NWSL Commissioner on Abby Wambach and Bill Simmons: "Women's Soccer Doesn't Need Saving"

Tonight on #AnyGivenWednesday: USA Gold Medalist @AbbyWambach and @BillSimmons have a plan to save women's pro soccer. 10 PM on @HBO pic.twitter.com/bM60nQGaF9
— Any Given Wednesday (@AnyGivenWeds) September 28, 2016

Oh thank heavens, we're going to be fine. Last week, on Bill Simmons' HBO show "Any Given Wednesday," he and Abby Wambach revealed a "plan to save women's pro soccer."

This plan must have come as a great surprise to those following the National Women's Soccer League here in the United States, as the league nears the end of its fourth and most successful season to date. The NWSL championship match, between Western New York and Washington, will be broadcast on Fox Sports 1, on October 9.

"Saw the interview, and I don't recall them mentioning our league specifically," NWSL commissioner Jeff Plush said on a conference call Tuesday. "But the idea of saving women's soccer—I'm not going to debate with people like Abby, who have done so much, but women's soccer doesn't need saving. Anyone who watched what were two phenomenal games in the last handful of days…I would tell you that you'd have to be a pretty glass-half-empty person to think it needs saving."

The numbers reinforce Plush's point. The league's attendance was up 10 percent across the board, which is notable not only for the growth itself, but because the bump followed a 2015 in which the U.S. women won the World Cup, which is often cited by critics as a temporary high point for women's soccer in the country, and came despite a disappointing 2016 showing in Rio, complete with quarterfinal loss to Sweden. While the Portland Thorns are often cited as a league outlier—and their 16,945 average attendance led the league—the rest of the league absent Portland actually saw greater proportional growth, with attendance up 15 percent among non-Portland teams.

And the league had a moment this weekend that few who experienced it, on television or in the stands, will ever forget. With 20,086 in the stands in Portland, the Thorns and Flash battled deep into extra time, with Western New York coming up with just enough offense to edge the home team, 4-3, in a dramatic playoff victory. The entire match served as the kind of advertisement the league deserves. But it came just a few days after Simmons and Wambach spoke about the concept of women's pro soccer as if it remained some abstract idea, rather than something that exists and is growing.

Although the first question of the interview was about the NBA—it's a Bill Simmons interview—eventually the pair got around to soccer, within the context of women's sports in general. Simmons, helpfully context-free, declared, "I wanted to ask you about the WNBA, and women's pro soccer, which can't build a successful pro league in America. It just has not worked as a business." The WNBA, incidentally, saw attendance jump 4.6 percent this year, and national television ratings on ESPN increased 11 percent.

"I think that women's soccer and women's basketball deal with similar issues," Wambach said of the two leagues. "I think it's money…the more soccer grows in this country, the more people will come to the games, and I think the more corporate sponsorships come, which, inevitably, is the thing that actually sustains these leagues."

The NWSL has struggled to add sponsorships, but has retained their biggest ones, from Nike to Coppertone, while the teams have added a range of new sponsors this season. But by Wambach's own description, the sponsorships are the lagging indicator, something that will follow sustained audience growth—which the NWSL continues to build.

Simmons pushed right past any discussion of the detail, instead adding helpfully, "I have an idea to save women's soccer, because you're right! People love it! The patriotism and all that stuff." What followed was a strange suggestion for some kind of America-Europe Champions League, made up of 20 countries playing. What was no doubt a detailed plan for how to pay for this somehow did not make air.

Wambach countered with a suggestion instead of a world club championship, although where those clubs would play when not in the Simmons Champions League—or where the money would come from for a worldwide league, in this reality in which even domestic women's soccer apparently is failing—was unclear. Wambach wants to limit the world league to just U.S. and Europe.

"Screw China, get them out of here," Simmons assented.

The good news is that Simmons declared that he and Wambach will be co-commissioners of this new league, where Simmons will bring his "strong opinions on style of play" to the table, which he said he's gleaned from going to, you guessed it, his daughter's youth soccer matches.

The real commissioner of the actual pro soccer league in the United States will be in Houston Sunday, where the NWSL final is rapidly selling out. The league is not yet where it hopes to be—few are four years into their existence. Salaries need to come up across the board, and more corporate buy-in along the lines of what the NWSL has seen in 2016 will allow that to happen.

"Is there more to be done? Absolutely," Plush said. "We say it every day, and we believe it every day, and we're going to work on it every day. But it doesn't mean that we'll for one second apologize for having a really excellent league. While people can have their opinions, I'm going to have a much more optimistic point of view."