Angel City Salary Cap Penalties
News broke yesterday that the NWSL found that Angel City had side letter contracts with five players that were not reported to the league, and that when that additional salary was included, Angel City was $50,000 over the salary cap for four weeks during the 2024 season. The penalty for the hidden payments and salary cap violations is a $200,000 fine, a 3 point deduction, and Julie Uhrman and Angela Hucles Mangano have been suspended from conducting any transfer activity until the end of 2024. My initial reaction was shock, but as that slowly wore off, I was pretty disappointed. And the more I dug into this, the more upset I got. I’ll explain my understanding of things, and I get into a pretty extensive timeline of trying to see how money was spent that got us into this position. Feel free to skip that section and go straight to the end, unless you really want to get into the weeds.
Side Letters and When Were We In Violation?
There is a lot to unpack from this, but let’s start with what the league called the side letters. That makes it clear that this wasn’t an accounting error, or anything accidental. These contracts were designed to hide salary from the league. There’s the contract that’s given to the league, and then there’s another secret contract for more money. It’s cheating, there’s not two ways about it, and I think that all of the penalties are justified. The ESPN report said that these sideletters were for 5 players signed in 2023, but they don’t say who they were, or how much they were getting paid above their public salary. We can probably make some guesses about which players got these deals, but I don’t think that’s productive, and I think that the fault is with the front office anyway. I would bet that every player was told that everyone does things like this, and it’s no big deal. I would be very, very interested to learn just how much extra money was being paid, and really, that seems incredibly relevant to everything else. Hopefully we’ll learn more in the coming days.
The other detail that stood out to me is that we were over the cap for 4 weeks during this season. I think that it’s clear that this was the first four weeks, as it was after Week 4 that Nielsen and Henry were traded away. If we were over the cap after that point, it would still be ongoing. And same if it was the addition of the Zelem and Press salaries. It would still be ongoing, and the league would still be investigating, and it wouldn’t be news yet. Those trades always felt like there was an sense of desperation on Angel City’s part, in order to get them done before the deadline. And in fact, both were done on deadline day. The transfer fees seemed a little low for both players, but especially Nielsen. I always felt like these were take-it-or-leave-it deals, and Angel City had to take them. At the time, I thought it was to free up funds for a future move, but now we know the real reason why.
Timeline
But my overwhelming feeling is how did we get here? This roster, and especially our opening day roster, does not look like the most expensive roster in the league. This would make more sense if we’d signed a bunch of free agents, like Gotham, or had a big transfer, like Bay or Orlando. So let’s go back to the end of last season. For starters, it seems impossible that we were over the cap at the end of last season, although I bet that there were players who were receiving these same sideletter contracts then. But the big thing is the sudden retirement of Julie Ertz. She had to be on a high salary; she’s a star player of the USWNT. Taking that salary off the books should have provided some breathing room. Then, we go into the offseason, and the salary cap gets raised by 40%, from just under $2 million (including allocation money), to $2.75 million. An extra 40% to your budget should be a really big help.
The first big transaction of the offseason was exercising the option on Leroux’s contract to bring her back for another year. It was possible to let her walk as a free agent after last season. My feeling was that this was done for the optics; we paid a steep price to get her, and she’d only had 7 starts and 2 goals in her first 1 and a half seasons. Giving up on her after such little time on the field would have made losing that draft capital and transfer fee even worse. And, arguably, this was the right call. At least, she has played over 1,500 minutes this season and is our second leading scorer. But I’m sure that’s at a very high salary.
Next, there were extensions for Vignola and Anderson, and then Mathias had a club option on her contract exercised as well. That all seems like standard business. Anderson finished last season as the #1 keeper and Vignola was a big piece of the undefeated run. Mathias had missed the whole year, but it felt similar to Leroux. It would be a bad look to trade Lussi away for a player that never plays a single game for the club. Also, we had so many injuries at fullback, and had to forwards playing fullback, so it made sense to keep an actual fullback on the roster. All those moves make sense to me. I do wonder, though, if both Anderson and Haračić were getting paid like starters this year.
Then, one of the big deals: Angel City signs Gisele Thompson under the U18 mechanism, just days before her 18th birthday at the end of November. This is a salary that her agent has made available. She’s on a three year contract worth $525,000, with bonuses that could add another $125,000. This is a little misleading, though, because one “year” of this contract was basically just the month of December in 2023. The new league year starts on January 1. But even if her base salary is spread over three years, that’s $175,000 per year, which is a lot in a league in which the minimum salary is $37,000. I’m not saying that Gisele isn’t worth that, but no other teenage fullback is getting paid that salary. That is a star player salary. But I’m not against this deal. She’s a unique talent with a unique relationship to Angel City, so it’s probably worth it. But maybe now is the time to start saving money?
Now comes one of the first strange ones: Vanessa Gilles. She’s so good, and she absolutely doesn’t want to play for Angel City, but she actually extends her contract with Angel City, in order to extend her loan to Lyon in December. I just don’t get this. Initially, sure, Gilles wants to go to Lyon, and it’s the right thing not to stand in her way. But then when she becomes a crucial part of their team, and after the first season, it feels like, okay, let’s make this official. And now, when Angel City really needs money, we say, okay Lyon, you can keep a top defender for free. If we’re needing to raise money, then demanding a transfer from a wealthy club for a player that has already left seems like a good place to start.
Then there is the choice to move on from McCaskill and Weatherholt in December and January, but these aren’t really cost saving measures, because they were free agents. We just didn’t give them new contracts. But even then, in the LA Times article, it was said that they weren’t brought back, in part, for salary cap reasons. That seemed odd at the time, with the news about the cap going up 40%, but makes more sense now. In December, we also exercised the option on Jun Endo’s contract for the 2024 season, and signed Gorden to a 3 year deal, with an option for a 4th. Both key players; both make sense. There’s a flurry of free agent activity in December, because everyone was waiting to sign free agents until after the expansion draft. Angel City got protection from that, if you remember, by trading Camberos and $50,000. I think that’s money that had to be spent, even though it’s a huge net loss on Camberos. Declaring a Protected IX would have been a nightmare, as I wrote about at the time.
In January is when there’s a lot of money being spent by Angel City that does not make sense to me. There are contract extensions for Madison Hammond, Lily Nabet, Megan Reid, and Elizabeth Eddy. Eddy is probably the one that really stands out. I like her, and I thought that she did well in her brief cameos as a national team replacement player. But this year, she’s only played 11 minutes. Even if she’s only getting paid the league minimum of $37,000, is that worth it? The part that really bothers me, though, is that this was before the draft. Would we still have made that decision after drafting Curry? At best, Eddy projected as a sporadic role player, and I’m not sure that we needed to get a player like that locked up, especially on a two year deal. And I’m sure that she’s good in the locker room, but are we really looking for veteran leadership on a team with Riley, Leroux, Gorden, Emslie, Press, Spencer, Henry (at that point), Nielsen (at that point), and more. That seems like a deal that could have waited. Then, right before the draft, we spend $40,000 to get Meggie Doughery Howard from San Diego. Transfer fees count against the salary cap, so why did we spend $40,000 on Dougherty Howard, especially hours before the draft when we didn’t know who we were going to get? Especially, because we went and drafted two midfielders (Knox and Garziano) first thing. Why not wait and see who you get? And there were other free agent midfielders available. Even if Weatherholt had wanted to be paid $20,000 more than Dougherty Howard, that would still be a net savings. And I’m not convinced that Dougherty Howard is a big upgrade over Weatherholt. Also, at the draft, we spent $15,000 to acquire the draft pick that became Garziano, who we ultimately didn’t offer a contract. That doesn’t feel like the action of a club trying to save money. Again, $40,000 and $15,000 are not very much, but since we were ultimately only $50,000 over that would have made all the difference. I think that we could have not spent that money, and had a team just as good this year. Actually, if we’d not signed Dougherty Howard and kept Le Bihan, I think that we’d be better.
Le Bihan was also signed to a one year contract extension, with an option for a further year, which again seems odd considering how things played out. It never felt like Tweed trusted her, so why bring her back? Then, this is where I think that the money really goes off the rails. The next signing is Casey Phair. Kennedy Fuller won’t sign until March, but I’ll discuss her here, because I think the same factors apply. I think that they’re both talented teenagers and lots of other teams were interested. At the time, I thought that it was a real feather in Angel City’s cap that they chose to play here. I’m sure that they were both sold on this as a place to grow, but now I’m wondering if part of that was that Angel City offered significantly more money than anyone else? Based on Gisele’s deal, that seems very possible. These are, basically, free agents, so they are in a position to negotiate a competitive salary, unlike draft picks. Certainly, they can’t have been sold on things like training facilities, as Fuller trained with at least Kansas City and Chelsea, who both have better setups than Angel City. I also think that in the case of both these players, it wasn’t something that Angel City planned on, but then the opportunity presented itself, and they went for it. So maybe that accounted for some additional, unplanned spending. But they are players with a high potential and they cost nothing in terms of transfer fees or draft capital (back in the days when the draft was still a thing). So again, it makes sense, but I don’t think that anyone had planned on spending that money. The roster spots are another aspect that make me think that. I was surprised when we opened the season with 26 players on the roster, the max allowed, because we all expected Press back at some point. Somebody had to go.
But back to money. This is also the point where Angel City makes their two biggest expenditures: $275,000 for Rocky Rodríguez and $130,000 for Messiah Bright. I spoke about this before, but I’ll quickly recap why I think the Rodríguez deal is too much. This is amongst the top 25 highest fees ever paid for a player in the women’s game, and for context, it is almost equal to what Chelsea paid for Lauren James and more than $100,000 more than Kansas City paid for Temwa Chawinga, and typically the highest price is paid for goal scorers. But the thing that always got me was the situation with Portland. During her time with the Thorns, Rodríguez went from 1,721 minutes to 1,068 minutes to 598 minutes with only 7 starts in her final season with the Thorns. Her role in that team was decreasing. It was also common knowledge that Portland were trying to sign Jessie Fleming from Chelsea (if I heard about that, then the Angel City front office certainly did). Adding Fleming was going to decrease Rodríguez’s role even further, but the word was that Portland needed to raise money to meet Chelseas’s asking price for Fleming. It seems like when you’re looking to sign a player that is not in her current team’s plans, and when that team is desperate for cash, you should be able to strike a bargain. You should have all the leverage in that situation. But instead, we pay $275,000. Again for context, Taylor Flint went from San Diego to Louisville for $150,000, and I think that she would have been a better fit on the field and has really emerged as one of, if not the best, defensive midfielders in the league. I can’t think of any justification for the price for signing Rodríguez, except that she’s a bigger name. This always felt like a marketing decision to me, rather than a soccer decision, and I’m sure that Rodríguez has sold more jerseys than Flint would have, but from a salary cap standpoint, that doesn’t matter.
The fee for Bright is more understandable, at the time. She was coming off a Rookie of the Year nomination, but there is some question of leverage here. Bright had requested a trade and Orlando was looking to move her. They also wanted extra money because they were planning to spend a lot on Barbra Banda. $130,000 feels like the fair price at the time, but considering that Orlando needed to make the deal, maybe that could have been talked into something more like $100,000. Because again, we now know how tight against the cap Angel City already was. So $130,000 doesn’t feel like a team that is trying to pinch pennies. The other question is, what did Angel City’s depth chart look like? I’d assumed at the time that Bright was being signed as a starting striker, but if she was being signed as a backup to Leroux, that $130,000 looks worse. There were free agents available, most notably Ella Stevens, who’s been outstanding for Gotham this year. My idea the whole time was to sign Ada Hederberg as a free agent after Lyon’s season ended. Her salary would easily have been $100,000 more than Bright’s (she’s a Ballon D’Or winner after all), but since she’d join in the summer, it would only be for half a season. Then, at the end of this year, you could let Leroux leave as a free agent, and that would free up the rest of your money. Jenni Hermoso was another prominent name available that wouldn’t have cost a transfer fee. My point is that there were options that could have helped the team. Spending $130,000 on what became our backup striker is not the action of a club looking to save money. Especially for a club that already had three back up strikers on the roster. I mentioned this last week, but was there really no transfer or loan available for Katie Johnson? It seems like a lot of clubs in Liga MX Feminil would love a player of her quality. She’d get playing time, and would probably score a lot of goals. Angel City would get salary cap relief. It seems pretty win/win.
One other small deal: Hannah Stambaugh. She was signed for a $10,000 transfer fee. $10,000 is not that much, but was it necessary for a #3 keeper? There were only 6 keepers taken in the draft, meaning that there was definitely someone available who had 4 years of college experience who was available for free. Stambaugh seems great; she’s a fan favorite and she got a huge roar when she played in the friendly against Juarez. But Angel City declined the club option for 2025, meaning she’s almost definitely not coming back next year. I guess my point is that $10,000 is not that much, but it feels like a luxury signing, not a team that is trying to pinch pennies.
Now, through this whole article, I’ve been looking at how Angel City could have saved $50,000, because that’s how much we were over, but the reality is that it was actually much worse. In February, prior to the season start, Jun Endo tore her ACL, and was immediately placed on the Season Ending Injury list. The salary of players on SEI don’t count against the salary cap. This injury was bad in so many ways, from personal to the effect on the team, but it was actually a lifesaver financially, which makes me feel terrible to say. Curry and Fuller were both signed after this, and Angel City couldn’t have signed both if the injury hadn’t happened. And had Endo not gotten injured, the salary cap violation would have been a lot higher than $50,000. This does, at least, explain why no effort was made to bring in a player to replace Endo’s role. We were probably already over the cap, or close to it, when she got hurt.
Future
This news also has a big impact on the future of the team. There are currently 10 Angel City players that will be free agents, and I have no idea why their contracts were all lined up to expire at the same time. Endo was on this list, but she has signed a new three year contract. I’ll break this into tiers, as I see them. In the top tier is Claire Emslie, Christen Press, Sydney Leroux, and Madison Curry. In the next tier is Meggie Dougherty Howard, Jasmyne Spencer, Merrit Mathias, and Didi Haračić. And in the final tier is Katie Johnson and Hannah Stambaugh. The cap is going to go up again, but I don’t think that there is any way that we can keep all the players in that top tier, nor do I think that we should. To me, Emslie and Curry are the priority signings in this group. And I’m not sure how there wasn’t at least a club option on Curry’s rookie contract. There’s also the damage of what this does trying to sign new deals. Will Curry want to come back after learning that some of her teammates were being paid extra under the table? Are players going to look for a more stable management situation? In the next tier, Spencer had an option for 2025 that the club declined, so she is almost certainly leaving. Dougherty Howard’s $40,000 transfer fee also feels worse if she leaves for free after only one year, but if there is a lot of cleaning out contracts, I wouldn’t be surprised to see her go. Mathias has been injured almost her entire time with the club, with only 3 starts over almost two years, and Gisele is clearly the Right Back on the team moving forward. Haračić is a big question. For me, it’s time to move on. Angel City has the worst goalkeeping metrics in the whole league. And now that the playoffs are almost definitely out of reach, I think we need to be starting Anderson to have the best possible assessment of whether she’s the one to be starting next season. In the final tier, it also seems like a certainty that Stambaugh is leaving. And yeah, I really don’t get what anyone gained from Katie Johnson sitting on the bench all year. She’s 30 years old. She should be somewhere where she can play every single week. When she was subbed on in a Summer Cup game, but then subbed off a few minutes later for Christen Press to make her debut, it should have been clear that Tweed didn’t have a role for her. We should have been able to find someone to at least take her on loan through the end of the year. But now that we know how close to the cap Angel City currently is, and knowing that Endo will be back next season on increased wages, and Riley’s salary will also be factored in again too, it seems clear that probably a lot of these free agents are going to have to go.
Conclusions
Free agency is a big part of this for me. I’ve said before that it feels like Angel City was constructed for the NWSL of five years ago, not the NWSL of today, or more importantly, of tomorrow. Total free agency is a fairly new thing, and Angel City hasn’t seemed able to utilize it. A big part of what got us into this position, I think, is the fact that we spent $520,000 on bringing players in, but almost every outgoing player left as a free agent. The only one who didn’t was Camberos, who we traded to Bay FC for $50,000 and Expansion Draft Protection. That $50,000 was immediately sent to Utah for Protection from them (plus an additional $50,000). We needed that protection, and Camberos didn’t look likely to play a big role. Still, we spent $308,000 to bring her to Angel City, which was the 5th highest transfer of 2023 (in the world), so recouping $50,000 and Protection doesn’t exactly feel like good business. I think that we needed to have players on longer contracts, so that when they go to other teams, Angel City is getting at least some money in return. Conversely, if we’re letting players go for free, we should focus on signing players for free. But $520,000 out the door, and $0 returning is always going to be trouble.
I’ve largely tried to keep my feelings out of this for the article, but I did want to touch on that. Part of what made these punishments so severe was that this isn’t the first infraction from Angel City. We were fined $20,000 for tampering before we’d even played a game. And while it was determined that no rules were broken, a lot of people felt that Angel City approaching, and then signing, Freya Coombe midseason, while she was still working for Gotham was at least a breach of etiquette. I went back and looked at the documentary, and there’s a quote from Julie Uhrman where she says, “We’re a new team. A lot of us haven’t been in soccer before. Do I question the league, or get upset with the league for fining us? No. If we break a rule, we should absolutely be fined. We’re learning the rules, and a lot of times we’re pushing against the boundaries because we question why the rules are the way the are.” Sure, if that rule is why don’t we give away 10% of sponsorship, please question it. But hiding money from the league, and spending over the salary cap is disrespecting the other teams, and disrespecting the sport. To me, it’s this very Silicon Valley mindset that the rules don’t apply to me. But part of what makes sports work is that everyone plays by the same rules, whether that’s on the field, or in the league offices. If this was an honest mistake, they would have just spent over the salary cap. Hiding the money shows that they understood the rules, and ignored them, but didn’t want to get caught.
And even after examining all the deals, I still can’t believe how much money was spent. The cap went up $700,000 and we opted not to re-sign last seasons top scorer, and it still wasn’t enough money. I’m definitely in favor of all NWSL players being paid more money, but that’s happening. The league minimum is going up every year, and the salary cap is going up every year. I still don’t entirely get how we spent that much money during the offseason.
Also, I’m kind of just embarrassed at how badly this was done. There was an anonymous GM survey conducted by ESPN recently where one the questions was “Does everyone follow the rules?” and 11 out of 14 GMs said “No.” But there was one particular anecdote where a GM said that they were trying to trade for a player, and then were informed by the other club that that player was receiving additional, undisclosed compensation. I would bet that that GM was from Utah, and that player was Amandine Henry. but whoever it was, it seems almost certain that Angel City was the club being dealt with, and it’s crazy that they’d say to another GM, “Oh, by the way, we’ve been cheating.” Potentially, this is how the league first got wind of the hidden payments. It still seems like a major issue that we don’t know just how much the hidden payments were for, but I assume that they have to be substantial. If it was only $1,000, why would you bother to hide it? But the thing is, of course word was going to get out. Whether that was from players, or agents, or other GMs. There was no way that they were going to keep their secret payments a secret. And so of course some punishment was inevitable and it was going to damage the team.
And that damage goes beyond the fine or the 3 point deduction. Angel City is now going to be synonymous with cheating, like Manchester City, or the New England Patriots, or Canada with drones. That’s how other fans see us now. And I’m kind of embarrassed, too, about what it got us. Angel City’s roster is full of holes, we were 11th in the league (now 12th after the deduction), and I thought it was because the front office wasn’t doing enough. Now I learn that we were cheating, and apparently spending more than every other team in the league, and 11th was still the best that we could do.
Maybe other teams are breaking the rules too. Probably they are, actually. But part of what drew me to Angel City was that stated intent to lead the way in women’s soccer on the global stage. Secret side letter contracts aren’t leadership. Roster mismanagement isn’t leadership. Salary cap violations aren’t leadership. Angel City was supposed to set the standard, and try to get other clubs to follow our lead. Instead, we’re becoming a cautionary tale. Now every other club in the world is going say, “Don’t do it the Angel City way,” and that erases a lot of the good work that the club has done. To me, these actions betray a lot of the ideals that the club stood for. You can’t change the sport, when nobody wants to be like you.