Two days after Gotham lifted the 2025 NWSL Championship trophy in San Jose, Calif., the club’s general manager and head of soccer operations, Yael Averbuch West, stood on the steps of New York City Hall as music blared through the crisp air and fans cheered. She urged everyone on that November morning to “pay really close attention to what we’re building”.
The club’s path to lifting their second NWSL crown in three seasons has been every bit intentional, with deliberate steps taken year-round, including on that day. As players enjoyed their long-overdue championship parade in New York, the club’s sporting staff remained in California to scout one of their top college prospects for 2026.
“There’s a lot of work to be done to sustain success,” Averbuch West told The Athletic in December, weeks after winning that championship. “Winning a little bit is relatively easy, but winning a lot and winning consistently over a long period of time is incredibly hard, and that part of the project is really what I’m focused on. How do we make this the norm at Gotham? That’s the puzzle now.”
Gotham returns to Sports Illustrated Stadium on Saturday for their 2026 home opener against North Carolina Courage. The evening could feature the long-anticipated return of captain Tierna Davidson, whose season was cut short last year by an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. It follows Gotham’s opening win against Boston Legacy, in front of a historic Gillette Stadium crowd.
The reigning NWSL Champions have entered a new season ambitious as ever.
Last week, the club signed former Chelsea star Guro Reiten, one of the best left-footed wingers in the world. Her arrival, on an initial loan to July before a free agent move in the summer, will boost a team bursting with talent — from World Cup winners and Olympic medalists, to promising young stars. The club has mastered building a championship roster within the strict confines of the NWSL’s salary cap and other limitations.
Guro Reiten will be an impressive addition to the Gotham roster (Ben Roberts Photo/Getty Images)
“In a competitive landscape, understanding rules, thinking about the rules, strategizing based on rules or seeing when rules might change or need to change, is absolutely the key to competing and succeeding,” Averbuch West told The Athletic. “Roster construction is what I’m really, really passionate about. As a club, we really pride ourselves on being ahead of the curve with rule changes and thoroughly understanding the existing rules and how we can use them to succeed.”
One of those rule changes was the implementation of the High Impact Player rule, which allows clubs to go $1million over the 2026 base salary cap of $3.5m for players deemed “high impact”. The rule is the subject of a pending grievance by the NWSL Players Association, which opposes its implementation and has called for the league to raise the salary cap instead. The NWSL maintains it was justified in implementing the HIP rule, while the Players Association says the league violated federal labor law and their Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) when doing so. The situation remains unresolved.
Offseasons are usually busy for Gotham. In 2024, on the heels of their first NWSL championship, the club signed a quartet of USWNT stars — Davidson, Emily Sonnett, Rose Lavelle and Crystal Dunn — shaking up its roster entirely. While Dunn left last year and has since retired, the remaining trio have become the heart of Gotham’s veteran core.
For 2025, the club brought in players such as eventual NWSL Rookie of the Year Lilly Reale, Sarah Schupansky and veteran midfielder Jaelin Howell, among others. Their most notable signing of the season remains Jaedyn Shaw, who joined the club in September for $1.25million from the North Carolina Courage and who was vital in the team’s post-season run.
This year, the club took a more conservative approach, focusing instead on roster stability and enhancing the club’s existing structure.
“We talked about, for multiple reasons, trying to solidify the core of our roster, because we have had two previous offseasons where we had a lot of roster turnover,” Averbuch West said. “Some of it was by design, and some of it was things we needed to react to. This year, it was really important to us not to have that.”
Gotham had the shortest offseason of any NWSL club this year, featuring in the inaugural FIFA Women’s Champions Cup in London in late January, where they finished third after being eliminated by runners-up Corinthians in the semi-finals and then beating Moroccan side AS FAR. The club said it viewed January as a continuation of the 2025 season. “From a staff and player perspective, we don’t want to wildly change the way we’re doing things,” Averbuch West said.
Gotham finished third at the inaugural FIFA Women’s Champions Cup (Jasper Wax/Getty Images)
Still, the team was simultaneously preparing some seismic future moves.
While Averbuch West and the rest of the team celebrated on the steps of New York City Hall, Richard Gunney, the club’s director of scouting and roster development, stayed in California to catch the NCAA Sweet 16 match between Stanford and Brigham Young University. His assignment: to scout top prospect Jasmine Aikey, who scored twice in the Cardinals’ 6-0 win that day. Aikey was high on Gotham’s recruitment list as a backup for Florida State forward Jordynn Dudley.
Gotham recruited Dudley in January, a signing that required long weeks of hard work. The 21-year-old is considered one of the highest-rated forwards in the NCAA, opting to leave college a year early after providing 30 goals and 29 assists across 53 matches. She made her Gotham debut last week.
While Aikey later signed for expansion club Denver Summit, Gotham’s scouting trip was not in vain. It was there that Gunney spotted Stanford’s Andrea Kitahawa, who the club signed in January. The forward and former collegiate captain adds depth to Gotham’s frontline.
Gunney, a former assistant head coach with the Portland Thorns (2017-2021) and San Diego Wave (2021-2022), has been at Gotham since 2022, arriving at the beginning of a formidable shift in the club’s direction. Averbuch West was hired as the club’s general manager the year before, first as interim in July 2021 and then permanently in December. The two have worked closely to execute Gotham’s vision and roster development.
“We do a really good job of making match day fancy and glamorous, but the reality is behind the scenes, you want it to be as boring, as consistent, as predictable as possible,” Gunney says.
Rarely is football consistent on the pitch, as Gotham’s previous two seasons have shown. “What you need behind that is an aligned, consistent approach in how you recruit, how you spend, to ensure you’re not rubbing against your salary cap to make big acquisitions,” he says.
“If you have inconsistency, when performances don’t quite go your way, you make erratic decisions and that takes you further off track. It’s no surprise which (teams) then are towards the top end of the table.
“That’s the evolution of Gotham. It was all a whirlwind in 2021 and 2022. Now, there’s a structure, a strategy and process that we didn’t have before.”
Another piece to Gotham’s puzzle is head coach Juan Carlos Amoros, hired in November 2022. His success was immediate, leading the club to their first NWSL championship in his inaugural year. This was no small feat, considering the club finished bottom of the league the previous year. Amoros was voted 2023 NWSL Coach of the Year and, in April, he signed a five-year contract extension to keep him at Gotham through 2029.
“It’s key to have some continuity when you are successful, and to build on that. The first year we obviously (had) changes that looked great on paper, because they were fantastic players and people,” Amoros told The Athletic in December. “But sometimes you also need to look at the whole environment that you are going to create, and you have to rebuild it. We knew we had the tools.”
Gotham’s outspoken motto remains “always building, never finished”. Shaw is a prime example of their ability to develop players. The 21-year-old signed a contract extension through 2029, after joining for $1.25million. Shaw has flourished in New York — a far cry from her slump at North Carolina Courage, where she spent less than a season. The club had been interested in Shaw for some time but were patient in signing her.
Jaedyn Shaw with her 2025 NWSL Championship medal (Ira L. Black/Getty Images)
“The roster is not just a spreadsheet of names and numbers to make up the salary cap,” Averbuch West said. “It’s an emotional entity. A roster is a locker room of human beings. It is a group that has to take the field and believe that they can win games. It’s the tools you hand to the head coach to be able to do what the coach needs to do. There’s always a science to it. There’s the data. We have an amazing scouting team that puts in a lot of work, but it’s also about the emotional side of it.”
Shaw’s arrival galvanized Gotham, according to Averbuch West. It was also the right gamble.
“Bringing in a top player at any point during the season is not a simple decision,” Averbuch West said. “I really recognize the human aspect of the roster and all these things, and sometimes you don’t know 100 per cent how it’ll play out, but if you’re thinking of that part, you can make a really a good, educated guess based on the art that is alongside the science of the roster construction.”
Gotham had their eyes on Reiten for some time, too, with the 31-year-old out of contract in summer. They began conversations with her agent in December. Meetings with Averbuch West, Gunney and her agent spanned 10 weeks, with the initial plan for her to join Gotham by summer.
“But our circumstances changed and we needed her before then,” Gunney said. “So, the last two weeks were, you could say, more whirlwind than we would have liked, but we had the foundation and preparation behind the scenes to execute.”
This speaks to the club’s constant desire to improve — whether recruiting a top collegiate star, a standout youth prospect or one of the most proven wingers in Europe.
“In year one, clubs should be saying: ‘We can make it to the playoffs’,” says Gunney. “In year two, you’re thinking: ‘Can we build on that?’ In year three, it’s: ‘Can we be (NWSL) Shield ready?’ But as you’re building, you’re asking: ‘Can we have this robust roster to cope with the league’s demands (and) be ready to perform in the playoffs down the stretch?’ It gets talked about a lot, how we went from worst to first to win the first Championship, (while being) the lowest-ranked seed last season. This season we want to be No 1 in the league come the end of the year.”
Reiten qualifies as a High Impact Player, so her salary could be supplemented by the $1million in additional funds above the salary cap. The rule goes into effect July 1.
“For us, it’s an opportunity to expand what the salary cap is, but it’s also opportunity to gain a competitive advantage against all the other teams that are trying to do the same thing,” Averbuch West said of the new rule.
The NWSL’s salary cap is uniquely American. Clubs in Europe don’t have the same limits on what they can offer a player to sign them. This has forced the NWSL to reimagine how it pays players. It also means clubs such as Gotham are balancing their budgets differently from clubs elsewhere in the world.
“A top European club, let’s say Chelsea, might be happy to have a player that’s on £500,000 ($670,000) per year sat on their bench. You can’t have that level of investment for your salary cap (if) they’re not performing for your team,” Gunney said. “So, you’ve got to be really smart with your allocation of your resources, your allocation of your salary cap.”
The salary cap, as outlined in the current collective bargaining agreement, features a base of $3.5million in 2026, with that figure rising to $3.7m after revenue-sharing adjustments. By 2030, the base will jump to $5.1m.
Averbuch West said these raises don’t match the rising salaries in women’s football.
“It’s not going up enough,” she said. “We’re in a marketplace where salaries are continuing to increase, if you look globally, and so, as a club with really big ambitions, we have a really tough puzzle with the amount the salary cap is going up year-over-year.
“All players negotiate salaries that go up year-over-year. It doesn’t even account for what we need to do with that. For us to retain the talent that everyone loves, and our team and all of our fan favorites — and continue to make sure it’s competitive, and we’re introducing young, high-potential players to the mix — something’s going to have to continue to change.”
Innovation is part of Gotham’s ethos. They’re determined to continue evolving, especially as they look ahead to what could be a historic year for the club.
“We want to continue to win, but we want to do it better, and we want to be better, both on the field and off the field,” Averbuch West said. “I am working through a list of who we know we are, and trying to really clearly define, ‘who do we want to be?’. What is it I hope becomes the club’s identity, long beyond my time here, Juan’s time here, our current roster’s time here?
“That’s the project. It’s really daunting in a very exciting way and I’m using all of my time and everything I do to try to move us closer to that. There’s a lot of work to be done.”