The root problem in the National Women’s Soccer League abuse scandal is that the owners haven’t run the organization as a real business. This is vividly apparent in the petty person of Washington Spirit owner Steve Baldwin, who treated a championship team as a backbiting crony clique, and apparently thinks a “fiduciary” is a birdbath.
That the NWSL allowed the Spirit’s noxious and contentious ownership-limbo situation to go on for so long is in keeping with league leadership’s habit of deafening silence at the top, which enabled hand-tossing amateurs and abusers to operate at will, and on whim.