NEW YORK – NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman described the decision to abandon Sunday’s match between the Seattle Reign and Racing Louisville as a “no-brainer” after Louisville’s Savannah DeMelo experienced a medical emergency, showcasing a change in league strategy as a medical event halted a match for the second time this season.
DeMelo is stable and alert after collapsing on the field at the end of the first half, and as of Monday was undergoing testing at a Seattle-area hospital to determine the cause of the incident. Berman said she received a call on Sunday during the match concerning DeMelo and made the decision to abandon the match, which eventually resumed on Tuesday from the second half.
“In any game, our operations and medical team are overseeing and on standby for any and all communications that are required,” Berman said during a press conference on Thursday. “Sometimes that relates to a medical situation and it is really me. I am the one who makes that decision and in that particular situation, I got the phone call that Savannah had a medical emergency and needed treatment and that everyone who was there was pretty rattled and immediately directed the team to abandon the game.”
The NWSL made a different decision than it did in May, when Angel City’s Savy King experienced a medical event in a match against the Utah Royals and later underwent successful heart surgery. That match resumed after King’s collapse and the league faced criticism from the teams involved as well as the NWSL Players Association, eventually leading to a policy change days later. Berman said Sunday’s event in Seattle, though far from ideal, allowed the league to demonstrate its own growth.
“First, let me just say that we’re so thankful that both of those players are okay and that although, it presented some challenges for us in the operations and from a business perspective,” Berman said, “that those situations happened at a time when medical staff was there to respond and make sure that they were safe, so that’s most important.
“No one wants to have experience practicing these policies but having had the opportunity to play it out earlier this year, assess and learn the things that we could do better and actually have the chance to do it better the second time around was a moment that allowed us to show what we’re capable of. The decision-making tree was streamlined, we knew exactly what was happening and we knew exactly who needed to make decisions and we facilitated them immediately and in particular, just to state the obvious, the decision to not continue the game was a no-brainer and did not require contemplation and so we at least now know exactly how to manage those situations and are confident that, hopefully we’ll never have to do them again, but because we’ve had to now a couple of times in the same season that we’re at [the] best position to be prepared.”
NWSL to expand on a rolling basis
Berman also made some announcements focused on the NWSL’s future during her remarks on Thursday, chief among them the fact that the league will move to a “rolling process” for its expansion process.
The commissioner has overseen two different expansion rounds during her three-plus years in charge, which saw the Utah Royals and Bay FC join the league for the start of the 2024 season and will see Boston Legacy and the Denver Summit enter the NWSL in 2026. Those expansions had a start and end date that interested parties had to follow but Berman said the league now intends to provide flexibility to prospective owners as they make bids to join the NWSL.
“We made the decision to shift to a rolling process mostly because we’ve been through [these] two rounds and so we pretty much know the universe of people who are interested,” she said. “There’s more than a dozen of them. These conversations are ongoing and each of them have a different perspective on how much time they need to launch, the investments they need to make in order to be successful, including potentially around infrastructure and we want to not force a square peg into a round hole. We want to be more flexible so that we can get the best possible result for the next round.”
During a press conference in January, Berman said there were around 80 interested parties during the last expansion round but added that they were at different stages of the bidding process. The league does not currently have a fixed number of teams in mind for the league, providing additional comments to past comments that the NWSL could be as big as the major men’s sports leagues in the U.S., each of which have 30 or more teams.
“What I meant when I said that was that the reason the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, Major League Baseball are as big as they are is two reasons – one, the size of our country and the number of [designated market areas] that exist that can support a team; and number two, the player talent pipeline, the product itself,” she said. “Those two things, there’s nothing different about our league that would mean we can’t be that size and that’s really what I meant, not that I was intending to say we’re going to be 32 teams by some date. It was really just to say we don’t view the ceiling on our growth as any different than any of the men’s leagues.”
NWSL plans for World Cup break, pushes D2 league to 2027
While there is no specific timeline on expansion, Berman had a few more details to offer on the league’s plans during the 2026 men’s World Cup. The NWSL plans to take a break during the group stage of next summer’s competition, which will run from June 11-27, and could return in time for the Fourth of July weekend, when the World Cup’s round of 16 begins.
Berman has previously noted the logistical challenges the World Cup will provide the NWSL, with seven of the league’s markets also serving as host cities for the 48-team tournament. While most of the NWSL’s home venues will not actually host World Cup matches, FIFA may use those stadiums and the teams’ training grounds as facilities for the World Cup participants.
“We did make the decision to stop play during the group stage, importantly, so that’s a time where we think it will be literally impossible for us to play,” she said. “We’ve done enough analysis to know that we can return, I believe it’s Fourth of July weekend. That is the beginning of the knockout stages where enough teams will have been eliminated that there will be appropriate access to infrastructure.”
The NWSL, meanwhile, will be pushing its plans to launch a Division II league to 2027. CBS Sports reported that the league filed an application to U.S. Soccer in April, likening it to a developmental league in the vein of Minor League Baseball, though a handful of logistics had yet to be ironed out. The league mentioned a 2026 start date but the eight Division II teams named in the application – all associated with existing NWSL clubs – were slated to play in the Division I teams’ stadiums, which would only add to the infrastructure issues posed by the World Cup.
“We are focused on 2027 now,” Berman said. “The decision to file, essentially, was to preserve optionality. We are and have been, for the better part of the last year, analyzing how and what the best mechanism is to support the space just below the first team environment and we do continue to believe that’s the place where we need to play a role and we’re still evaluating the best way to do that and so we made the decision to extend the horizon for our launch.”