Football

Does Mackenzie Arnold’s NWSL move signal a turning tide in women’s football?

Published

5 months ago

July 11, 2024

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Does Mackenzie Arnold’s NWSL move signal a turning tide in women’s football?

Four years ago, as she sat on the bench watching her club Chicago Red Stars lose the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) championship final, Mackenzie Arnold couldn’t help but wonder whether bigger things were waiting for her someplace else, beyond a horizon that she couldn’t yet see.

Having signed for the club in July of 2019, Arnold was always second-in-line behind USA national team goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher. She wouldn’t play a single minute for Chicago, either in the regular season or the play-offs, during her entire time with them.

Her time with the Matildas wasn’t much better. Having always sat behind Melissa Barbieri, Lydia Williams, or Teagan Micah in the pecking-order, Arnold rarely had a chance to develop form and confidence within the national team through the scattering of games she was given every year.

Mackenzie Arnold had struggled for years to be Australia’s first-choice goalkeeper. But a move to England changed all that.(Getty Images: Brendon Thorne)

And when she was afforded a chance, there was no telling which way her performances would swing. In the 2019 Asian Cup semi-final against Thailand, for example, her own errors almost saw the Matildas knocked out of the tournament entirely, though she redeemed herself by saving three penalties in the shootout that followed.

So she was looking for a new challenge. A fresh start. Consistent game-time. And a competition that would let her grow into the player she knew she could be.

In fact, many of her Matildas team-mates were looking for the same, including her Chicago team-mate Sam Kerr. Having bounced between Australian and American leagues over the years, stitching together something resembling a full-time football career, they knew such a schedule was no longer sustainable.

Luckily, Europe was calling. And in particular: England.

The Women’s Super League had just become fully-professional and full-time — one of the only women’s leagues in the world to do so — and its clubs were beginning to sign internationals. Kerr was snapped up by Chelsea, followed quickly by Caitlin Foord and Steph Catley to Arsenal. Hayley Raso went to Everton, Alanna Kennedy to Tottenham, Chloe Logarzo to Bristol.

So Mackenzie Arnold followed suit, signing for West Ham in 2020. And that’s where everything began to change.

Over the four years that Arnold played for the club, the WSL became the destination league for top-level women footballers. Traditional men’s clubs were finally waking up to the potential of the women’s game and pouring in more money and resources than they ever had before.

Wages were higher, facilities were better, seasons were longer, crowds were bigger, there were multiple other cups and competitions to participate in, and the competitiveness was growing as more national team stars flocked to the league.

Arnold improved. From a surprise substitute appearance in her first season to becoming the team’s number one shot-stopper, Arnold’s club form slowly translated into that for her country, with a breakout tournament for the Matildas at the 2023 Cup of Nations leading to her life-changing role in goal during the Women’s World Cup on home soil. West Ham was the place she needed to be in order to believe that she was capable of the things she’d always dreamed about.

At the same time as the WSL was blossoming, the NWSL had begun to fade, losing its biggest internationals to Europe, watching some of its clubs fold, while also grappling with its own significant cultural and structural problems including widespread sexual harassment and abuse allegations towards coaches, as well as cover-ups by club administrators and owners who knew about it.

The world of women’s football, which had originally been dominated by the USA and its champion-producing NWSL, tilted towards Europe. And there it has stayed.

Until now.

Despite becoming West Ham’s captain and winning its Player of the Year award in her most recent season, Arnold has decided to return to America, announcing this week that she had signed with the Portland Thorns.

And she’s not the only Matilda to make her way across the pond in the past year or two. Kaitlyn Torpey (San Diego Wave) and Cortnee Vine (North Carolina Courage) have both signed there since last year’s World Cup, while Emily Van Egmond (San Diego Wave) has renewed her contract.

They’ve been joined by a growing list of dazzling international players including Barbra Banda, Asisat Oshoala, Hina Sugita, Temwa Chawinga, Jessie Fleming, Ji So-yun, Amandine Henry, Ann-Katrin Berger, Jen Beattie, Deyna Castellanos, Esther Gonzalez, Sofia Jakobsson, and Rachael Kundananji.

Arnold’s decision to move back to the NWSL when her stocks are arguably at their highest is a sign, perhaps, that the global order of women’s club football is tilting back the way it came a few years ago.

Indeed, a closer look at what the NWSL has done in the past World Cup cycle shows just how ambitious the league has become in this space, and why so many more big-name players are starting to move or return there.

Unlike the WSL, whose teams are heavily dependent on the financial and structural support of their corresponding men’s clubs, the American league is wholly independent from its male counterpart, Major League Soccer (MLS). It has been that way since its inception in 2012, and has only grown in its stand-alone success since then.

Such a liberated structure has allowed the league to stand on its own two feet culturally and commercially. Clubs are their own women-focused enterprises, with supporter communities built entirely around the women’s game.

Sponsorships and partnerships with businesses are geared towards women’s sport, while kits and merchandise items are designed specifically for women’s teams and fans.

It has its own governing body, its own union, its own collective bargaining agreement, and its own broadcast deal, which is currently worth $240 million over four years.

Kansas City Current, founded in 2021, is the first NWSL to build its very own stadium for its women’s football team.(Getty Images: Jamie Squire)

And the league is continuing to expand, adding even more markets and more money to the pool. The current season sits at 14, while bids from several other major city centres including Boston, Denver, Minnesota, St Louis, and Cleveland have all expressed interest in joining the league in future years, with a reported license fee of over $50 million.

Perhaps no other club has acted as a barometer for the NWSL’s rapid growth than Angel City, which debuted in the league in 2022 and has already been valued at roughly $180 million, making them not just the most valuable women’s club in America, but arguably in the whole world.

Their mission-driven model of investment, which is backed by a huge list of celebrity investors and athletes, gives back 10 per cent of its sponsorship revenue to the local community, showing a new way of doing women’s club football that is beyond simply what happens on the pitch.

There are arguably few clubs that embody this transformation quite like Portland. Once a paragon of the principles the league was founded upon, the club went through its own back-room reckoning, firing its former owner who allegedly knew about an abusive former coach but did nothing about it.

Change is now afoot. The club’s new leaders are promising a bright new dawn. And Arnold has taken off towards that horizon.

She is one of a growing number of top-tier players doing the same, recognising that the stuff that happens off the pitch is just as important as what happens on it.

The past month, for example, has seen damning reports that Manchester United will force their women’s team out of their specially-built training site and into portable demountables so the men’s team can use their facilities while their own receive upgrades, while long-time WSL participant Reading Women have also tumbled all the way down to the fifth division due to lack of financial support from their men’s club to keep their program going.

Manchester United Women are experiencing many challenges due to their reliance on the men’s club for funding and support.(Getty Images: Clive Brunskill)

This, wrote former Lewes FC CEO Maggie Murphy after Reading’s demise, is “an effect of having created structural incentives toward dependency on men’s ownership groups whose level of interest simply cannot be controlled by women’s football actors.

“We are told that the revenue will come. We just need five (more) years of leaning on men’s clubs before we start to break even and then grow. Sadly, by then, our dependency on men’s teams will be hard to wean off and we will probably have seen that Reading was far from unique.”

This is the NWSL’s greatest strength: it is built and run entirely by people whose sole focus is women’s football. And that foundation trickles down to every aspect of the experience for players, from wages to staff to administration to facilities to broadcasting.

More competitions are being added to the NWSL’s regular season, too, including the Challenge Cup and a new summer tournament between clubs from the USA and Mexico: another nation that is blossoming in the women’s league space.

Both of these nations, in addition to Canada (which has recently started up its own professional women’s league), will be co-hosting the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, while the Los Angeles Olympics will take place two years later.

As such, the next five years could see an even greater focus on and investment in the women’s football across North America, potentially tilting the global scales so far in their direction that no other leagues, so long as they’re beholden to men’s clubs and cultures, are capable of matching it.

How many more Australians could we see there if, or when, it does?