On Friday, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) announced it had hired former FIFPro director of global policy Sarah Gregorius as its new sporting senior director.
Gregorius will be responsible for “advancing player relations and development, optimizing performance standards and centralizing best practices and minimum standards”, per the league’s announcement. She will work under chief sporting director Tatjana Haenni, whom she has known for years and interacted with in her role at FIFPro, the global footballers’ union.
The hiring is a strong signal from NWSL about its commitment to player standards.
In addition to its advocacy, FIFPro has a watchdog-like status in relation to the game’s various leagues and governing bodies. Gregorius’ work in particular over the past five years has addressed everything from mental health to maternity protections to schedule overload. The league approaching her about taking on a player welfare and development role is an invitation to be seriously critiqued from within.
“I’ve asked them why (they wanted to hire me) many times,” Gregorius said on a call with The Athletic. “Because I’m also curious to understand, given not just my work at FIFPro, but also my background as a player — and not exactly a quiet player. Even when I was still playing, I was pushing governing bodies and things like that to be a bit more accountable and to be a bit more honest in their decision-making.
“That wasn’t just because I worked at FIFPro. That’s very intrinsic. I firmly believe that if you want a sustainable, thriving football industry, you need to (center) the players in everything you do.”
Gregorius wasn’t exactly looking to leave FIFPro, but when the NWSL said it was interested in her, it spurred her to consider the next step of her career. Her work at FIFPro was in a good place — not complete by any means, but in a place where Gregorius felt she could pass it on to the next person. This was also an opportunity to start directly effecting change; while FIFPro can guide and advise, it does not make policy.
“I’m dead keen to learn and be exposed to other sides of football that I wouldn’t have seen working at FIFPro, which, the scope is very narrow,” Gregorius said. “It’s player welfare, player-rights protections, shifting the needle, shifting the balance to make it more favorable towards the players. So I’m also looking forward to finding out what I don’t know about the game and seeing how I interact with those other important pieces that go into decision-making.”
This is an interesting time to be able to drive policy in a women’s professional sports league. The NWSL wants to be globally competitive, demonstrated in its recent collective bargaining negotiations that did away with entry drafts, expansion drafts, and discovery rights, aligning the league more with how the rest of the sporting world handles player movement and contracts. But the NWSL is also in growth mode, while international women’s teams look to the United States as a growth market as well.
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“I’m really looking forward to being in an organization that has self-determination,” Gregorius said of NWSL. “It exists for one singular reason, and that’s for the women’s professional league that it governs and those players. That’s it. It has that autonomy. It has that independence. And I think what’s super-interesting about women’s football in the United States is it’s not dealing with a Premier League or La Liga — this hugely dominant men’s football industry or hierarchy.
“I’m interested to be in an environment like that, where — put it this way — to feel less like a sales pitch towards the men and the male part of the organization, which is certainly part of the experience in Europe for the most part.”
It’s that lack of institutional history that Gregorius thinks will allow the NWSL to innovate and differentiate itself from other leagues. One of the things she wants the league to avoid is a growing gap between its haves and the have-nots, maintaining a baseline standard where any team can attract quality players.
“The top players, they’re not going to any team in France, are they? They go to the top two,” she said. “It’s the same in Spain. You don’t want that in the U.S. I think you have to be able to say, ‘This is the quality of care across the board, and that is guaranteed whether you’re signing for the team that finishes one to two, or the team that finishes 12 to 14’.”
Gregorius’ work as part of Haenni’s team, will ensure standards grow across the board in the league to provide 14 — eventually 16 — good markets, not just three or four. If players see the NWSL is a league where they can universally have a good off-field experience, word will spread as internationals tell their old teammates and their national-team colleagues about it. Eventually, she hopes that if the NWSL can innovate towards issues including player standards and labor relations, it’ll spread back to other leagues the same way the NWSL has taken on global standards.
“I think once you see someone else doing it, it becomes less scary. I think early adoption in the European football context — because you have men’s football, it’s just so big and it’s so entrenched — is very, very difficult over here,” Gregorius said.
One example she gave of pushing other leagues forward was in the most recent collective bargaining agreement (CBA) process, in which the league voluntarily opened early negotiations with the NWSL Players Association (NWSLPA). Not necessarily the exact collective-bargaining process — different countries have different labels and standards around how that process works, and other player associations may represent different kinds of membership — but the use of collective action itself.
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“I’m actually just hopeful that some of the international players that are within the NWSL have now seen what the players association can do, what a union can do,” Gregorius said, “and will start to push their own national team, their own federations, because they’ve got this taste of what collective action can provide for them.”
It doesn’t have to be in the form of a CBA; Gregorius pointed out that while a CBA can be an indicator of good governance, there are plenty of things leagues can do to provide a positive environment. In any case, a CBA is a tremendously difficult process even when negotiations are voluntary. Case in hand: the 10 months NWSL and the NWSLPA spent negotiating over several details. But leagues can implement things like maternity leave, safeguarding, and travel policies if they want, or if pushed hard enough by their employees.
At first, Gregorius will be back and forth between Amsterdam, the Dutch city where FIFPro is based, and New York City while she relocates and finalizes her visa, but she should be permanently moved by the end of the calendar year. In the meantime she’d like to be able to visit all 14 NWSL teams, schedule allowing.
“I’m hoping that I can get around the clubs, meet everybody, have a bit of an understanding about the similarities and the differences, because there’s just no point sitting in a fancy office in New York and trying to guess what’s happening out there,” she said.
“The NWSL is in such a unique position to do some really cool things, that hopefully, if it can keep sort of breaking the mold in a way, that the other leagues will learn from and embrace as well.”
(Top photo: Elsa / Getty Images, Nick Tre. Smith / USA Today)