As a player, Ali Krieger went into NWSL Decision Day focused on one result. She was Gotham FC’s captain in 2023, the first time the league played all of the final games of the regular season simultaneously. The job, she remembers, was to not worry about the other games going on.
Three years later, Krieger spent Decision Day with eyes on not one game but eight. For the first time, all of the final games of the NWSL season were aired by the same network. Krieger, now a lead analyst for ESPN, and host Kelsey Riggs Cuff anchored the coverage from headquarters in Bristol with a show that was part whiparound, part watchalong, and ultimately wholly new for the 14-year-old league.
There was no shortage of storylines. With 16 teams in action, the slate of simultaneous kickoffs was the largest in the league’s history. San Diego and Gotham were fighting for the Shield; four teams were jousting for home-field advantage; three were vying for the final playoff spots.
The league simulated Sunday’s games 50,000 times and found more than 200 possibilities for playoff brackets, with 6,561 ways the results could go. How do you prepare for the way that the story does spin? The network deployed 60-plus cameras and more than 150 staffers around the United States, plus about 20 in Bristol.
Cuff and Krieger met with researchers, rewatched games and assembled a 12-page Google Doc of notes. You lean into the breaking news feel of it,” Cuff said in the green room, about an hour before the games began. It wasn’t ESPN’s first time producing a whiparound-style soccer studio show – the network has done so for the Bundesliga and US Open Cup – but it was the first for the NWSL.
A Tennessee-Missouri five-setter meant the start of the Gotham match was pushed to the ESPN2 slot, and the studio show did not actually begin until about 25 minutes into the games. By the time it kicked into gear, there was plenty to talk about. San Diego, in second place and facing Bay FC in San Jose, scored the day’s first goal in the ninth minute; Gotham scored in their own game seconds later.
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