The NWSL announced the rumored changes to their compensation guidelines in a post on the league website today, and they’re every bit as big as promised.
The headline takeaway is a $300,000 allowance in allocation money that can be purchased by any team directly from the league. This can be used for two primary things: buying down player salaries that exceed the salary cap that year or paying transfer fees for overseas players. Transfer fees in women’s soccer worldwide have historically been extremely low, with the total cost of transfer fees in the world totaling only $564,354 in 2018, so this potentially adds a massive influx of cash to the global market for women’s soccer, even assuming that teams only use a small portion of their allocation money for external transfers.