Continuity, chaos and Rodman: how Washington Spirit are thriving in NWSL

The National Women’s Soccer League is just past the midway point of its 14th regular season, with 12 of 30 games remaining in the regular season (though half the league’s teams have one or more games in hand).

Despite a number of developments in 2026 – including two new expansion teams and the Utah Royals on a historic tear – some things have stayed consistent. At the moment, that includes a third consecutive season featuring the Washington Spirit as a top-two team. With the business end of the season looming, the mark of success is twofold: maintain that consistency through the end-of-year melee and into the playoffs (easier said than done) and, importantly for the Spirit, level up with a first-place finish in the table and/or a Championship trophy.

Continuity at the top doesn’t come easy in a league such as the NWSL. Over the years, the league has earned its reputation as a parity-based competition where – whether it be a weekend upset between teams at either end of the table, or a “worst-to-first” scenario from one season to the next – anything can happen. Teams have had years-long runs of dominant results. Most notably, the North Carolina Courage finished the regular season in first place for three consecutive seasons from 2017 to 2019, while also winning the NWSL Championship twice in that time. But over the course of 14 seasons the NWSL table has been famous for fluctuations.

Some early new trends have emerged in recent seasons. Teams such as Gotham, San Diego, Kansas City, Orlando and Washington have had a steady presence in the playoff spots (notable by NWSL standards), but their places in the top eight have varied, as has their success in the playoffs.

And yet while teams around them have had their highs and lows throughout the table (including a mercurial Gotham, one of three teams to beat Washington this season, who moved ahead of them into first place on Sunday) the Spirit have been, well, consistently good. And they’ve been good despite navigating myriad changes, including the departure of the former NWSL rookie of the year Croix Bethune – who now plays for Kansas City – and two key starters in the run to the championship last season (Aubrey Kingsbury and Casey Krueger) on maternity leave.

“Turnover is normal in this league, so we do not take continuity for granted,” says Haley Carter, Washington’s president of soccer operations – a former player, coach and executive who most recently played a key role in Orlando Pride’s historic championship-winning season in 2024.

Describing the importance of adding the right players to a strong foundation, Carter says: “We try to be thoughtful about who joins the club. When we sign a player or hire on the sporting side, fit is one of the first things we look at, because we are trying to build an environment and not just a roster.”

The Spirit have done a commendable job with talent identification in recent years, and have folded international talents from a large swath of countries into the spine of their team. Last June, Sofia Cantore became the first Italian in NWSL (she finished with four goals and one assist in 12 games, and has the same number this season). They also signed the league’s first Paraguayan, the 18-year-old Claudia Martínez, who has three goals in an impressive rookie campaign.

With the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (Wafcon) ongoing, the Spirit have six players there representing Nigeria, Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. (It’s a nod to the team’s depth that they’ve managed reasonably well without them.) Importantly, with Kingsbury out, the 28-year-old Scottish goalkeeper Sandy MacIver has stepped in with aplomb, setting a team record for consecutive clean sheets (four) and has the fourth-best save percentage in the league.

Of course, in addition to the Spirit’s impressive cadre of international talents, one of the NWSL’s most marketable names, Trinity Rodman, is pivotal to their past success and ongoing hopes of winning more trophies. Rodman’s 13 goal contributions in 18 games are the team’s most amid an in-form season. Her ability to press a backline, create space, take on defenders and link with teammates such as Cantore or the Colombian midfielder Leicy Santos has been inseparable from the side’s consistency this year.

With interest from abroad, Rodman’s contract was so important to the team and league that (with the investment-happy support of the team owner, Michele Kang) the NWSL created a new “high-impact player” policy to help keep her stateside. The so-called Rodman rule allows teams to spend $1m outside the standard salary cap for players who meet certain criteria.

Kang, who has made news in recent weeks because of a $400m lawsuit with John Textor, is one of the most well-known figures in women’s football, as the owner of three clubs in three countries (the Spirit, OL Lyonnes and London City Lionesses). According to Carter, collaboration among the trio is indeed under way. It is “one of the most exciting parts of what we are building” and “is more structured than people might assume”.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, the three clubs collaborate across medical, performance and technical departments, and use “shared themes, shared processes, and increasingly shared software platforms for talent identification, performance management, athlete wellness, and operational efficiency”.

While things are looking bright for the Spirit at the moment, the remainder of the regular season and the playoffs just beyond will be the final proving ground for the theme of their season thus far: despite changes and good old NWSL chaos, the Spirit can be reliably good.

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Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.