Last Updated: 02/02/2025
As a Gotham fan, the past two months have been absolutely devastating. After being spoiled with an offseason last year where hardly anyone left and some very big names came in, I was not prepared for the emotional distress of the 2025 offseason (the only thing keeping me going is remembering that it could be worse–I could be a Wave fan). I created this offseason tracker to see if Gotham’s situation is as uniquely terrible as it seems (it is), and will be updating it weekly until the March 12th deadline for teams to submit a final roster.
Some notes on my methodology:
Visual #1: Number of players out by team
This is so sad. Where is my team!! On the other hand, it’s a great time to be a Spirit, Courage, or Pride fan. I would say it’s a great time to be a Chicago fan, but honestly they could’ve benefitted from a little more roster movement.
Visual #2: Number of players in by team
Pride seems to be going by the philosophy of “if it ain’t broke…”. Meanwhile, already scary Spirit and Current teams are adding even more players, and suddenly kind of scary Dash and Royals are also adding a lot of exciting personnel. I’m trying to be cautiously optimistic about Gotham (no one would’ve predicted the season that Spirit had last year after trading away star players for draft picks).
Visual #3: Players in by type of player
Thankfully, there are only three new children being added to the league this year. The huge amount of college signings is a positive reflection on the new CBA–this time last year there were hardly any college players signed to teams, so this is really exciting to see! Finally, there’s quite a bit of intra-league movement, and an exciting amount of players coming from overseas.
Visual #4: Players in and out by position
Interesting to see what positions teams seem to still have a need for, 6 weeks ahead of the start of the season.
Visual #5: Players out by number of goals and percent of team goals scored in 2024
Again, Gotham stands out here. Super scary that Spirit are so low, and it might seem scary that Dash are also so low until you remember that they didn’t really score goals.
Visual #6: Players in by goals scored (of players coming from other NWSL teams)
Six teams don’t have a single goal-scoring NWSL player coming in, although it’s important to contextualize this information in the positions of players being brought in (for example, the NWSL players that Gotham has signed during the offseason are a defensive midfielder and a goalkeeper, both of which are unlikely to score goals).
Visual #7: Goals added by players coming in/going out
American Soccer Analysis has this super cool statistic called goals added (g+), an explanation for which can be found here. This next graph looks at the sum of g+ of all the players leaving and all of the NWSL players coming in for each team.
Teams want to be in the bottom right quadrant and want to stay away from the top left. Two teams(ACFC and Pride) have not signed any NWSL players, so their g+ in is 0. Dash, Bay, and Courage have had great offseasons by this metric, and Gotham and Wave are floundering.
Visual #8: Free Agent Status by Team
The first bar of this graph is the total number of free agents, and the next three bars (re-signed, left team, status unknown) add up to the value of the first bar. The last two bars (left team, left NWSL) are subsets of the second bar (left team).
It’s interesting to see how each team’s offseason moves compare to each other’s–excited to see what this translates to once the season starts!