Neel Shelat looks at some overarching tactical trends in NWSL and asks what that might mean for team style analysis and player recruitment
The National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) is one the biggest and strongest leagues in the world – if not the biggest and strongest. It has some of the best teams, players and coaches. Irrefutably, though, it is the most entertaining and unpredictable among the world’s major leagues.
After 10 complete seasons, the NWSL has seen six different winners and back-to-back champions on just two occasions. By contrast, the English Women’s Super League has seen only four different champions and six successful title defences in that time, Liga F just three and six respectively, the German Frauen-Bundesliga has exclusively been shared by Wolfsburg and Bayern Munich, and the French top-flight has been dominated by Lyon, who have won all but one title.
There are a couple of major factors that contribute to the NWSL’s vastly superior competitiveness at the top (which we will soon get into), but it also has some interesting consequences. Chief among them is something we are seeing in 2024 – a shift away from the traditional meta.
Now, meta here refers neither to the dictionary definition of the word nor what Mark Zuckerburg and co. have been up to of late. Instead, this is a term we are borrowing from gaming circles, where a bit of lexical corruption has led to the word deviating from its traditional meaning and referring instead to the ‘most effective tactics available’ (Football Manager players will be nodding sagely). That phrase is often incorrectly cited as a full form, but it is a good way to understand the meaning nevertheless.
In a footballing context, meta is probably best approached from a competition-wide level. The main competition clubs participate in is, of course, their domestic league, so that is what they must focus on predominantly. The meta will obviously differ for clubs of different statures, but the meta for the strongest teams in the strongest leagues at the moment seems to be a positional, possession-dominant. and control-focused approach. The likes of Barcelona Femení and Manchester City’s men’s team have used such approaches to great effect to thoroughly dominate their leagues in recent years.
In the NWSL, though, the meta seems quite different this year. The top two teams in the league – who have lost just one of 32 matches between them – are 10th and 11th in terms of average possession, both well below 50%. It seems a much more transition-based style is emerging as the NWSL’s new meta, so let us explore that idea and the factors enabling its rise.
The NWSL’s Unique Contexts
As previously alluded to, there are a lot of things that contribute to making the NWSL so competitive, and have in turn enabled this shift in the meta.
Squad-Building Rules
The biggest reason why the NWSL has never had a dominant leader is that the league’s rules are designed to prevent that from happening. Like pretty much every major American sports league, the NWSL has strict squad-building rules featuring foreign player limits, salary caps, and other spending limits through things like allocation money.
The long and the short of it all is that teams must submit squad lists of 22-26 players and are effectively prevented from hoarding all the superstars, as the best players in the league are theoretically spread across the clubs. Of course, in reality, some teams will always have better squads than their rivals by extracting better value for money, while others might not touch the salary cap, but these rules are certainly effective in preventing massive gaps in squad quality.
As a result, the NWSL is objectively the strongest league in the world in terms of overall team quality across the board. TransferLab’s Club Strength+ model as all but one NWSL side is placed in Tier 1, while all other leagues have teams in Tier 3 or lower.
Naturally, then, it is far more difficult for a team to be utterly dominant in the NWSL than in any other league, not just in terms of results but also playing style. Opta Analyst’s zones of control visualisations provide a great depiction of this, so let us use them to contrast the NWSL this year…
… and the English Women’s Super League’s 2023/24 season.
Quite clearly, there is a lot more equality in the NWSL than in the WSL. Of course, some teams such as NJ/NY Gotham FC are able to keep a lot more control than others like the Chicago Red Stars, but there are no massive outliers either way such as Arsenal, Chelsea, and Manchester City in one direction, or Bristol City and Brighton & Hove Albion in the other.
Of course, the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea and City are followers of the ‘traditional’ meta, as they seek to patiently control possession and dominate territory before wearing their opponents down. That approach is far more difficult to execute in the NWSL on the above evidence, so it can’t become the clear-cut meta.
The Playoff Format
Besides squad-building constraints, the NWSL has another major mechanism to make things more competitive at the top. Rather than first place at the end of the regular league season, the big prize is decided in the NWSL Championship at the end of the playoffs. Qualifying for the playoffs is not all that difficult – over half of the league will go through this year – but winning those ties is.
This format further weakens the effectiveness of the traditional meta in the NWSL. While Arsenal, Chelsea, or Manchester City seek to amass the highest-possible points tally and best-possible goal difference by getting results against weaker teams, more often than not NWSL’s title competitors’ fate is really decided in the playoffs when they come up against similarly strong sides.
In such matches, it is once again very difficult to establish utter dominance and control. These games are obviously far more end-to-end affairs, so NWSL teams are better off gearing up for such contests by improving themselves in the transition phases and not bothering so much about trying to achieve complete control.
Solid Low Blocks
There are a few tactical factors/trends that also contribute to dissuading teams away from a heavily control-based approach in the NWSL. Among them is the prevalence of solid low blocks this year.
Of course, most teams do not start out in a low block, and a few look to press high up the pitch too. The likes of Gotham FC and the Kansas City Current definitely fall in the latter category with single-digit PPDA figures this season, but they do so with a measured approach in which they carefully lay pressing traps before springing to win the ball back. Nobody really goes gung-ho chasing the ball around, so all the teams maintain good compact defensive blocks regardless of how high up the pitch their line of engagement is.
Naturally, then, they can all comfortably drop into solid low blocks which are tough to break down. The majority of the league drops into a 4-4-2 block in their own half, using the shape that is widely regarded as the best for deep defending given the horizontal and vertical coverage it can offer. So, if a team looks to adopt a very patient possession-based approach, their attackers are going to be in for a long day at the office.
That is not to say, though, that all NWSL teams are good at defending full stop. Four teams have conceded over 1.5 goals per game this season, so they clearly have a good deal of room for improvement. Interestingly, though, they are 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 10th in terms of the number of shots they have conceded, which means their issues do not stem from being forced deep and conceding lots of shots.
Contrast that to the WSL, where the two teams that conceded over two goals per game also conceded the most shots last season, suggesting that they were penned in for long spells and did not defend too well in their low blocks.
Weak Rest Defences
Having established that even the worst NWSL defences aren’t particularly bad at defending in a block, we still must provide an explanation for where they are giving up goals from. The answer is quite simple: in transition.
The two aforementioned worst WSL defences do not look too bad in terms of average chance quality conceded with npxG/shot conceded values of 0.10 placing them perfectly mid-table in that respect. Again, that reinforces the idea that they were forced to defend deep for long spells and ultimately just did not do a good job of it.
Each of the four poor NWSL defences has conceded higher-quality chances than that on average with npxG/shot values of 0.14, 0.13, 0.11 and 0.11. So, their problem is not the volume but the quality of chances they are conceding, which suggests that they are bad at defending in transition rather than in settled defence.
The eye test certainly backs this idea up, as the NWSL has some questionable rest defence structures, to say the least. There are some exceptions such as Gotham FC, but for the most part, the lack of overly control-focused approaches leads to teams committing quite a bit in the way of attack without worrying about protecting their defence too much. Rather than narrow full-backs, overlapping full-backs who advance along the touchline are a more common sight when a team enters the opposition half. Even the teams that use a back-three – be it in their starting formation or by creating it through asymmetric full-back movements – do not appear to ask their midfielders to be too positionally disciplined and consequently can leave their back line exposed after turnovers.
Now, asking your defenders to defend in transition is not necessarily bad, but you’d obviously want to have very good transition defenders if that is to be a sustainable approach. The trouble is that there aren’t too many elite transition defenders in the NWSL, so almost all teams can be significantly vulnerable to counterattacks.
These things are a little difficult to illustrate using data, but we can have a pop at it using some TransferLab metrics. Here’s a scatterplot showing the 1v1 defensive capabilities of defensive players in the NWSL (pink) as well as four of the strongest European leagues:
We previously established that the NWSL is the best league in the world in terms of overall squad quality across the board, but that does not seem to be true in this specific aspect. In this sample of 250 players, there are very few from the NWSL at or around the top, while the biggest cluster of pink is the bottom left quadrant.
Star Signings in Attack
So far we have seen that the NWSL has solid defensive blocks, exploitable rest defence structures and defenders that aren’t particularly outstanding in transition, so all the conditions are in place for transition-based attacks to thrive. The final piece of the puzzle to complete the shift in the meta is, of course, having attackers who can deal serious damage in transition. A couple of teams made major signings prior to the 2024 season in this exact direction, and they are currently one and two in the league.
The Orlando Pride brought in Barbra Banda from Shanghai Shengli after her outstanding performances in the Chinese Women’s Super League and on the international stage with Zambia. She has proven herself to be among the very best transition attackers not just in the NWSL but in the world, as she poses a multifaceted threat with her electric dribbling and rapid pace for runs in behind, enabling her to get into promising positions in the final third with great consistency from where she has produced great output through chance creation and finishing.
Banda is the joint top-scorer in the NWSL this year with 12 strikes, level with Temwa Chawinga. The Malawian forward is also enjoying her debut season in the league having joined the Kansas City Current from Chinese side Wuhan Jianghan, for whom she averaged over a goal per game in 80+ appearances following a stellar career in Sweden (her sister, Tabitha, is one of the greatest female African players ever). Chawinga has been similarly excellent all-round, arguably posing an even greater dribbling threat as she can play on the wing as well.
So, while the NWSL might not have the best transition defenders in the world, the league certainly has some of the best transition attackers. Here is a visualisation to back that up, with Banda so far in the top right that her name gets cut off, while Chawinga is hidden behind Sophia Smith.
There is one more player worth mentioning among the new arrivals, Croix Bethune. She joined the Washington Spirit as the third overall draft pick and enjoyed a sensational debut senior campaign as a creative number 10 in their 4-2-3-1 system under Adrián González, showcasing excellent vision and creative forward passing.
Bethune played a significant role in enabling the Spirit to adopt a transitional approach through a different route from the top two, which we will analyse shortly.
Case Studies
A myriad of factors have led to the shift in the NWSL’s meta, but it is equally interesting to see how it has manifested itself. The only way to do that, of course, is to take a look at the teams’ tactics.
Possession-Based Underperformers
Before we get on to the transition-based teams, it is worth touching on the sides who have underperformed this year using more patient possession-based approaches.
Chief among them are the San Diego Wave, the defending NWSL Shield holders. They are currently outside the playoff spots with fewer points (15) than matches played (16), so it is safe to say that their title defence has not gone well. They sacked head coach Casey Stoney in late June, presumably deciding to abandon her possession-based and transition-averse approach.
It is worth noting that there were various other factors such as questionable squad building and injuries that led to the Wave’s underperformance, but their defending in transition was a far bigger weakness this season while they struggled in the way of attack too.
Another side in this category are defending champions Gotham FC, although it might seem harsh to call them underperformers when they are fourth in the standings. Given the superteam they assembled in the offseason, though, that should be a fair assessment as many expected them to run away at the top of the table. Instead, they have struggled to score too many goals despite the wealth of attacking talent in their squad, as Juan Carlos Amorós’ heavily control-based approach has hindered them in that respect.
Gotham’s squad quality and tactical execution have, however, helped protect them from the transitional attacks that are ripping up others as they have the second-best defence in the league. Clearly, there still is some merit in sticking with the traditional approach.
Kansas City Current
The poster team for the NWSL’s new meta are the Kansas City Current. Led by Vlatko Andonovski on his return to club football after a relatively unsuccessful stint in charge of the United States Women’s National Team, the Current have arguably been the most exciting team to watch not just in the league but all around the world this year.
They have lost just one NWSL match this year with a 10-5-1 record, and their tally of 40 goals at an average of 2.5 per game is by far the highest in the NWSL. Their xG tally of 37.1 is just as impressive, and they have amassed it with the fastest direct speed (average speed of ball movement towards the opponent’s goal line during sequence by Opta’s definition) in the league.
Looking at Andonovski’s Coach ID radar from his time in KC so far, the team’s intention to be direct is very evident. Regardless of what sort of opposition they come up against, the Current are always incredibly transition-heavy and drop into a low block quite a lot to generate counterattacking opportunities.
The main variation in the Kansas City Current’s approach across matches comes in their pressing. Generally, they tend to sit in a 4-4-2 block against more possession-based sides, seeking to lure them in and hit them on the counter. They have a clear blueprint after winning the ball back: get it forward as quickly as possible and ideally feed Chawinga in the final third.
This approach has worked a treat against many teams who want to control possession and territory before attacking, but it isn’t the best approach to take in all matches. Against teams who have weaknesses in the build-up or do not commit so many bodies forward in the opposition half, the Current are also able to press high in a 4-2-3-1/4-1-4-1 shape depending on the opposition’s build-up structure. Once again, the intention is to win the ball back and get it towards goal as quickly as possible, which is why they have by far the most shot-ending high turnovers in the league this season.
This turnover-transition approach has worked a treat against the more possession-based sides, but it can come unstuck against fellow direct teams who also do not want to keep so much possession. In such cases, the Current are happy to keep the ball themselves and generate attacking transitions through a different route.
Artificial transitions can be generated by initially circulating possession very deep to lure opposition blocks forward (press-bait them) before attacking the space created around or behind their defence. That is exactly what the Kansas City Current look to do when they have the ball, using their back four and two defensive midfielders to do the press-baiting before hitting their spread front-four, who deal the damage in transition.
So, irrespective of whether they have more or less possession in a match, the Current always seek to attack in transition. The key to their success is ultimately very simple: having an elite transition attacker in Chawinga.
The Malawi international has registered 18 goals and assists in the league so far this year, while none of her teammates have more than half that tally. Her ability to play across the front line is another big plus as her exact position can be altered from match to match to target specific weaknesses in opposition back lines. Since she can attack from almost anywhere, Chawinga is almost impossible to stop once she gets going.
Orlando Pride
The league leaders, the Orlando Pride, have also dealt a great deal of their damage in transition, but their approach is different to the Kansas City Current’s in some ways.
The distinction should quickly become clear with a look at head coach Seb Hines’ Coach ID radar. The Pride do a lot more deep circulation, which means they lean on artificial transitions a good deal besides traditional turnover transitions.
So, the Orlando Pride neither look to press high a great deal nor drop into a low block too easily. They have the second-highest PPDA figure in the league as they prefer to stay in a compact 4-4-2/4-4-1-1 mid block, restricting their opponents as far as possible. If forced back, they have quite a solid low block as well.
This more measured defensive approach has possibly enabled the Pride to have the league’s best defence in terms of goals conceded to go with the second-best attack, and this balance is surely what has kept them the only unbeaten team in the division this season. They are pretty similar to the Kansas City Current in terms of their attacking, certainly as far as having a star forward is concerned.
The key to everything the Pride to going forward is Barbra Banda, who has contributed to over half of her team’s goals with 17 involvements. She too can play across the front line but profiles much closer to a traditional centre-forward than Chawinga, which influences the specifics of her side’s attacking play.
For one, their turnover transitions tend to involve far more direct balls in behind for her to chase as opposed to a sequence of passes forward into her feet, which is what Chawinga prefers.
Moreover, the Orlando Pride’s possession-play is a bit more intricate. They do not have a fixed shape they move into from their 4-2-3-1 formation as it changes based on the players in the XI and their opponents, but things like asymmetric full-back movements to form a back-three are quite common. They like to have a compact base of five or six players who can press-bait opponents, but their releases come in the shape of passes out wide or line-breaking carries from a full-back or midfielder more often than not. As a result, their final third entries are a lot more focused down the wings.
Banda is responsible for a good deal of those as she is a rapid ball carrier, but she also is a more dependable box presence than Chawinga and likes to get on the end of moves there. In fact, all of her goals this season have come from shooting positions inside the box and right in front of the net.
Washington Spirit
The most interesting side in the NWSL as far as the shifting meta is concerned have to be the Washington Spirit. They have not been nearly as transitional as the top two in the first half of the season, but they have used transitions to great effect as well.
What makes them so intriguing, though, is what is next. They were led by interim head coach Adrián González in the first part of the season, but he has now made way for Jonatan Giráldez. The former Barcelona coach certainly prefers a much more control-oriented style of play, so it should be interesting to see if the Spirit move away from what has been a pretty successful approach so far.
For now, though, we can only look at what González did with the team. His side kept more possession with an average of over 50%, engaging in a lot of deep circulation but also using transitions a lot against top-of-the-table teams in particular.
The Spirit also used a 4-2-3-1 formation for the most part, but their key player was in a different position. Rather than their line-leading attacker/striker, it was their number 10 who dealt the most damage through her excellent positioning between the lines, half-turn receptions and forward passing in transition.
The majority of her passes went out to the right, partly due to her right-footedness but also since the most dangerous attacker she could pick out was on that wing, namely Trinity Rodman. The USWNT winger’s exceptional dribbling skill and pace troubled many a defender in transition, helping her register nine goals and assists. Bethune, for her part, has as many as 14 in a very impressive rookie season so far.
Other Teams to Watch
We have taken a look at the top three teams in the league, but it is worth briefly going over some others. This team sequence styles plot is a handy starting point:
Quite clearly, the Chicago Red Stars and Racing Louisville are two of the most direct teams in the league after the Kansas City Current. Stylistically, they seem to be well-suited to take advantage of this new meta, but they are lacking a bit of quality in all areas of their squad to really hit the next level. Still, the fact that they are in and around the playoff spots shows the effectiveness of their approaches.
The Portland Thorns are quite interesting as they have found a nice mix between control and directness this season. They place third in the league in terms of passes per game, but having a supremely versatile striker like Sophia Smith to lead their attack enables them to both patiently break down low blocks and tear through defences in transition.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the North Caroline Courage stand out as the clear outliers in the slow and intricate corner. They are up in the playoff spots in sixth, but a run of four losses in five matches between May and June was a big cause for concern before a few victories brought them back on track going into the summer break. How they fare in the second half of the season will be interesting follow.
So, Is Transition-Attacking the NWSL’s New Meta?
That’s the question we promised to answer in the title, and after about 4,000 words, we are pleased to reveal that the answer is… maybe.
What we can definitively say is that the top teams in the league have used heavily transition-based styles to great effect this season as we have seen. Only time can tell whether that is indicative of a wider shift in the league’s meta or a mere coincidence, but there certainly are a good few factors that make transition-attacking a much more effective strategy in the NWSL than in any other major league. Some of them, such as the defensive weaknesses in team tactics and personnel are fixable, but some others like the playoff format will remain everpresent in all likelihood.
The fact that the biggest, or at least most high-profile projects in the league are not aligned with this potential shift is what makes matters interesting. There is a chance that the Washington Spirit’s potential success under Giráldez or Gotham FC’s all-star squad win titles with a more control-oriented approach and convince competitors to swing back the other way, but a good few of them are banking on transition-attacking this season at least. If it is indeed the outcome of the 2024 season that decides which sort of tactical direction teams will prefer to take, then we could well be witnessing the start of the shift in the NWSL’s meta right now.
Stats courtesy Soccerdonna, Opta via Fbref and FotMob, and Opta Analyst.
Header image copyright IMAGO / USA TODAY Network / Denny Medley
