Draft Beer, Not Athletes: NWSL Goes Free Market, Dumps The Draft

This is the most exciting time of the year for most sports fans in North America as MLB comes to a conclusion in the World Series while the NFL, NHL and NBA ramp up another season. (There is also golf’s President’s Cup, the just-completed U.S. Open tennis tournament and the Breeders Cup, too.)

But that enthusiasm is being tempered more each year by concerns about the viability of the competition. Specifically, the spectre of tanking in pro sports and chaos in the U.S. collegiate sports system brought on by NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) legislation has created new demands on athletes and schools alike. How to assure labour rights in such a turbulent landscape?

In our 2022 book Cap In Hand, How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports & How The Free Market Can Save Them we argued that artificial salary restraint and draft parity had passed whatever usefulness it was designed to serve and are now diluting the product by punishing excellence. Ditto the drafting of top amateur players by useless teams as a means to ensure parity.

The over-expansion of franchises in the top levels of the sports leagues (NFL/ NHL: 32 teams. NBA/ MLB: 30 teams) has required evermore tortured accounting to grow  the equity of franchisees while the product is watered down. The notion that markets like Winnipeg, Green Bay, Pittsburgh, Tampa or Jacksonville can equitably compete on an annual basis with New York, Chicago and Los Angeles is absurd and achieved only through salary manipulation and the assignment of franchise stars to teams that have wrecked their businesses. 

In a more realistic scenario teams would compete at the level they can afford either through market size or the subsidization of a rich owner. As we point out in the book this has been the model in European soccer for over a century. But in their zeal to market sports as if it were a franchise operation like KFC leagues in North America create enormous supplies of inventory in 80-plus  game schedules.

In this scenario teams openly announce their intention to lose at season’s opening in an effort to gain top draft picks. Their fans, who pay handsomely for games on TV and in digital,  are left with nothing to root for over six-months plus of play. This cynicism is corrosive. As we’ve argued earlier, this had led to owners embracing the demon of betting to get reluctant viewer engaged. If they can’t cheer a winner maybe they’ll cheer a player prop or a parlay of games. 

Failing that, they await getting lucky in the draft at season’s end, hoping a chance draw will give them the next generational talent. Their fear is losing their team and its history overnight. But our remedy, like that of soccer, is divisional play with relegation and promotion to a lower/ higher team.

When we toured the book most interviewers agreed with the premise that this system stinks while also creating scarcity/ salary inflation, but few could see an alternative to parity. Ah, the P word. Owners mouth it, fans accept it.

But as Scott Stinson points out on TheScore : “Are overseas leagues on the verge of collapse due to the lack of parity? No - but they do face some parity-related challenges. The gulf in spending power between heavyweights like Real Madrid and Manchester City and their lesser domestic rivals does create imbalances. But if you asked fans of a small club if they should just be handed the right to claim the best teenagers in the country for a few seasons, they would think you mad. In the case of the NWSL, the salary cap will likely ensure that talent is spread around the league anyway.”

So now the National Women’s Soccer League is prepared to plow new ground in its latest CBA with its players. The NWSL has abandoned a draft of prospects as a means of stocking their rosters. Granted, the NWSL competes with soccer leagues with no drafts or salary caps, so it must be competitive. But they intend to go into the market to find the best employees.

As we wrote in Cap In Hand, it was not this way in the past for the big leagues. Then the courts got involved. “For a long time this concern was rectified by the U.S. Supreme Court that— in the case of MLB— granted the sport a constitutional exemption from anti-trust laws. With the legal approval of the judges, the leagues were able to skirt labor laws on restraint of trade and monopoly status in several landmark cases brought by athletes. 

Using the baseball example, sports without antitrust exemptions were allowed to define player contracts as open-ended documents, tying players to a team in perpetuity and killing their market value. While Babe Ruth commanded a salary driven by his value in the 1920s, few athletes enjoyed the same leverage for the next half century. Any competition was quickly stomped out.”

The drafting of players came from the NFL in the post WWII days. It’s a sacred concept to everyone. Except the NWSL. Yes, it is still married to salary caps. But as we show in Cap In Hand, the freeing of talent eventually forces dropping salary caps with all their machinations. Yes, the top stars will be paid astronomical salaries. But the fringe players value— like a bit payer in movies— will reflect his real worth. 

Speaking of the communications revolution. “…the sports economy has been changed by the communications revolution that carries games and players’ images  around the globe. No longer does a league need a team in every town to spread its product. Soccer has demonstrated that the sports world has morphed from a the overstocked inventories  of the franchise model to (a global) one based on matchups of elite teams populated by elite players. 

Without a salary cap, the beautiful game has allowed for the growth of super teams in smaller leagues. There is no parity narrative in soccer, just the unending quest for the best product possible. As a result, the sport has finally made a breakthrough in North America.”

While small, the NWSL may be about to prove a very large point about the running of sports.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.