big soccer fans, or some blend of the two. Hardcore fans are the ones who wake up at ungodly hours in order to watch a grainy livestream from across the globe, buy the limited merchandise, and travel multiple time zones for games.

SEE MORE: How do you solve a problem like the Portland Thorns?

So clubs have two tasks: keep up their casual numbers through their high turnover rate, and expand and solidify their hardcore numbers through deep fan outreach and cooperation. Limited resources means having to decide which group gets which amount of focus, but the division isn’t as hard a choice as you might think.

Contrary to first assumptions, hardcore fans can be much easier to please than casuals. What hardcores want is a good product on the field and some acknowledgment from the team for their time and devotion. That attention can generally take the form of a few concessions from the team: acknowledging them on social media, giving them their own section in the stadium, and designating a tailgate spot by the venue. NWSL hardcores, usually members of a club’s supporters group, tend to understand the limited resources their teams have and will adjust their requests accordingly.

Casuals, on the other hand, may sometimes expect much more. There can be demands for players’ time, with frustration and anger following when they don’t receive it. Casuals who only come to one or two gamedays and are new to the concept that women’s club soccer is not blessed with the glitz and glamour of a national team appearance can be surprised or confused by the difference between the two. They’re not necessarily there for the product on the field, so their experience is measured by metrics like the overall gameday experience and what souvenirs they got from the game.

This is not to condemn casuals or glorify hardcores. There are simply differences in the way they experience the game, so they both need different approaches when marketing to them. Understanding their differences and how they make up a club’s total attendance can also help determine what percentage of resources need to go where. Are season ticket renewals healthy or growing? Maybe a little more focus can go to casuals. Are walk-up or single-ticket sales looking good? Then perhaps more community outreach.

There are so many moving parts to nurturing NWSL. One or two big solutions are not going to save this league. The constant grind, the push for more fans, more TV viewers, more acceptance – those will yield results. Of course, it behooves the league not to mess up golden opportunities like marketing synergy with tent-pole events like the World Cup and the Olympics. Sometimes the league can sprint instead of taking it slow and steady. But this league, through its very continued existence, can help build better growth conditions for itself, creating a positive cycle that gradually chips away at the resistance to women’s sports.

When the National Women’s Soccer League was conceived, one team stood out for being the only club at the time to be affiliated with a Major League Soccer side. The Portland Thorns fell under the same umbrella as owner Merritt Paulson’s Timbers and would share front office staff and facilities. It also meant they would have substantially more money than the other seven teams in the league, and their allocation of high-profile internationals like Alex Morgan, Christine Sinclair and Tobin Heath did little to diminish the perception that they had been given the keys to daddy’s car.

They had a high-profile coach hiring, too, bringing on board former United States’ World Cup and Olympics winner Cindy Parlow Cone, who would have to stand up to early hype that has followed the team around since its inception. Her roster that first season was littered with big names, backed by Paulson’s money and already adored by a soccer-mad city. Their first home game drew a raucous 16,479 fans, part of what would be a dominant year at the turnstile:

The Thorns won the NWSL championship that year, but they also finished 11-6-5 and third in the league in the regular season — not stellar results, but overshadowed by the championship win. There were expectations that the Thorns would not just win but would be dominant and stylish given their good fortune.

Now, two years and two coaches later, the Thorns are still searching for somebody who can deliver on that first year’s promise.

Inheriting a champion

Parlow Cone resigned a few months after the 2013 season citing a desire to spend more time with her husband; of course, there was speculation that her resignation was more about the team’s performance, sometimes having to force wins in inelegant fashion. She was not molding the Thorns into ownership’s vision of a flagship team.

On the back of a title, year two brought even bigger expectations. Enter Paul Riley, formerly of Women’s Professional Soccer’s Philadelphia Independence – an expansion team he guided to back-to-back  title game appearances, losing as underdogs to FC Gold Pride (featuring Brazilian star Marta as well as Sinclair) and Western New York (Marta, Sinclair with the addition of Morgan, this time). In Philadelphia, he got performances out of confidence players like Amy Rodriguez, who had suffered Tony DiCicco’s mishandling with the Boston Breakers. He handled big personalities, like former U.S. international Tasha Kai, and brought along future NWSL core players like Lianne Sanderson, Leigh Ann Robinson, and Vero Boquete. Winning Coach of the Year in both of his WPS seasons, Riley, it seemed, had the pedigree to take a more talented Portland team all the way again.

But his tenure was almost immediately marred by a gaffe when he failed to protect fan favorite midfielder Mana Shim from the 2014 expansion draft. The Houston Dash, allowed to pick up to two players from every roster, took Shim, forcing Riley to give up a draft pick a week later to bring her back. Why he hadn’t protected her in the first place, fans asked.

The Thorns still put together wins in season two, but rumors of discontent surfaced. It got around that Riley had kept up two-a-days while the team was in season, leaving players tired and disgruntled. The Thorns went 10-8-6 to once again place third and slip into the playoffs, only to lose to FC Kansas City in the semifinals. At the time, Riley said that the team hadn’t “produced in big moments” then went on to criticize FCKC’s facilities and attendance, a criticism he would end up repeating about Chicago.

A second chance

Riley’s record was not as good as Parlow Cone’s, but Portland had signed him to a two-year contract, and there was a sense that perhaps, in the spirit of fairness, he needed one season to adjust. So began season three, an interesting year for a league that would be interrupted by the 2015 World Cup. National team players could be expected to be gone for at least a month, depending on how their countries did in the tournament. Teams knew to plan for at least six weeks without some stars, even with NWSL’s mid-season break to cushion the blow.

Still, Riley stacked his roster with players who were almost certain to be gone, with Canadian allocations Rhian Wilkinson and Kaylyn Kyle as well as England striker Jodie Taylor joining the team. This was in addition to the internationals already on his roster, like Morgan, Heath, Sinclair, German international Nadine Angerer and Australian fullback Steph Catley.

The Thorns struggled all summer. They opened in positive fashion, an enjoyable 4-1 win at home against Boston. Then their season started a slide into a trench of dropped points and limited offense. The team seemed uninspired, in disarray, going winless seven games in a row during a period that overlapped with the World Cup. Even when their international players returned, they struggled, taking just one point from their last four games. They would have multiple-goal games, then droughts.

Riley seemed not in tune with his team, perhaps having lost some of the locker room. He insisted on using a 3-6-1 formation even when it continued to leave his team vulnerable in defense, Their final record, 6-9-5, left them sixth in the league, beaten for fifth by a Houston team that finished dead last in 2014.

Under Riley, the Thorns had gone from league champions to not even playoff material. Fans could look at teams like Seattle and Washington, who had finished in the bottom two in 2013, and see teams that had built something better season by season. The Thorns had gotten worse, backsliding from season one.

Throughout the season, Riley spoke of his long-term plans, claiming that he really needed three years to build something, but fans grumbled and critics puzzled. Three years? To build what? He already had a roster some coaches could only dream of. He had everything, from the players to the resources to the fan support. And he posted less-than-mediocre numbers, leading the Thorns to not renew his contract at the end of the season.

Moving forward

“Not renew his contract” is perhaps a polite way of saying “dismissed.” Either way, the Thorns face a search for a new coach — a coach who will inherit many of the problems Riley faced. His replacement won’t even have the benefit of an intact season to get the team settled, as the 2016 Olympics will interrupt the schedule much as the World Cup did. It seems likely the United States, Canada, and Australia will qualify — but absences by even one of those countries would change the Thorns lineup.

And where does a team find a coach for such a high-profile position? The Boston Breakers, ninth out of nine in 2015, just finished their own coaching search, having poached Matt Beard from Liverpool in the FA WSL. Beard is now the fourth British coach overall to join NWSL, after Riley, Seattle’s Laura Harvey, and Washington’s Mark Parsons. Could the Thorns also look overseas? Or maybe they could look within US Soccer’s youth system? Keep it American with an MLS or NASL-experienced coach? Someone who’s toiled in WPSL or the W-League? Or perhaps they have the pull to grab an esteemed international coach, like former U.S. boss Tom Sermanni, who is currently relaxing as an assistant with Canada? As almost everyone who works in Portland has said, there’s no other experience quite like it in women’s soccer.

And once this coach is hired, they must face not just the 2016 college draft but an impending expansion draft, as Orlando City SC joins the league with a women’s side. Who on that roster do you protect? Who do you let go, perhaps to open up spots for draft picks or trades? A systemic gutting doesn’t seem to be the answer, not with the pieces Portland has.

SEE MORE: NWSL offseason question no. 1: Is the league ready to expand?

The job is, to be sure, a role that will come with a fair bit of expectation, perhaps more than some other coaching positions in the league. With greater resources come greater expectations, and rightly so. Are expectations too outsized for the position, though? What is reasonable to ask of a Thorns coach in context of their roster, staff, budget, and team history? Playoffs? Finals? Winning it all? Considering what coaches like Harvey and Vlatko Andonovski (FC Kansas City) do with their resources, it doesn’t seem like too much to ask forat least a playoff spot.

The Thorns head coach position is one of the most prestigious in women’s soccer; at least, it is one of the most desirable club coaching jobs out there. But the variables surrounding this job — the usual needs of a coaching search flavored by greater-than-average fan scrutiny and a cocktail of premium players — combine to make this an intriguing situation. It’s not the same as the Breakers finding a coach; there’s no storm of expectation swirling around Boston, nor is there a numerous and restless fanbase or a very outspoken owner prone to tweet-and-delete.

Like it or not, Portland is unique in NWSL because it is bigger and richer, and soccer is the dominant local sport. Whoever ends up in the hot seat there will have to be ready to deal with the scrutiny while fulfilling the clear expectation that they build a championship team. There’s no room for just acceptable, going by Parlow Cone leaving, and there’s definitely not room for taking two years to build a base.

Good luck, future Thorns coach, whoever you are. You’re going to need it.

Over the coming weeks, Stephanie Yang, new contributor to World Soccer Talk, will be tackling a series of major questions facing the National Women’s Soccer League as it approaches its third offseason. In her first installment, Stephanie analyzes the league’s expected partnership with Orlando City SC – potentially the third Major League Soccer franchise to venture into the NWSL.

The NWSL is not like the women’s soccer leagues came before it. It’s not just the structure of the league and the tight financial caps that distinguish it; it’s the very fact of its existence. No American women’s pro soccer league has made it out of the third season.

A week short of Oct. 1’s NWSL championship game, the league sits on the cusp of a fourth season, not only with all its founding teams still onboard but prepared to expand for the second time. The league will have 10 teams in 2016, with Major League Soccer franchise Orlando City SC starting a women’s side.

NWSL’s last expansion was with the Houston Dash in 2014, the league’s second year of operation. Coach Randy Waldrum has stated that, from inception to actually playing a game, the Dash, a partner of MLS’s Houston Dynamo, had about 90 days to pull everything together. That means rosters, staff, logistics – everything.

SEE MORE: Report: NWSL will expand to Orlando in 2016.

But the Dash are still in the league and have found a measure of success – if not on the field (having yet to make the playoffs) then with ticket sales, going from what was already the league’s second-highest league average attendance of 4,650 in 2014 to 6,413 in 2015, a 38% increase. This is in no small part due to the World Cup bump and the presence of final hero Carli Lloyd, who spent the league’s first two years with Western New York. The combination of increased attendance and the stability of an established MLS team’s infrastructure show that the league was both ready and able to handle an expansion.

Two years later, the league wants to expand again, begging the questions: Is it ready? Is it able?

Ability is the easier question to answer, since expansion is again going through an MLS team. While itself a new expansion team in MLS, Orlando has had robust attendance in its inaugural season with an average of 31,987 so far, second highest in the league. With that infrastructure comes facilities, a front office, staff, training resources, community resources, sales and marketing know-how and all the little things that go into a running a pro sports team.

The real question is readiness. Is Orlando ready for a women’s team? How do you translate the ticket sales on the men’s side to the women’s side? There’s no guarantee that Orlando City men’s fans will be interested in or able to watch Orlando City women.

But Orlando City SC fans think the franchise is ready. Jessica Konecny, a member of The Ruckus, one of Orlando’s official supporters groups, says that soccer is now an established sport in Orlando and central Florida. Via email:

“Orlando City SC announcing an NWSL team franchise could not have come at a more perfect time. There is already such a heightened excitement around soccer in this city in general because of Orlando City SC but the fact that the U.S. Women’s National Team just won the World Cup will play heavily in this new team’s favor. The U.S. Women’s National Team will be playing a Victory Tour match at the Citrus Bowl on Sunday, October 25th and I think this will be a perfect test to gauge the city’s enthusiasm for a women’s team.”

In addition to questions on the Orlando side, expansion will certainly have an effect on the rest of the league, starting with the schedule and the expansion draft. For the former, things will get easier, as an even 10 teams make for a much smoother schedule than an odd nine. But for the latter, many a carefully planned roster may now go awry as teams have to decide who to protect and who to put into a pool from which Orlando may draft a handful of players.

Then there’s allocation. US Soccer, Canada Soccer, and the Mexican Football Federation pay the salaries of a select group of national team players, effectively subsidizing the league and allowing clubs to focus their budgets on players with less name recognition without shelling out as much for heavy hitters. When the league started, these allocation rosters were divided amongst eight teams, but now with 10, that’s theoretically fewer allocated players per team.

Clubs are free to trade their allocated players, however, and no longer have to trade allocated for allocated as they did in year one, allowing some teams to stack themselves with national talent (FC Kansas City, five U.S. allocations) while others to go nearly without (Boston Breakers, two). National federations probably won’t be increasing their allocation budgets, either, leaving the same number of allocated players to circulate amongst clubs.

Orlando will certainly get an initial allocation, since one of the central tenets of the league’s marketing is getting to watch U.S. national-team talent. Orlando will want their own national team names to build an advertising campaign, especially in an Olympic year. There’s nothing quite like getting to say “gold medalist X” will be in the house.

And then there’s the money. NWSL does engage in some level of profit-sharing, and naturally, MLS-backed sides probably stand to pay back into the league the most. As reported by the Portland Business Journal, the Thorns were the only team in year one to turn a profit and duly paid a portion of that back into the league. Of course there’s no guarantee that an Orlando women’s team will make enough to be giving back some of the excess, but it’s much more likely to do so than, for example, New Jersey-based Sky Blue FC, whose attendance numbers are last out of nine teams (2,189 average attendees in 2015, up from 1,656 in 2014).

There are other performance indicators besides attendance. In an article at Inc.com, MLS commissioner Don Garber listed national and local media coverage, TV ratings, and the use of soccer specific stadiums as metrics to use.

The soccer-specific stadiums metric needs a bit of tweaking to be applicable to NWSL since it’s catch-as-catch-can for each team and their facilities. Some clubs still play on fields with gridiron lines, constrained by budgetary and geographical concerns. But charting NWSL’s transition to using soccer-specific facilities with a certain minimum seating size could be a useful metric.

In terms of national coverage, the league is of course experiencing the most exposure it’s seen since its inception due to the World Cup. There are plenty of complaints that the league and US Soccer haven’t maximized the effects of the World Cup bump, but even inefficient efforts have yielded healthy results.

Average league-wide attendance increased 22%, from 4,139 last year to 5,046. And because the national team was guaranteed a 10-game Victory Tour if they won the tournament, now every primetime broadcast is an opportunity for commentators to link “USWNT” and “NWSL” in people’s minds. Former players like Aly Wagner, Leslie Osborne, Cat Whitehill and Julie Foudy have dutifully talked up the league and its clubs during pregame shows, in-game commentary, halftime and post-match analysis.

Local coverage varies by club, of course, but many NWSL clubs have at least one or two dedicated correspondents who track them throughout the season. Once again, the World Cup comes into play, with local outlets wanting to cover national teamers like Carli Lloyd, and by extension having to at least mention that these players are signed with local clubs.

TV ratings are iffy. NWSL’s broadcast deal with Fox Sports was been hampered by a late announcement that prevented extensive promotion and, of course, competing sports. Some games saw decent ratings, like the 136,000 for the Houston Dash versus Seattle Reign. Other games saw abysmal numbers, like the Reign versus Washington Spirit semifinal, which was up against both the NFL and the US Open tennis tournament and had 48,000 viewers.

But the league did have a deal, and is apparently in talks for next season’s deal – and will hopefully emphasize the context around their low ratings. Much may depend on the numbers generated by the Reign versus FC Kansas City final, to be broadcast on Fox Sports 1 from Providence Park in Oregon on Oct. 1. That puts the final at 9:30 p.m. Eastern time on a Thursday, which is traditionally when most networks schedule their strongest primetime lineups. Seeing an increase in total number of games broadcast, scheduling better days and timeslots, or moving more games from Fox’s streaming service to their actual broadcast could be good indicators of progress.

One of the threads running throughout the questions facing expansion is the World Cup. Whenever there is a league, it always sees a World Cup bump. That is not the issue. The real question is whether that bump can be made to last.

Realistically, the gains from the World Cup probably chart like an exponential function falling off—a nice big spike to start, but then a steep drop-off as the hype fades and the news cycle moves on, finally ending in a more stable and gentle decline. That the World Cup bump would die is a given; it’s that tail end of the chart that matters. Instead of returning back to the original baseline, can the league push its baseline up for an overall gain? Can the league sustain this new baseline, so that in the lean years between World Cups and Olympics, things don’t backslide and clubs remain stable?

Signs seem to point to yes. NWSL was founded during those lean years after its predecessor (Women’s Professional Soccer) had a very public implosion. It was a league built with lean years in mind. Expansion doesn’t have to mean stretching too thin; done correctly, it means bringing in additional resources that don’t stress the system.