When USA smashed Japan in the Women’s World Cup final, drawing record TV ratings for soccer in America along the way, Jeff Plush was probably smiling somewhere.

Plush is the commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League, the top-flight domestic league where nearly all of Team USA’s stars play. Women’s soccer leagues have had a spotty history stateside, but when the World Cup players returned home from Canada, the impact was almost immediate for the NWSL.

Games are selling out, from soccer-crazy Portland, where more than 21,000 fans showed up for a regular season Thorns match on a Wednesday, to the suburbs of New Jersey, where Sky Blue FC typically struggles to draw fans.

But can this growth for a professional women’s soccer league really last? Plush is counting on it.

“We’re on track for where we should be in 2015,” Plush told the Guardian this week. “We’ve seen tremendous growth. People call it a bump or a bounce. I think it’s actually a new normal for us and that’s the way we’re going to articulate it. Our plan for 2016 and beyond is to hit different numbers than we’ve had in the past.”

The NWSL is already bucking the trends set by its predecessors, Women’s Professional Soccer and the Women’s United Soccer Association. Both leagues folded after three seasons and NWSL will enter its fourth next year.

Plush said it is “absolutely 100%” that all nine teams will return to NWSL in 2016. WPS, which played its last season in 2011, saw three of its teams fold while the league was active.

Megan Rapinoe, the star of the USA’s opening World Cup match against Australia and a midfielder for Seattle Reign, shares Plush’s optimism. Asked how long the so-called World Cup bump will last, Rapinoe sang the word “forever” and reporters laughed, but then she paused and thought about it: “I think a while, to be honest.”

Rapinoe said: “I think people just totally got attached to this World Cup in a different way than they have in the past, and it was so close to home. That was such a huge thing to have American fans know they can go watch these players in their own cities for the rest of the season. Hopefully the bounce isn’t coming down – it’s just continuing to go up.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Megan Rapinoe takes on Houston’s Jen LaPonte. Photograph: Trask Smith/ZUMA Press/Corbis

Unlike seasons past, the NWSL benefits from being owned and operated by US Soccer in partnership with the Canadian and Mexican federations, a model that subsidizes the salaries of national team players and cuts down on operational costs.

But steady ticket sales certainly help. Within a year, WPS saw average per-game attendance drop by almost half. But the NWSL resisted a sophomore slump, keeping attendances nearly the same from its debut season to the next. Of the club’s nine teams, all are having their best season this year attendance-wise, except for one, the Western New York Flash.

“We had 16 sellouts in the second half of the season when we had zero in the first half. That demonstrates that the marketplace is responding to these players coming back to play for club teams,” Plush said. “Our clubs are working really hard and the things they are putting into place will bear fruit if you keep working really hard with a market that is now aware that you’re out there.”

Building a professional women’s sports league from scratch is hard work. Plush optimistically told reporters he expected a broadcast deal to be unveiled shortly after the season began, but it didn’t come until three months later when USA were in the semi-final of the World Cup, halfway through the NWSL season.

“I wouldn’t say it’s harder than I expected. It’s appropriately hard,” Plush, the former Colorado Rapids managing director, said when asked whether NWSL was more challenging than MLS. “We’re a young business and we’re still charting our course of what we want to be and trying to grow at the same time.”

“I don’t think the TV deal took longer than it should have,” he added. “It took as long as it needed to, but in an instantaneous news cycle, people want to hear something every day. That’s good. When people want information about our league, that’s a positive. But we need to work in a prudent manner.”

The deal put six NWSL matches on Fox Sports 1 this season, which includes the playoffs and championship, and another four on Fox’s digital streaming service. Fox was the broadcaster for the Women’s World Cup, and set a record for the most-watched soccer match in the US, men or women, with the USA’s 5-2 win over Japan in the final.

USA's World Cup victory over Japan smashes TV record for soccer Read more

The World Cup bounce may last thanks to another boost that neither of the previous two women’s leagues had the chance to capitalize on: the Olympics. WPS and WUSA folded before a season could be played during the summer Olympic Games. The US women will start Olympic qualifying in February. It provides a big opportunity for the league – but it’s an opportunity without precedent.

“You like to think that – you like to think that having that excitement translates,” said national team and Chicago Red Stars forward Christen Press when asked about the Olympics sustaining the NWSL’s growth. “But to be honest, it’s impossible to predict what will happen. The US won the last Olympics and there was no league.”

The playoff picture

With playoffs looming next month, the Portland Thorns are dangling on the edge of missing the playoffs for the first time. The opportunity for the Thorns to control their own fate is long gone, and now they need the Washington Spirit to lose their last three matches of the season.

But the Thorns still need to fight to stay alive, too. Even if Washington loses their last three games, the Thorns must win their final two of the season. That could set up a particularly interesting showdown on Sunday when the Thorns will host the Spirit in front of a sellout, a win-or-die scenario for Portland. That match will air on Fox Sports 1.

The Thorns and the 21,000-plus fans with tickets for this weekend will have to cross their fingers that Washington doesn’t spoil their fun tonight though. The Spirit will face FC Kansas City, a team that is already into the playoffs, and a draw there will end Portland’s season.

MVP Spotlight

With Crystal Dunn on the Spirit, the Thorns may be in big trouble. Dunn was the player on the bubble of the US national team who many fans and pundits felt deserved a spot on the World Cup roster, but was one of coach Jill Ellis’ final cuts. She has been a mission to show Ellis how wrong she was and leads the league in goals with some impressive runs straight through back lines.

Although Dunn is looking like the favorite, there are some dark horses to be named the league’s MVP. If somehow the Thorns defy the odds and deny the Spirit a spot in the playoffs, Allie Long is likely to have plenty to do with it. Long, the engine of the Thorns attack, sits in the three-way tie for second in goals this year. The Thorns ran hot-and-cold for stretches, but Long made her mark, now sitting second in all-time league goals.

Who is first for that all-time record? Kim Little, the Scottish striker for the Seattle Reign who joined the Reign last year and was an immediate force to be reckon with. Little’s spotlight could’ve dimmed when the World Cup players returned in full swing, but instead she netted her first NWSL hat-trick last week.

Unstoppable Reign

For anyone who has been following the NWSL, it likely came as no surprise when the Reign clinched the NWSL Shield for the best regular season record on Wednesday night. The Reign steamrollered their way through the competition this year, a continuation of their dominance last year.

Coach Laura Harvey deserves the credit for her shrewd moves to build arguably the strongest roster in the league since a dismal opening season in 2012. But her vision in building a World Cup-proof squad was perhaps the difference this time around. The Reign’s two best scorers, both of which sit in the league’s top four scorers overall this season, are Little from Scotland and American Beverly Yanez. The Reign had just two players leave for the World Cup in Hope Solo and Rapinoe.

The Reign have two matches left for the season, but Harvey will begin thinking about the playoffs immediately. Despite their dominance last year, they fell to Kansas City in the final after not losing in three meetings.

Needing Intervention

How bad does a team need to get before looking for a major overhaul? That is the question the Boston Breakers will need to answer before next season. The Breakers have won just four games in 19 this season. Perhaps worse, they more often than not haven’t even looked competitive in games.

The glaring culprit is their defense. They’ve allowed a whopping 42 goals in 19 games. That is the most in the league by a margin of 12 and cause for some lopsided, demoralizing score lines like their 3-1 loss to the Reign on Wednesday.

Boston’s scoring record is average – three teams have been worse at finding the back of the net than the Breakers and most the teams that are better at scoring are only marginally so. That makes the defense’s stats all the more concerning.

If not the defense, the spotlight may fall on Tom Durkin’s record since taking over in 2014. The Breakers fired their previous coach, Lisa Cole, in the middle of the inaugural NWSL season, at the time saying it was necessary as the team pushed to reach the playoffs. But the team’s performance has been worse under Durkin, who has a winning percentage is .270 to date compared to Cole’s .425 during her shortened season.

The Breakers have at times appeared to be on the losing ends of transfer deals, particularly an usual one this month where Boston sent English forward Lianne Sanderson to Portland, but Seattle served as the middleman and gave less to Boston than they got from Portland. Boston will need to be a bit more shrewd if they hope to pull off the sort of transformation Harvey did.