2026 NWSL Previews: Washington Spirit, Gotham FC
/Our 2026 NWSL Season Previews have started and today we hit the Washington Spirit and NJ/NY Gotham. If you want to support this coverage of the league, you can head to our Patreon. For $5 a month you can get access to a lot of the data visualization tools we use to make these previews.
If you’re more of an audio person, our friends at Expected Own Goals spoke to Riss Willett of Shea Butter FC to talk Spirit, and Jenna Tonelli of Sports Illustrated on Gotham, available wherever you get your pods. If you want to support them, you can head to their Patreon.
Editor’s note: Our Spirit preview this year is written by Jason Anderson, a long time ball knower on the DC soccer scene and scout for Crux Football. He recently started a new venture at Green Line Soccer, and we’d encourage you to go check it out.
After cratering in the final couple of months of the 2023 season, the Washington Spirit have been on a particularly wild ride. Jona Giráldez was incoming, arrived, and left; Adrián González has been in place the whole time, albeit alternating between interim head coach, assistant coach, and now straight-up head coach.
In the meantime the Spirit won a Challenge Cup, finished in second in the NWSL Shield race twice, lost two NWSL finals, survived a season-long availability crunch that saw over 200 player-games missed in 2025, and figured out how to operate without multiple presumptive starters up top, at the 10, in the heart of the midfield, and at fullback. This team has been in flux for so long, and deserves their flowers for contending amid all the chaos, and we haven’t even mentioned Trinity Rodman yet.
2026 is supposed to be different. The injury clouds have largely cleared, and González is settled into a role he seems more than capable of thriving in. The front office staff has sharpened up with the addition of Haley Carter (who between Rodman’s contract, a nearly seven-figure transfer for Claudia Martínez, and Croix Bethune’s shock trade request has been busy) as CSO, and a deep squad of players competing for time are approaching their prime years.
With Michele Kang aiming for the stars, the demand for trophies has always been present. For the first time since the start of Mark Parsons’ return to the club in 2023, the feeling that the Spirit are — for better and for worse — intertwined with chaos seems to be shifting. A more mature, stable side should in theory be ready to take the next step, but that just means the pressure is truly on for Washington to win the big one.
Catch me or I go Houdini
The Spirit were a thrilling team to watch in 2025. Even with a list of unavailable players that nearly always ran between eight and 11 names long, they showed serious resilience and skill, conjuring up late game-changing results at an almost comical rate. Huge names like Bethune, Ashley Hatch, Hal Hershfelt, Casey Krueger, Trinity Rodman, and Andi Sullivan all missed big chunks of the season, yet Washington always seemed to have the critical goal hidden up their sleeves.
The Spirit scored five result-changing goals after the 83rd minute, and four in second-half stoppage time. That shifted three games from draws to wins, and two more from losses to draws, generating eight points. That’s the gap between the Spirit in second place and NJ/NY Gotham FC sweating it out on Decision Day in eighth place.
There’s something exhilarating about living life on the edge, and on some level the Spirit have become a team that needs to be on a knife’s edge to produce their best moments. The 2021 championship-winning season came with the club at the center of the NWSL abuse scandal, with Kang’s battle for ownership of the club and some less-discussed humiliations (the games forfeited over Covid-19 rule violations, for example, left scars). On some level, Washington’s ability to transcend difficulties can be their best strength.
However, if you take a look at that rolling NPxGD graph above, you’ll sense the problem: you don’t always succeed when you’re right on the edge of spectacular success and crushing defeat. Every great team has a number of tight one goal wins they squeak out, and it’s often said the best teams know how to win ugly. But there’s a reason goal difference and expected goal difference are often more predictive than the table. To paraphrase a great post, game states are real, and strong, but for the Spirit they haven’t exactly been a friend.
Washington’s more experienced players mentioned this numerous times throughout the season, and González joked about wanting “a normal game” after yet another show-stopping win. This is a process-oriented team, and they know the thrill ride has been an issue. That thinking has carried over, with Esme Morgan bringing it up when asked at the club’s media day.
“I think sometimes when you look around the changing room and see how much talent we have, it's easy to not—complacency is the wrong word, but I think sometimes we can have too much belief that we have the ability to win games, and don't always put in the ground steps to do that and sort of win the battle first,” the England defender told Green Line Soccer.
If you’re close to the Spirit, how you feel about Washington’s 2025 is probably wrapped up in the stunning late twists, and not in how often they had to pull a rabbit out of their Shockwave yellow hats to steal a result. There’s confirmation bias at play in how this team is perceived.
Let’s be blunt: the Spirit were shut out six times in six matches by the Kansas City Current and NJ/NY Gotham FC last year. Granted, Gotham rode a bit of luck to secure a couple of those clean sheets (a 0-0 regular-season draw that saw the eventual champs play 10v11 for an hour, and a CONCACAF W Champions Cup stalemate played at Subaru Park), but we’re talking about a little luck, and only in those two games. Washington’s xGD split across four regular-season contests and the NWSL final against KC and the Bats was -3.09, and they were held to 1.02 xG or lower four times.
Ultimately the Spirit weren’t able to create chance volume or chance quality in those games, and their supply of 30-yard bangers, diving headers, heel flicks, and thunderous last-gasp volleys was tapped out. That’s not fate being cruel, but rather a bit of regression to the mean arriving when they could least afford it. If this is a championship-winning season, that’s going to have to change.
Levitating
Spirit fans, amidst worries over Rodman’s future and new fretting over Bethune’s departure, have been open about wanting the club to sign a new, proven striker (particularly Catarina Macario). Even with Rodman’s long-term contract, Bethune’s departure left the team down a star. It’s not a fan’s job to worry about making the cap work, and who doesn’t want to add another striker, right?
Here’s the thing though: Washington already has Gift Monday at home.
The list of players above the Nigeria striker in the 2025 G+ table is two names long, and those names are reigning two time MVP, Temwa Chawinga, and perhaps the best striker in the world, Barbra Banda. Monday was in the 99th percentile for receiving G+, the 96th for In Box Receiving, and the result is a shot chart like an analyst’s Mona Lisa.
Sofia Cantore won adulation for scoring wonder goals, but Monday emerged as the starter down the stretch because she escapes her marker, runs to the area where goals are scored, and gets the ball over the line. On a team with Rodman, Rosemonde Kouassi, and Leicy Santos dominating the ball, what you need out of your 9 is to do exactly what Monday does.
Speaking of Rodman and Kouassi, we’re looking at a Spirit front three that finished third, fourth, and 12th in the overall G+ table for the entire league last year.
If they’re largely healthy — a notable “if,” as Monday was the only one of the trio to play more than 1,400 minutes in 2025 — Washington’s attack should be something special. There are questions about depth once you get past Cantore and Martínez (at least until Ashley Hatch returns), but the tools are in place to solve the best defenses across the league.
The midfield will be solidified by Andi Sullivan’s incoming return to full fitness, with Mexico captain Rebeca Bernal likely to see action alongside Hal Hershfelt in the season’s early weeks. At the back, Washington will call on NWSL Defender of the Year Tara Rudd to lead the way, but her center back partner Esme Morgan was the Spirit’s best defender from a Goals Added perspective by some distance.
The England defender’s 1.13 G+ was fourth among center backs, and her 0.59 Passing G+ in 2025 was 14th league-wide. Ghe only center backs to place higher were Sam Staab and Kaleigh Kurtz, two standard-bearers in the category. Take a look at Morgan’s passing sonar in the attacking third:
We talked about how Rodman and Kouassi are so difficult to defend, and Morgan is regularly the main supply line. The Spirit midfield is good enough to force teams to commit resources to close them, frequently resulting in Morgan and Rudd being the release valves that keep the ball flowing into that attack.
Training season’s over
All that said, the Spirit have some issues that will be hard to address with their current roster build. Aubrey Kingsbury, an absolutely fundamental piece of the team’s emotional puzzle, will miss the season as she’s expecting her first child.
That leaves González looking at three goalkeepers who aren’t proven in NWSL play. Presumptive starter Sandy MacIver came in before the 2025 season after recovering from a torn ACL on international duty in April 2024, and made her only league appearance in a 4-3 loss to Angel City FC that I’m still not sure actually happened. The Scotland goalkeeper also started all four of Washington’s CONCACAF W Champions Cup contests, posting four shutouts while barely being tested. Still, that’s just five games in 23 months, and while the buzz around the Spirit is that the club believes the former Everton and Manchester City ‘keeper is ready for the call, there’s not enough evidence to make a data-based case one way or another. It was more than five years ago now, but the last season we have decent sample size for MacIver, 2021, she was the worst goalkeeper in the FAWSL conceding 13 goals more than expected per 100 shots faced. Ouch.
If MacIver falters, 27-year-old Kaylie Collins appears to be next up, though her last appearance in a competitive match anywhere came with the Western Sydney Wanderers in February 2024. The Spirit signed rookie Sara Wojdelko out of Vanderbilt, and got her a loan with DC Power FC of the USL Super League through the end of May. The arrangement lets her train with the Spirit several times a week, and the Illinois native recently made her pro debut in a 2-0 win over Brooklyn FC.
Further up the field, the issue is depth. Santos is the lone natural playmaker on the team, and any injury to the Colombia midfielder would require asking Cantore to give the 10 role a try, or to push Deb Abiodun into a more attacking role (as she has played at times with Pitt and Nigeria). Similarly, with Abiodun carrying a preseason knock, Sullivan’s match fitness an unknown, and Heather Stainbrook out on loan with Dallas Trinity, Washington will enter the early days of 2026 more or less needing Hershfelt and Bernal to play a full 90 minutes.
This carries on up top. Cantore would start on most NWSL teams, and huge new signing Claudia Martínez is considered one of the world’s best prospects, but the attacking cupboard looks pretty empty behind them. Kate Wiesner has played as a left winger at times, but we may see González deal with the issue by shifting into a 3-5-2 should the front line end up short even one starter.
Bang Bang
Ultimately where this team ends up is going to depend more on the real and necessary improvement in this group than whether they can pull the rabbit out of the hat again. The thing about needing a superstar to do something incredible at the last second is that one day, you reach into the hat and there’s no rabbit (or, even worse, you look up and Rose Lavelle is holding it instead). They’ll be good enough to be in the mix, but how healthy they can stay, and how well they manage the goalkeeping situation will ultimately decide whether the curtain drops and a trophy appears, or they’re left looking around hoping for more.
Down the shore everything's all right
An eighth-place regular season finish is nearly forgotten now as Gotham FC enters its fourth month as reigning NWSL champions. With two championships under its belt, the club is a far cry from the one that players would go overseas to avoid a decade ago, in large part due to the appointments of General Manager Yael Averbuch West in 2021 and head coach Juan Carlos Amorós ahead of the 2023 season.
The pair has gone on to win the club one continental and two domestic trophies (as well as an international bronze medal that they’d maybe prefer to forget about) in their more than three year stint together. Gotham were pegged as the second or third best team in the regular season by some of the publicly available models heading into 2025. They were not that. Behind this gilded exterior of trophies lies the fact that even in this best ever era for the club, they should have been better.
That 2025 season ended up seeing the Bats winalmost all there was to win, with two new shiny pieces of hardware added to the trophy cabinet, so in one very real sense the club delivered. But in another, equally real sense, Gotham snuck into the playoffs on a singular point, winning just one more game than they lost, and finished the season 20 points behind their 2024 campaign. Their previous title winning campaign had them cutting it even closer, with the Bats not securing their spot in the playoffs until after they had played their final match of the regular season. Being a playoff team, and a playoff winning team, is no small feat. But is it perhaps time for Gotham to take the next step and seek success in the playoffs and deserve it?
What would they need to improve?
Offense. Or more specifically, finishing.
Gotham’s defense in the Juan Carlos Amorós era has always been pretty solid. The Bats conceded the third-fewest goals in the league in 2023, fewest in 2024, and second-fewest in 2025. Of their eight losses in 2025, five were by a margin of one goal, so one opportunity would have been enough to rescue a point. And of their nine draws, five were scoreless. The lack of impetus to score even once cost them 10 points on 0-0’s alone! The Bats’ defense stayed one of the strongest in the league, but their weak attack was the missing piece that kept them from seeing sustained success in the regular season.
In 2025, Gotham FC had little issue getting the ball forward, finishing the season with fewer box touches than only Kansas City, Washington, and San Diego, all of whom scored more goals than the Bats. Their issue instead lied in turning those attacking chances into goals. With 0.01 less xG per shot than the league average, 2% fewer of their shots being high xG, and 7% fewer of their high xG chances turning into goals, the numbers confirm the observational evidence of the Bats getting shy around the goal.
This defense has already proven to be of a championship caliber. But wouldn’t it be great to be an offensive threat too?
Do they have the tools to improve?
There are two key differences between Gotham at the start of 2025 and Gotham at the start of 2026. First, they’re retaining pretty much their entire 2025 starting lineup, having lost just 153 of 3300 total playoff minutes (5%) in the form of Gabi Portilho.
Prior to the start of the 2025 season, Gotham had lost 528 of the 2310 minutes played in the 2024 playoffs (23%) in the form of Delanie Sheehan, Yazmeen Ryan, Lynn Biyendolo, Jenna Nighswonger, and some substitutes. The only player who saw 2025 playoff minutes who will not be joining Gotham for its 2026 campaign didn’t even play in the championship game, meaning every single Bat who touched the field in the last game of the 2025 season will be available to the team in 2026. It’s hard to definitively prescribe continuity as a cure for poor finishing, but better team chemistry from the get-go can only help, right?
The second key difference is that Gotham is working with slightly different personnel. Players not returning include forwards Ella Stevens, Gabi Portilho, and Geyse (five combined goals in 2025), plus midfielders Josefine Hasbo and Stella Nyamekye. On the other side of things, the club acquired midfielder Savannah McCaskill out of the San Diego Wave for a generous $175,000 in intraleague transfer funds. They also re-signed Katie Stengel and Kayla Duran to new, longer term deals and picked up some solid college players in Jordynn Dudley, Teagan Wy, Andrea Kitahata, and Talia Sommer. Paul Harvey’s College Dashboard has Gotham with by far the best college draft class, scooping up prospects ranked #3, #9, and #16 overall.
McCaskill is essentially taking the roster spot previously occupied by Hasbo, but with hopefully more minutes spent on the field after Gotham paid a hefty sum for her to come back to the East Coast.
On the one hand, Savannah McCaskill was a better passer in 2025, and she has experience playing both deeper as a defensive midfielder and in more advanced roles. Gotham seemingly have no backup six, pending Taryn Torres return from injury, and Gotham has run two advanced midfielders for some time now. Welcome aboard! McCaskill has also already found her way onto the scoresheet for Gotham, earning a goal at the FIFA Women’s Champions Cup in January.
On the other hand, Savannah McCaskill turns 30 in July, and pending any contract renegotiation, Gotham FC just paid $175,000 for only one year of her. And while she had a great year in 2025, she had kind of a stinker of a 2024 season. Swings and roundabouts.
Ultimately, it comes down to, in this mix of returning and new players, there is someone who can finish their chances?
A striker?
Esther González is an obvious answer here. The league’s second top scorer in 2025, who scored 37% of Gotham’s goals last season, will probably be able to produce for the Bats again this year. But if the Bats want to chase real success, relying on the Spaniard to perform like she did last year would be unwise. Although she hasn’t shown any significant signs of slowing down, Esther is newly 33 playing in a very physically demanding position. She also spent the bulk of pre-season away from the team on maternity leave. As talented as she is, she is also inconsistent–the Bats’ over-reliance on her was a big cause of goalscoring dry spells in May, August, and October of last year.
Jordynn Dudley is one of the most anticipated new arrivals to the league this season, as the 2025 Hermann Trophy finalist comes off of an 11-goal junior season. Dudley is especially renowned for ability to both create and finish chances, and although NCAA talent doesn’t always translate perfectly to the big leagues, I’m hopeful she can do something for a team that desperately needs both of those.
A winger?
Jaedyn Shaw was Gotham’s playoff hero in 2025, scoring go-ahead goals in the quarterfinal and semifinal games. She’s also found decent success with the national team lately, scoring two goals and assisting one in her five appearances since the NWSL season ended.
Andrea Kitahata is coming off of a massive senior season as captain of the Stanford Cardinal. With 17 goals and eight assists in the last year alone, as well as a recent call-up to the U-23 national team, she will hopefully be additive to this team’s attack.
Guro Reiten, Gotham’s latest acquisition, has had a wildly successful career at English powerhouse club Chelsea FC, averaging 11 goal contributions per season. Although she’s declined with some injury problems over the last two FAWSL seasons, she will at the very least be filling a big hole in Gotham’s roster as a true left-winger.
A midfielder?
Rose Lavelle was Gotham’s second-highest scorer last season despite missing the first half of it. The Bats are lucky enough to have her ready on day one this time around and hopefully she can produce like she always does. Lavelle ranked top of all center midfielders in NWSL in 2025 by goals added.
Jaelin Howell scored the third-most goals for the Bats in 2025, which may seem odd for a defensive midfielder until you remember that her first goal came after three months of launching balls into orbit from outside the box. I’m not exactly holding my breath for Howell the goal scorer to continue in 2026. But hey, I have no doubt she’ll be instrumental to the team.
Will they improve?
Will Gotham have an easier time scoring this season when they need to? Probably. They’ve got pretty much their entire lineup returning and a roster that includes a healthy Rose Lavelle, exciting young prospects in Jordynn Dudley and Andrea Kitahata, and a Jaedyn Shaw that has an increasing hunger for goals. If they don’t score enough, we can talk about it next year. On the other hand, if every player does eventually live up to their full potential this season, Gotham will surely have an embarrassment of riches. But isn’t that the goal of the Averbuch West-Amorós administration?