When you have a complaint with your employer, do you take it to Twitter? Or do you discuss it in-house, and if so, how?

That’s the question for the NWSL and its players in the wake of a barrage of harsh comments from US national team players after the league proceeded with a game at Western New York on a field barely wider than the penalty area.

League commissioner Jeff Plush apologized for the situation. Megan Rapinoe, who didn’t play in the game, was not appeased by the apology:

Of course @NWSL has to apologize,but all @JeffPlush said was"we knew it wasnt up to standard,approved it anyway, sorry" Apology not accpeted — Megan Rapinoe (@mPinoe) July 10, 2016

The talk escalated to into a long blog post from goalkeeper Hope Solo, who also didn’t play in the game but used the occasion to give a laundry list of complaints about the league, ranging from unsafe and unsanitary conditions to, for some reason, the scoreboard at a practice field.

MLS went through its growing pains in the pre-Twitter world of the 1990s and early 2000s. Alexi Lalas, the former MLS player and team executive-turned-broadcaster, has been on both sides of internal discussions about playing and living conditions, from the paltry pay of the league’s early days to their practices on a grass parking lot with bits of broken glass.

“I think it was incumbent on the big names of the team to deliver the message,” Lalas said. “That would be to the (general manager), sometimes to the coach … Sometimes it gets completely changed, sometimes it gets nudged in the right direction.”

The NWSL actually has open lines of internal communication. What it doesn’t have is a large staff to respond to such issues. The league office has three people – Plush, an operations director and a communications director – plus a couple of interns.

And players don’t have a collective voice. The problem, Seattle midfielder Keelin Winters told Excelle Sports, is that it’s difficult to ask players to pay union dues when they’re not making much money – in some cases, less than $10,000 for the season.

MLS players didn’t unionize at first, instead embarking on and eventually losing a costly lawsuit that dragged on for years. (The lead lawyer for the players in that case, Jeffrey Kessler, now represents women’s national team players in their labor dispute with US Soccer.) After the lawsuit was resolved, players quickly unionized, bargaining for substantial raises to the league’s minimum salary and pushing the single-entity league toward limited free agency.

“Until you have some sort of organization that is collectively thinking about the good of the group, you’re going to struggle,” Lalas said.

The previous US women’s soccer league, WPS, had a players’ union. But as the league declined through its third and final season, the union had a tough time gaining traction. It gained attention mostly for a grievance it filed against magicJack owner Dan Borislow. Ironically, one of the union’s allegations was that he had banned players from using Twitter.

And WPS officials and teams also found themselves on the receiving end of Solo’s Twitter wrath, more than once. In September 2010, Solo was suspended for one game after she tweeted complaints about game officials and said, “It’s clear the league wanted dc in playoffs,” referring to her team’s opponent that night, the Washington Freedom.

That wasn’t even the most inflammatory series of tweets Solo issued that year. After a game in Boston, she accused Boston fans of throwing coins and yelling racial slurs. Andy Crossley, then Boston’s general manager, recalled finding no evidence to back up her claims but getting nowhere in asking Solo’s team, the Atlanta Beat, for some conciliatory language.

“I asked Shawn (McGee, Atlanta’s general manager) for a quote from Hope stating that she regretted using Twitter to raise the issue publicly before addressing her concerns through proper channels,” Crossley posted on his blog two years later. “Shawn told me that was a non-starter – Hope wouldn’t say a word.”



Crossley also had a thought on public relations that rings as true in the NWSL as it did in WPS: “The standard solution to WPS problems – relying on the league’s cloak of invisibility in the media – didn’t work with Solo, because she made headlines.”

The next year, Solo’s Twitter feed mysteriously vanished, tweet by tweet, soon after she griped about WPS deducting a point from her new team, magicJack. But she was soon back in action, and she tweeted a few insults toward player-turned-commentator Brandi Chastain less than an hour after playing a game in the 2012 Olympics. Solo now has 1.05 million followers on Twitter.

Such powerful platforms can help the NWSL. Or hurt it. And US players don’t necessarily have the incentive to avoid the latter.

To get the league up and running in 2013, the players and US Soccer hashed out a Memorandum of Understanding spelling out financial terms for playing for the national team and in the league, which the federation organized and underwrites. That agreement reveals a deal that gives national team players scant short-term financial incentive to root for the league’s survival.

The deal calls for at least 18 players to be paid $72,000 for national team duties and $46,000 to $56,000 for league play. (The 27 players in the pool in 2013 get the high end.) They can each make $101,000 just for national team duty if the NWSL does not exist, even if players opt to play in Europe, where rank-and-file players make very little but clubs will sometimes break the bank for stars of the caliber of a typical US national team starter. Even if a player misses an undefined “disproportionate number of days,” she would receive at least 75% of her national team salary.

Having the league around also revs up competition for national team roster spots, even with limits on the number of days a non-salaried player can be in national team camp. Witness veteran midfielder Allie Long, who spent years on the periphery of the US player pool but forced her way onto the Olympic roster. Or Crystal Dunn, who tore up the NWSL after left off the World Cup roster.

All of these terms are up in the air as players and the federation fight over their next contract, and this internal dispute also has gone public – partially. US players are rallying behind the slogan “Equal Play Equal Pay,” but their representatives decline to specify how that would work, particularly whether the women would give up their national team salaries (which men don’t have) for higher bonuses.

“It means exactly what it says,” Kessler said of the “Equal” slogan. “If a women’s player in on the team for a friendly, she should be paid the same as a man makes for being on the team for a friendly. If the man makes an incentive bonus for winning the friendly, the woman should get the same bonus for winning her friendly. There is nothing complicated about this.”

The national team is pledging proceeds from the sale of “Equal Play Equal Pay” T-shirts to the previously undefined NWSL Players Trust Fund. Union lawyer Rich Nichols explained that the union established the account after seeing demand for the shirts:

“Once we noticed that “knock-offs” of the T-shirt were being offered for sale by random people, we decided that if anyone was going to derive financial benefit from the sale of our t-shirts, it should be the NWSL Players,” Nichols said by email. “At the appropriate time, the WNT Players and WNTPA shall confer with their NWSL teammates and determine when and how the proceeds shall be distributed to the NWSL Players.”

In several respects, the NWSL is on the upswing. It has already outlasted the two previous attempts at a full-fledged professional league in the USA. A check of average attendance finds every returning team trending ahead of last year’s figures, excluding an outlier in which the Chicago Red Stars held a doubleheader with their MLS counterparts. New Jersey club Sky Blue lags behind the others in attendance but has still announced a series of local corporate partnerships this year.

And some of Solo’s protests don’t stand up to scrutiny. The narrow field in Western New York was certainly not accepted – club owners offered up their own apology, and the league fined the club – but Solo errs in claiming “there are no hotel standards” and in saying the league doesn’t follow Fifa rules on “an appeal structure for suspensions, bad calls, etc” or “minimum field dimensions.” The Laws of the Game actually state a game may be played on a field of 100 yards by 50 yards, as impossible as that seems to imagine.

PRO, the organization that oversees referees in US pro leagues, also disputed the contention that a referee consulted replay during the game at Western New York. And other complaints are dated – Solo refers to an incident in training for a game at the Washington Spirit’s Maryland SoccerPlex, though Solo’s Seattle team has not yet visited Washington this year.

PRO is also the organization that posted the 2014 NWSL operations manual online, a document that goes into painstaking detail mapping out every bit of the game officials’ transportation, requiring teams to have a detailed emergency response plan in case of earthquake, and stipulating that visiting locker rooms must have coffee, tea, cream and sugar available. The league declined to share an updated version of that manual, which includes hotel standards.)

Yet Lalas doesn’t fault Solo and others for speaking up.

“I have no problem with Hope or anybody else fighting for an improvement of conditions,” Lalas said. “That’s how things get done, too. If you don’t ask, then nothing’s going to be done. Sometimes, you’ve got to be a squeaky wheel about it.”

MLS struggled at the turn of the century and nearly folded after six seasons. Even after that, players limped along in challenging conditions for years – goalkeeper Troy Perkins was named to an All-Star team while holding down a second job in the mortgage industry. Now players make decent money, if not always a salary competitive with strong European and Mexican clubs. And the glass-strewn parking lot training sessions are history.

“It was less than ideal, to say the least,” Lalas said. “They knew it, everybody knew it. Now most teams have their own training facilities. But we were starting from scratch. The coaches knew it, the GMs knew it. When they were able to upgrade, they did.”

Whether the NWSL makes it to that upgrade could depend on whether players and the league’s owners can find some common ground amid all the other turbulence in women’s soccer.