While owners of various NWSL teams reported some victories and some very mixed messages with their recent, "Hot, fresh, young, amateur night" held at stadiums across North America this past weekend, the internal debate over paying players, at all, still rages on.
Theresa Diederich - A Sky Blue FC player for the past two seasons, she graduated from Alabama with 23 goals and 10 assists in 2014. Diederich was recently "called up" to the bench for Sky Blue as an Amateur player. In this way, Sky Blue FC and the NWSL were able to be a massive cheap-as-shit franchise and league and not pay her. Most would call this exploitative and predatory behavior from a league and team, they would be right.
PHOTO: From empire of soccer website: http://www.empireofsoccer.com/finishes-preseason-straight-33457/
A source in an ownership group spoke to The Nutmeg News on Monday evening and they had the following to say, "Given that fans don't seem to be entirely opposed to our recent Amateur call-ups, we would like to expand the program to the entire NWSL. The owners are already talking about paying players less or just mandating that the female players all play for the love of the game. It's one way to ensure that our teams become profitable on a quicker time frame."
Reportedly, NWSL ownership started talking about expanding the amateur scheme when fans seemed to just readily accept that the league couldn't or didn't want to pay players coming into the side due to major international absences.
"We were able to spin this about college eligibility, but honestly many of these women have already graduated college and are simply finding any reason to play the game they love. It's a perfect opportunity for us to take advantage of that love," stated an inside source with the NWSL. "It's like a shark swimming around a minnow. Do we need to ensure that allow minnows are fed? No. As long as we feed Alex Morgan and Tobin Heath and the kids get to scream their heads off, no one is going to care if the minnows are fed. At this point, we are going to see if we can slowly drop the minimum salary, while crushing the spirit of the low paid entry players and increase the subsidy for the International players, thereby allowing a massive wage gap that forces antipathy between the two sets of players and massive amounts of resentment."
The Nutmeg News will have more on this as the NWSL expands the amount of Amateur players allowed on a team to 11 per side and increases the concessions in Portland and Orlando to cover the legal costs.