In the NWSL in 2025, 13 separate players saw their season cut short due to an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. In the ongoing 2026 season, nine players have already torn their ACLs, most recently Brazilian forward Dudinha in a friendly against the USWNT on June 9. It’s no surprise, then, that the league and its players association (NWSLPA) are joining Project ACL, a global research project hoping to reduce ACL injuries in professional women’s football.

On March 28th 2026, the Denver Summit played in the Mile High City for the first time ever in front of a record-breaking 63,004 fans, making it the largest stand-alone women’s soccer game in US history. A little under 13 years earlier, the NWSL’s first ever game brought together 6,784 fans to watch FC Kansas City take on the Portland Thorns. Today, despite being one of the only leagues with independent clubs that cannot build on the success of male counterparts, the NWSL boasts the highest average attendance of any top-division women’s football league in the world. This feat wasn’t achieved overnight, however. How did the league get to this point?

At the end of last year, Forbes published a list of the world’s most valuable women’s sports teams in 2025. Of the 25 teams featured, 13 were football clubs and eight were clubs playing in the NWSL, making it the most-represented football league on the list. What have these NWSL clubs done to earn such high valuations?

Every football playing child grows up with heroes and a club they love above all others. They ask for that team’s shirt every birthday and dream of one day wearing it themselves with their own name on the back. For these players, that dream became reality.

Celia Segura’s name is already history at FC Barcelona. The striker of FC Barcelona B, the second team, arrived at La Masia, as the club’s youth academy is knowns, in style. After her arrival at the team in 2018, she broke the goal record and became Barcelona’s top scorer in youth football after scoring 121 goals in her first season with the team and at just 12 years old.

With much of the sporting world focused on the ongoing Men's World Cup, plenty is happening in women’s football too. Europe has confirmed more of its direct qualifiers for next year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil, while the transfer market is beginning to gather momentum as clubs prepare for another busy summer.

Salaries in women’s football remain one of the sport’s most talked-about topics. They are a measure of how far the game has come. In some leagues, players still need a second job to make ends meet. In others, new financial records are being set.

When the United States women’s national team won the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2019, businesswoman Michele Kang was so uninformed of the world of football that she didn’t even know who Lionel Messi was. That idea seems inconceivable today as the women’s football tycoon owns and is closely involved in three clubs across the globe. How did she get here and what impact has her investment had on the sport?