Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we're still loving life in America's hat, We're knee deep and poutine and Tim Horton's and the only Orange Monarchs in sight are the butterflies in our hotel garden. It's Thursday, June nineteenth, Happy June teenth. On today's show, we'll be chatting with women's soccer statistician and historian Jen Cooper and her Hoopstats contributor Richard Cohen about the behind the scenes work that goes into keeping track of records, rules, stats and salary
caps in the WNBA and NWSL. Plus a cap worthy claim to fame, expert tips on spread and sheets, and a record that might not ever need updating.
It's all coming up right after this joining us now.
She's a researcher for the World Cup in the Olympics and the official historian for the NWSL. She's the keeper of keeper Notes, the only place NWSL fans can find comprehensive statistics and records for every year of the league's history, and she runs wo so Nostalgia, a YouTube channel featuring a bunch of games from things like w USA and conk CAF. She can tell you how many NWSL keepers have recorded five hundred or more saves, It's five. The number of players who have scored four goals in a
single game, it's three. And how many regular season minutes Abbi dal Kemper has played in her NWSL career so far. It's thirteen, three hundred and thirty seven. It's Jen Cooper, Hi, Jen.
Hey, Sarah, I am so impressed with your stats. Well, I'm great with yours. You can take my job.
Also joining us, He's a contributor to Her Hoopstats and the Her Hoop Stats podcast. The man behind the now defunct website WNBA leen dot com, an independent site that covered women's professional basketball across the globe. He's a must follow on Blue Sky for all his live WNBA game commentary. Everything he says sounds smarter because of his accent. We go out now to London for Richard Cohen.
Hi, Richard, Hi, Sarah, And yeah, I wondered how you were going to follow that intro for Jane. I don't think I have quite quite the same level of qualifications, but I'll try to use the accent to make it sound better.
That's right.
Honestly, I would say that British people can account for so many shortcomings just by using that accent.
In America, we barely notice anything else.
You both have tremendous backgrounds, and you both offer a lot to a space that oftentimes is lacking in that statistics and record keeping in women's sports. So that's why you're here. I want to talk about that. Jen, Can you explain how you got interested in the.
Record keeping in stats side of soccer.
Well, I've always been kind of into archives. I think that's why I was a yearbook editor in high school and in college and just liked tracking things like looking at the history, and so that was already in me when you know, the soccer bug got me first in ninety four and then of course in ninety nine and
really exploded with the birth of the WSA. But it really wasn't until about ten years later when the US women were playing in Houston, you know where I'm based, and I was just curious about like, how big you know, so this was a good crowd, how big is this relative to previous games? And I started building this spreadsheet and I just kept going over the years because I was like, oh, how many times have they done this?
When this has happened. Oh well, I need to add a new column to this spreadsheet.
How about this, you know?
And then when the Dash came to town, I was lucky enough to be the analyst for the first three seasons when all the games were live and free on YouTube. And you know, since the league started really small and started very quickly, you know, didn't have a lot of resources, so there wasn't a lot of stats that the league could give give me in the in the play by
play announcer. But so I started tracking. I was like, well, I'll start you know, digging up you know, info for myself, and it just it kept going and going, and I had a lot of friends in Houston that said, you know, this is really interesting stuff. Why don't you put this
together in something for fans. And so in twenty sixteen, that's when I started publishing the Keeper Notes Almanac that had all the NWSL data, and I've just built it over the year, started actually printing it in twenty eighteen. First it was just PDF and it remains a labor of love. It is not something that you know.
Why but why in the labor of love, Because listen, I'm listening to you talk and I'm thinking it's short sighted of the NWSL when they started to not immediately have someone in that job with the belief that their league would last and it'd be worth keeping track of things. But knowing that they didn't do that, now they've got someone on the job who's offering it up, So why not hire you for that?
Well, they did, they did.
They had a stat service in the beginning, They didn't have the funds in the very beginning to have a lot of stuff that's available now. This stuff wasn't available ten years ago period in terms of the elaborate analytical stats and the coverage. So what I was doing. What I was doing was compiling. I don't want to diss the Andy Russell and say people they didn't do it. They were doing it. They just you know, that league
started so quickly, so suddenly. But what was great once twenty seventeen came around and you had A and E get into the league, that's when boom, like they hired a real stat service, right, and a much better website
and all these things. And we're seeing that progress now where I come in is really filling in those holes of those first three seasons that aren't on the same bandwidth, and it's very similar to all the tracking that I've done with US Soccer that there's really good records going back to the Olympics in ninety six, right, but that first decade, especially because it's basically pre Internet, right, you know, and we forget that before the ninety four World Cup,
US Soccer did not have money. So it's not like there's a lot of great men's records and no women's record. It's just the records are just really a spotty.
So it starts out as a passion project. And now it's sort of a job. You do the work independently, but you also work for several outlets.
So who do you work for now? And where have you worked in the past where you've sort of held this statistician role.
Let's see, I haven't had a statistician, a paid statistician role before this, but for a long time I was the like the main stat person for my alma mater for this annual event called beer Bikes, which you just you just have to google, but it's it's a relay erase where somebody chugs and then somebody rides a bike, and I was I was the keeper of all of you know, who won, what year, how many people had streaks, what, what were the records? And so I did that for
a long time. So my background is actually graphic design.
So you're not.
Working for Anny Networks now in that capacity, you're just doing your website stuff.
So I'm a contractor, uh for for Andy Broussel, you know, year round, mostly helping broadcast, right, so so that all the notes are ready, so all clubs if they have a question, especially the older clubs that have so much data, it's like, wait, is this the first time we've done this, Like no, this happened in twenty fourteen, you know. And I have a couple of great people helping me out, you know, on the stuff, because it's just going to get bigger and bigger, right, we got two more teams
coming next year. I also work on occasion as a contractor when there's a big event, right. So I went to France last summer to work the Olympics, following the US team around. Basically I was the stat person in the booth for John Champion and Julie Foudy as they were calling James right, you know. And I have to give props to Julie for dragging me along to France because the previous Olympics I was in the NBC headquarters in Connecticut while the Olympics are.
In Why am I not surprised that Foudy made sure to lift and take along with her, including to France.
Shee's like, next time you're coming with me?
Yeah, yeah, And then and then next month I will be in La supporting the studio show for Fox's covered of the Women's euro Right. So it's like it's that thing as we've all seen in many different kinds of jobs, like once you're known, then everybody is like, oh, well, we need to use.
So and so well, especially in a space where there aren't a ton of people doing it. And that's part of the issue across women's sports space, and Richard, her hoopstats is filling a hole in the women's basketball space. That's very similar. I remember distinctly a piece from Sue Bird in the Player's Tribune begging for more advanced statistics for the WNBA so that we could have debates about who's the best at corner threes and things like that,
and her Hoopstats offers a lot. So can you explain for those who aren't familiar what the site is and the work that you do for them.
Well, the site is sort of an effort to make advanced stats available about the women's game that weren't really
there until we started up in twenty seventeen. I wasn't there in twenty seventeen, but when Aaron Buzzilai, our founder and who still runs the place, started the website because he used to work it as the director of analytics for the seventy six ers in Philadelphia and before that with the Grizzlies, and a friend of his came to him and said the friend was working with Tennessee with the Lady Vols and said, I'm used to having all of these statistics at my fingertips from the men's game.
Is there anywhere that does this for the women? And Aaron looked around and said, no, there isn't and that led to him essentially making up her hoopstats. And Yeah, when I was talking to him in preparation for this recording, he mentioned that same bird article as something that he went back to and was surprised no one had done anything in response to that. Even when she said that, there was very little reaction to it. So, yeah, her Hoopstats was sort of to try and create something like
a sports basketball reference for the women's game. And yeah, it's been a steadily growing effort since then. It sort of started as a as just a stat site and a social media presence, and then since then, people like me you've come along and it's added articles, podcasts, and a lot of extra stuff, all of our work on the CBA and the salary cap, information that you can't get anywhere else except from the people that copy us.
Not exactly people like you, though, because Richard, I want to know how someone like you gets into the WNBA from across the pond.
Yeah, I get that question quite a lot, as you might imagine, and I don't have a great answer for it. The tournament I mentioned is this thing we used to have over here because basketball isn't big in the UK, but there used to be a tournament called the WYICB which was held over New Years each each year, and they played men's basketball, women's basketball, juniors, and wheelchair basketball all in the same tournament, all on the same court, one after the other, going from one to the other.
And I think that was part of sort of ingraining in me that it was all the same that like one wasn't the proper version of the sport, and one was this sort of other that you didn't have to pay attention to. So that meant when the WNBA started up in the late nineties, I was interested and yeah started following it. Then there was a gap there because we were sort of pre streaming, so it was very difficult to follow given that I wasn't in the US right.
But once that advanced a bit and it was actually possible to follow the game and get back I got back into it sort of in the mid two thousands, and Yeah. From there it just sort of developed from a fandom into sort of posting on forums and things like that, and then eventually sort of thinking, I'm posting these massive comments on forums, I might as well turn them into articles.
Yeah, or get paid for it. Do this for my job.
Well, getting paid for It's still kind of difficult. A lot of people trying to cover women's basketball have found it's hot, still hard to make it your primary job.
Yeah, I love that.
What's the biggest challenge you've encountered, gen when it comes to trying to stat keep and track in soccer.
Really the biggest challenge is connecting the older stats to the newer stats. Right, so we have data from twenty sixteen onwards. That's that's great, right. Once once Sandy Bissel made the jump with that with A and E coming in as a twenty five percent investor, of course that's all changed out, but that that kind of made this big leap into Okay, we have a real live stat service and we're going back and analyzing these things like like,
that was a huge step. But to connect to those first three seasons twenty thirteen to fifteen has been problematic, partly because those are the games where, especially that first season, you know, you may only have four cameras some of those some of those games just didn't.
It just had issues, Right, there's a whole assist that just comes from offscreen, like who was it?
God knows?
Yeah, and so like we need to add all that data to the main database. But there's going to be data that we cannot get from those those games, right, just because you're you're not going to be able to.
See Yeah, that makes sense.
Now, thankfully, almost every one of those games still exists in their entirety on YouTube. I thought that was one of the most brilliant decisions the NWSL made early on was all right, we don't have a TV deal. Games are all free live on YouTube worldwide. You know that that that was brilliant. But I think it's that connecting that final piece to our current data that's the last
thing that that that's going to be a hiccup. Right, Once we have that, it'll be much easier for any of the older clubs to be able to do just a you know, easy query of who has the most minutes for this club. You're right, because if you if you have one of the older clubs, they've got a they've got.
To two distincts data. Yeah, Richard, what about you?
Biggest challenge when it comes to stack keeping or keeping track of things in the W.
I think the stat keeping has gotten relatively straightforward, possibly partly because basketball is more geared towards keeping stats in the first place. That sort of soccer becoming a stat based sport is something that's fairly new, even in like
major men's leagues, never mind on the women's side. But sort of the major challenges are more sort of beyond the stats, sort of getting people who actually talk to us talk to us about sort of information and sources about rules and things like that, and getting the league to tell anyone anything. Basically always been very very secretive about everything, which is why half of my job, well not really my job, half of what I end up doing at the moment is answering questions on social media
when people say is this legal? What's going to happen next? Because no one at the league bothers to tell anybody anything.
So well, that brings me to my next question.
Actually, because technically WNBA salaries are private, so whenever a team signs a player, there's usually a line at the bottom of the press release that says, per team policy, terms of the deal, we're not disclosed. But then if you go log in her hoopstats just a few minutes later, you can find the.
Details of the deal that were not disclosed.
They have been disclosed, and they're beautifully laid out charts detailing how much each player on each team is making and how long their contract is for.
And that's really helpful for us.
Can you explain how this technically private information becomes public on her hoopstats?
I mean, I would my basic got so that would be the same way that they become public in the NFL or the NBA or Major League Baseball or anything like that. You talk to people, you find sources, and
you try to get the information out there. Fortunately, when you spend as long around the league as I have and you try to say intelligent things, this is a small enough community that eventually people sort of gain some confidence in you and are willing to talk to you, because, yeah, this is a small league and a small groups where everyone kind of talks to each other. Even though it's
obviously growing. I mean, we've seen a massive explosion in fan interest the last few years, but in terms of people who are sort of embedded within the league, this is still quite a tight group of people that know each other a lot and talk to each other. So, yeah, we source it and then we try and put it together. Again, you need to know the rules as well, because different contracts are different numbers for all sorts of weird CBA reasons.
So yeah, that's part of why it is better than anyone who's copied us, because we actually know the rules that are being followed.
Yeah, I mean, I think also the idea that the WNBA is better off being so withholding is very antiquated. There are so many discussions that fans want to have about leagues, they want to play GM They want to know how much each player is making so that they can argue whether should.
Be traded or kept or moved, or if they're pulling their weight.
And I think we're at the point now where the WNBA has to address and understand that the more information that's out there, the more conversations and debates and conflicts can be discussed in a way that's really beneficial to making the sport feel as valuable as some of the longer, more storied brands. NWSL player salaries also are not public.
There is an internal database that players have access to which is meant to help with contract negotiations, but no one has yet made a move to make that info public like it is on her hoopstats for the WNBA. Do you think that NWSL could benefit from more transparency on player salaries in the same way.
I definitely think it could benefit. But of course, you know, the obstacle is the end of cell Players Association would have to agree to make those public. Right, just just the fact that the players can now see internally what other players are making that's fairly recent, right, you know, it's I always feel like there's this push and pull between we want these sports. I'm sure Richard feels the
same way about Debba. We want these sports that we love and cover to be considered the same way every other men's sport is out there, which comes with, well, you have the eyes looking at your salary and you have people discussing every day that you had a good performance or a bad performance, or you should be trade or stuff like that. But you know, I've also seen,
you know, a lot of discussion from fans. It's like, well, I don't you know, I don't think we need to do that, you know, and also the players like I don't want that, right. So it's like I I want the information, right, I want this to be in our daily breath of Yeah they had a great game, No, that was horrible because of the you know, these data points and oh that player is overpaid or she needs to be paid more, she needs to be traded.
Right.
That's how sports.
Gets into you day in day out. That's how that's why there's so many talking head shows for men's football, basketball, stuff like that. The more information you have, the more discussion, the more discussion there is, period.
Yeah, yeah, you know, a lot of your work is accessible and free on your site, and then your stat almanacs are available for purchase. But because it's your work and not the league's work, most historical NWSL stats are not able to be googled. For example, if I were to google most NWSL career goals, something the folks who work on this podcast have done on more than one occasion. Looking for that, we discovered that the top result is an NWSL news entry from twenty seventeen, so not exactly
the up to date info that we're looking for. There, have you ever had conversations with the league about selling your work to them and making it a part of the official NWSL website, therefore a part of more coveraging conversation about the league therefore more likely to pop up in SEO, so that when we search that it comes to the top.
Well, I hadn't thought about it from the SEO angle, But they have all, you know, all all my data. They have, you know, everything that I create for them as a contractors is available to them. And I have to give their social media department a huge shout out for the work they don't in the last year and have to really highlight anytime something big happens. Right, Oh
my god, that was lynn Lynn Biendelo's you know, seventy ago. Yeah, you know, it's like this was you know, this is the first time this has happened, this is the youngest.
Well, if they're going to post it on social, why not have a part of their website that makes it all easy to find.
I think that's the next step.
Right.
We've seen a lot of hiring over the last year, and this league is growing so fast. I feel like sometimes it can't keep up with it keep up with itself, right, But that's that's what I would love to see, is that for any media outlet that they can find the answers they need, you know, and anything the league wants
in that I'm you know, happy to help with. But you know, when we think of all the challenges they've been dealing with, you know, with var and all kinds of other issues, Like I understand, you know, it's frustrating for me, but I understand how this always gets moved down in pity.
It's true, Right, they've got a lot on their plate from trying to professionalize an update based on all the new resources, we.
Got to take a quick Break more with Jen and Richard right after this.
You know, Richard, we've been talking on our show about the different WNBA contracts, and one of the reasons it's hard to sometimes have discussions is because we don't really understand them. Right, there's a guaranteed contract, there's a hardship contract, there's a rest of season hardship. There's a rest of
season contract that's not a hardship contract. Can you just give us briefly a summation of the different ways that a player can be signed and is there a limit on how many have to be or can be guaranteed? Why is there a rest of season and then a rest of season hardship?
Like, how does that work?
Right? Rosters have to be eleven or twelve players base rosters only a maximum of six of those per team can be protected.
Contracts that means guaranteed.
Which means guaranteed.
Yes, no matter what injury wave cut decides to fly after Hawaii.
For a nooner with someone, they're still going.
To get paid, barring anything in their contract about behavior.
And unless they get hurt overseas, which is obviously a thing in WNBA because people sometimes play in other leagues in the WNBA off season. The rest of season contract confuses people because they then they hear that and they think, well, the player is going to be there the rest of
the season. Then understandably given the terminology, but especially with a hardship all that means practically is that the contract is until the end of the season, but when a player returns, because hardship's are signed when players get hurt, so you get those when players are out. When the main roster player returns, the hardship player has to be released, so it's only a rest of season contract if that injured player were to stay injured all season.
And is there a difference between a regular hardship contract and a rest of season hardship contract.
Every hardship contract signed in the first half of the season will be a rest of season contract. Every hardship contract signed in the second half of the season will be a seven day contract until because there are two rules that come into conflict, you signed three consecutive seven day contracts with the same team, then you can sign a rest of season hardship contract after that. Yeah, you can see why the fans get confused and why teams don't bother to explain this stuff themselves.
I was going to say, because sometimes it feels like maybe we're looking at the same thing. It's just some team rights has signed a rest of season contract and some team just sigence has signed a hardship contract.
And sometimes they're right, completely nonsense in their press releases as well. In Indiana recently had to release a player and wrote that she'd been waived in their press release, wrote twice that she had been And you don't waive hardship contracts. You release the player because they don't go through waivers, so it's different terminology. So again, the teams don't always understand this stuff either, or certainly their PR departments don't. So yeah, that creates confusion.
Well, this is why we need you, Richard. I'm not going to remember and memorize any of that. I'm just going to call you next time I need to know what again out.
Oh, I don't expect anyone to.
Yeah, Jenna, I loved learning that you actually helped correct the number of caps for none other than world record holder for number of caps US women's national team legend, Christine Lilly. Can you tell us about that? How do you find mysterious uncapped caps.
Well, first you have to be a really big nerd. Then you have to have collected many many US Soccer media guides, all right, And so I was gonna do some trivia. I love to do trivia, you know, through social media. And the US women were playing in Arizona. So I was like, okay, I know they've played there three times. Maybe I'll do something about that. But I've learned working in TV. It's like, but let's always check the media guide. Don't just sure it's in here, but
let's check the media guide. So I look at the media guide and they have it all separated by state, and I was like, wait, there's these games in nineteen ninety five. I don't have these in my huge, ridiculously nerdy spreadsheet. So then I start flipping through the whole thing.
I can't find those nineteen ninety five Arizona games anywhere else in the book, right, So then I start checking against Christine's game by game thing, and I'm like, wait, this is off, Like what if she played in those games?
And so I reached out to US Soccer and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we have we have, you know, the game reports for those games and so when the next media guide came out, her numbers had adjusted, and I was like, oh my god, like I had just kind of talked to it and forgotten about it, and then when it the next one came out, I was like, ooh, I was.
Like, it changed. It changed. You know, that's wild. That's not just any cap number.
That is a record that may never be broken, or at the very least should be broken correctly if it is, which now will it?
And it took it took like a couple of years for it to cycle through the internet for everything to get threety four. And I was so thrilled that when when I met Christine Lilly for the first time, the person who introduced me, I said, will you please tell her that I changed her cap record?
I love.
That's wonderful.
By the way, Jenna have to ask, have you and my producer Alex ever been in the same room at the same time, Because the more you talk about your spreadsheets and your trivia nights and your nerdiness, the more I think that you and Alex may be separated at birth or potentially the same person.
We have not been in the same room at the same time, but we have texted a lot about very nerdy stat things.
Okay, okay, good. You guys should have a spreadsheet off sometime, Richard.
I recently discovered your blue Sky content, and I love it in particular because your eye for coverage differs from a lot of other folks, not just fans, but media as well, including calling out coverage that doesn't feel up to the professional standards that it should, for instance, just a.
Few days as I used to. So I like it. Go ahead, I'm familiar for it. No, you were watching a sky Sun game and you blue skiede. Quote.
You put the details of the Maybrey trade on the screen and don't even mention how vastly important the pick swap at the bottom of the list could be. If an NBA broadcasted that didn't mention it might move a team from number fifteen to number one in the upcoming draft, they'd be laughed at end quote.
Yeah, So I wonder if you could.
Talk about the ways that you think coverage isn't up to snuff for the most sophisticated viewers and what we lose in that, Because, to be honest with you, this is my job, and that's one of my teams and I hadn't really processed that part of that pick swap because it isn't talked about and it isn't written about the same way it might be in immen's league.
Yeah, I do think there are gaps in the coverage. I mean, obviously we do, or we probably wouldn't exist.
But the broadcasting of the WNBA has absolutely improved. I give all of the various channels involved and the people involved credit for that, but we do still have people who don't necessarily watch that many games apart from the ones that they're working, and don't necessarily aren't as embedded within thinking about the league and watching the league and covering the league as you kind of expect an NBA
or an NFL broadcaster to be. You sort of think if you hear, you know, Richard Jefferson or Doris Burke doing the NBA, you kind of expect that if someone asked them about a game that was on the previous night, they'd have watched it, they'd have been at home watching it, or they at the very least watch highlights of this game. You don't always get that feeling with some of the people who work on WNBA games. It's more that they've done their research, they've invariably talked to the coaches and
things like that. They know they're prepared. They're all prepared, but they're not as obsessive about the league as you sort of expect the men's league broadcasters to.
Be or potentially have multiple other jobs. Absolutely are the rules in order to kind of.
Yeah, it's not a dedicated job because like lots of the writers, Yeah, it's hard to make them make money and make this your sole career covering a WNBA, which you know, we all hope the leagues, these women's leagues are going to get bigger and bigger, and then people that will be their only coverage, that will be their focus.
Well, and I think also it's the way you watch and what matters to you, which is why it's so necessary to have folks like you two, because it's not the way my brain works and watches, but it makes the experience more interesting for me when folks like you offer things up because of the way you watch. And Jen, I wonder if you can still ever watch a game for fun or do you always find that your critical eye for content and stats is tracking things.
I think I gave up watching games for fun maybe twenty years ago. No, no, no, no, but well, okay, let me put it this way. Gave up watching for from a fan's eye twenty years ago because for me, what I'm doing it the way I consume these games, it is fun for me. It is fun for me to have my laptop with me anytime I'm watching a game. A lot of the times I am, you know, running a live Slack channel with the talent and producers and graphics at the time. Sometimes I'm not. It depends, you know,
on the game, So my engagement level varies. But there's no way I can just watch a game and not have some critical thoughts. Even watching the US Women's game, I'm like, why are they choosing those colors for the score?
Bug?
What are they thinking?
Right?
Like, it's down to every detail.
I was just going to say that I watched some of the games Gens covering as a fan. This is a weird crossover. I'm going to be in Switzerland for the Women's Euros that you're going to be covering from the Studio's a little dot in the in the crowd at the end. So yeah, I still get to watch the soccer as a fan. But yeah, I know the feeling in terms of yeah, I don't. I don't have a WNBA team and haven't for a long time, which yeah, does mean I can be neutral about it all.
Yeah, until they expand to Europe, it's going to make for some tough travel.
I've been calling for a London team for a long time now. I'm not not expecting it anytime soon.
I will say that, Richard, I have to ask you just did or her Hoop Stats podcast about EuroBasket, which is something that is huge where you are and mostly just a nuisance to us because players leave our w teams to go play in it. Can you give us the top two reasons we should listen to that podcast episode and we should be excited about watching EuroBasket.
I mean the top two reasons are the people that did it with me, which are Alfred Currier and Robert Mummery, who both know these teams and players inside out and gave great coverage of what to expect and what to see in those games. It's a major tournament, a major international tournament that these players care about a lot, and that will be high level basketball with potential upsets because Eurobusque involves a lot of teams that are relatively close
to each other in terms of talent level. In that France, Spain, Belgium will go in as favorites, but the other teams are capable of beating them. It's close enough that you know it's it's not an America up where if the US sent a full squad they would win most games by thirty forty points. We're talking about.
Correct me if I'm wrong, But France is actually missing a lot of players who decided to stay in the w and not travel over, so they won't have quite the advantage we expected even a month or so ago.
Absolutely, Marine Johannes, Gabby Williams, Carla Lake, Dominique Malongo, who's obviously gotten.
A lot of pretty big names.
Yeah, and France of probably still the favorites, which shows you how much talent is coming out of France in the basketball.
Well, they sure gave the US run for their money at the Olympics, so I think we finally woke up to that. All right, last question for both of you, I'm putting you on the spot, but is there a specific statistic in your sport that you have your eye on that you think someone is about to break, or a team is likely to up end, or a long standing stat that is finally ready and ripe to be broken.
Well, for NWSL, we have now, as of after the other night's Kansas City game, we now have four players tied for thirty one career assists, and assists don't happen as much as goals, right, you know, So it's like, please, will somebody just take this record and run?
Yeah?
So it's Lynn, it's Sophia Huerta, it's the retired Jess McDonald, and now Vanessa di Bernardo is tied. And I've had this queued up, you know, in our you know, milestones to watch for months.
Now it's like it's going to take it.
Somebody take it and run with it.
Everyone stops scoring solo goals using this tricks.
Yes, just take an assist.
And bury it from one of those four peoples, please, Richard, how about you?
Well, I'm going to twist your question a little bit and say that welcome to We're probably less than a year away of somebody shattering the highest salary that we've recorded since we've been doing this. Because we have a collective bargaining agreement negotiation going on at the moment because the leap, the players Association opted out of the current one, which means the current CBA expires after the season that is being played at the moment, so they need to
get a new one done before next season. We're all crossing our fingers that that happens without a strike, without a lockout, because that's not going to be good for anyone. And yeah, once it does, players could be earning maybe a million dollars a year. The people have certainly thrown that out as sort of, yeah, add a zero one to what we're seeing at the moment, So it'd be.
Very different, very different, I would imagine, And I don't know if there's a record of this that this season has the highest number and percentage of players with contracts ending in the exact same year.
Oh yes, we have about because.
Almost every roster, everybody's contract is done this season, so they could take advantage of that CBA yep.
Apart from the players that are on rookie scale contracts, which are three years plus one, virtually everyone else has said I'm not signing beyond twenty twenty five.
Right, So unless the league started with everybody on a one year deal or a three year deal or something like that. Unless the very beginning of the w involved everyone signing the same length of contract, I would guess that this would be a statistical anomaly in that category.
It's going to create a ridiculous free agency next year, assuming we actually get a CBA to allow us to have it. Yeah, because anyone can sign anyone.
And we here at this show are very excited about that. Richard, Jen, this was so fun. I learned a ton. Thanks so much for the time, Thank you, Thanks, thanks again to Jen and Richard for taking the time. We got to take another break when we come back. What makes a
record untouchable? Welcome back, Slay says, you heard Jen's story about getting Christine Lily's cap world record changed from three point fifty two to three fifty four international appearances after Jen stumbled upon two previously unrecorded games from nineteen ninety five. Well that got us thinking, will any other soccer player of any gender ever come close to Lily's record? The
current men's record holder isn't even close. Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo is the only man ever to reach two hundred international appearances, and he's currently at two hundred and twenty one. Total caps worth noting at forty years old, his biological footy clock is ticking, so perhaps another woman well. Canadian star Christine Sinclair, who retired last year, has the second most
caps ever at three hundred thirty one. As for the most capped active player, that honor belongs to thirty five year old Dutch player Sharita Spitza, who has logged two hundred and forty three appearances for the Netherlands since two
thousand and six. Meantime, on the US national team, thirty one year old Lindsay Heaps formerly Iran, has the most caps of any US active player, one sixty seven, meaning she's still less than halfway to Lily's record of three point fifty four, and there's reason to believe that Lily's record may never be broken. First, and foremost, her longevity
is legendary. She played for the US women's national team for twenty three years, starting at the age of sixteen, but also the world of women's soccer has fundamentally changed in Lily's playing days. The national team was essentially the only stable postgrad opportunity. In fact, a few years after graduating from unc Lily played for the Washington Wart Hogs of the now defunct Continental Indoor Soccer League, a men's league.
She was the only woman at the time.
Lily went on to play in the semi pro USLW League, then the professional WUSA and w the two women's pro leagues that preceded the NWSL. Lilly also spent some time playing at clubs in Europe. Altogether, from ninety four to twenty eleven, seventeen years of club ball, she played in just one hundred eight games. For comparison, mel Swanson reached one hundred five games in just seven seasons so far
with the NWSL. These days, with the NWSL, the English Women's Super League and other international leagues thriving, plus in season tournaments and interleague cups being added every year, top players are less reliant on their national team for opportunities to play, meaning the number of international games scheduled each year has gradually declined and players have more games to manage than ever before, and that balance can be seen
in decisions made by the coaching staff. For example, current US women's national team boss Emma Hayes recently announced that she's essentially giving all Europe based US national team players a quote much needed break this summer and she'll rely on players in the NWSL instead. Now, remember the NWSL in European leagues follow opposite schedules, with the NWSL breaking in the winter and the European leagues breaking in the summer.
Well, what does that mean for someone like Lindsay Heaps. Let's take a look at what she's been up to since the twenty twenty three World Cup.
Heeps played for the US in the twenty three World Cup in Australia and New Zealand from mid July to mid August of twenty twenty three. Then she suited up for her club side oll Lyon for a friendly in late August before their Division Ie Feminine season began in September. Heeps played that season while her club Can currently competed in Coope.
De France and UEFA Champions League matches.
Leon's campaign ended in May twenty twenty four with another championship trophy, and from there Heaps was called into the US women's national team training camp in June. She played Olympic tune up friendly state side in July, then headed back to France for the Paris Olympics from late July to mid August.
Twenty twenty four.
Then it was back to France for the twenty twenty four to twenty five Leon season, and back to the US where the she believes cup, and on and on and on it goes. That's a lot of mileage to put on the body. In an interview with ESPN's Jeff Kasoof, Emma Hayes said the only Europe based player she expects to call it for the team's pair of friendlies against Ireland in late June and their match against Canada in early July is defender Nami Germa, who currently plays for
Chelsea and returned from injury earlier this month. Hayes told ESPN the decision to arrest players was made using input from performance and medical staff, and included analysis of the number of minutes players have logged in recent years. We'll link to Kasoof's full interview with Hayes in the show notes. All that to say, Christine Lily's record feels pretty untouchable.
But if modern medicine keeps improving, maybe current US women's national team teenage phenom Lily Johannes will play into her sixties. Never say never. We love that you listen in slices but we want you to get in the game every day too, so here's our good game play of the day. Check out the incredible resources that Jen and Richard have poured their hearts into. We've linked to both keeper notes
and her hoopstats in the show notes. And if you're not familiar with the history of June teenth, honored today by doing some reading, put some links in our show notes to great stories by Henry Lewis Gates Junior and Derek Bryceon Taylor. We always love to hear from you, so hit us up on email. Good game at Wondermedia neetwork dot com. We'll leave us a voicemail at eight seven two two o four fifty seventy and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review.
It's easy.
Watch briefly forgetting You reside in a clown Country, rating ten out of ten seconds of ignorant bliss review. Here's my exchange with a Canadian barista Me Starbucks US app still work here, Barista?
Yeah? Where are you visiting from?
Me?
Chicago? Have you been Barista?
No?
Not yet me. Oh, you have to come.
It's the best actually, often said to be similar to Toronto Barista.
Yeah. Maybe in a few years.
Me, Oh yeah, shit, definitely don't come now and ignorant bliss bubble burst. Honestly, I'm just grateful I'm still capable of forgetting even moment harrily about the whrrors of the current time, and that I don't have to be nervous when I head back through immigration in the US later tonight. I know that's a privilege not everyone has. Now it's your turn, rate and review. Thanks for listening, See you tomorrow. Good game, Jen, Good game, Richard, you being embarrassed of
where I'm from. Good Game with Sarah Spain is an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You could find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Production by Wonder Media Network, our producers are Alex Azzie and Misha Jones. Our executive producers are Christina Everett, Jesse Katz, Jenny Kaplan, and Emily Rudder. Our editors are Emily Rutter, Britney Martinez,
Grace Lynch, and Gianna Palmer. Our associate producer is Lucy Jones and I'm your host Sarah Spain.