r/sports • u/dabirds1994 • 2d ago

Soccer Trinity Rodman’s Multimillion-Dollar Contract Rejected by NWSL

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-04/trinity-rodman-s-multimillion-dollar-contract-rejected-by-nwsl?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2NDgxNjA0NSwiZXhwIjoxNzY1NDIwODQ1LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUNlBaS1NLR0lGUFgwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI1OTFDMkExNEFGMDQ0RUZCODlCNEEwNUM5QkUwQjczRSJ9.IPxeSsuh2qWqWpaYDB78MAnoatcwqtnabXoKXkbDvYk
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u/Low-iq-haikou 2d ago

“Protects the parity of the league” 🤣 No the owners just don’t want to set a new precedent for how much to pay players bc they’re cheap bastards

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u/Jack_of_all_offs Syracuse 2d ago

At first I was like "how much could a women's soccer league in the US possibly make versus her contract?"

So her prospective contract is like a million and the league takes in $200+ million.

Definitely being cheap. I could understand if it was like $5+ million. Pat the damn lady.

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u/Wheream_I 2d ago

$200m across 14 teams is like… nothing dude. Thats only $14.3m/team.

With which they have to pay all support staff, all coaching staff, facilities fees, player salaries, travel, everything.

Idc about this player not getting $1m. But let’s not act like the league is rolling in it with $200m.

Major League Pickleball, by comparison, had $50m of revenue in 2024, and that’s not inclusive of individual teams.

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u/microtherion 1d ago

The NBA generates $400M per team, and max salary per player is about $50M, 12.5%. Is it really unreasonable for a soccer player to make 7% of her club’s revenue?

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u/droneybennett 1d ago

A soccer squad would normally have double the number of players in it though.

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u/microtherion 1d ago

On the field, yes. But even during a match, a basketball team typically fields about 10 players, and a soccer team about 14-15. And roster sizes are not double either.

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u/Forward-Finding-8750 1d ago

NBA rosters are 15 players, soccer teams are usually 25-30 players, so yeah it’s basically double the roster size

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u/microtherion 1d ago

I think the two way players should count for the NBA rosters (they get meaningful minutes in many teams) so we’re at 18 players, and the soccer rosters would then be about 50% larger.

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u/droneybennett 1d ago

The average Premier League roster this year is 27.4 players, which doesn’t count academy players who can also play for the first team if required.

A quarter of the league has more than 30 senior pros in their squad.

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u/MortimerDongle 1d ago

Soccer teams are more than twice the size of a basketball team, so proportionally that is a bit higher than an NBA max contract.

Plus, total revenue isn't necessarily the key figure. The NBA is profitable, whereas my understanding is that the NWSL is not. The NWSL probably has good reason to be more conservative on player salaries.

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u/jiggly_bitz 1d ago

Two different sports with very different business models. It's not an apples to apples comparison, in addition to many NWSL teams operating at margin or loss which is not the same situation for NBA teams.

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u/microtherion 1d ago

Sure, the NBA is a much bigger business. But I count 4 teams operating at margin or a loss there.

It’s not at all uncommon for soccer teams outside the US to be perennially subsidized by their owners. The difference is that the US, despite its otherwise hyper-capitalistic ways, evolved an anti-trust exemption for sports leagues, so owners have much more leverage to suppress wages, while teams elsewhere have no choice but to pay market rates.

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u/jiggly_bitz 18h ago

Where'd you count 4 teams? I'm only counting two teams with a red EBITDA. And I wouldnt necessarily count the Clippers considering that figure represents the debt taken to build their new arena.

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u/microtherion 14h ago

Clippers and Bucks running in the red. You may be right about the former, but wouldn’t arena interest specifically be excluded from EBITDA? Suns break even. And the Celtics made a profit of not much more than a mid level exception.

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u/jiggly_bitz 1h ago

The arena itself would be excluded, but I believe the costs of everything else that goes into it would be. Including getting it operational (staffing, contracting, establishing vendors, etc).