The NWSL Championship could not have worked out better for the league. The best team in the league, the Orlando Pride, beat the Washington Spirit, 1-0, in front of a sell-out crowd. Marta, the best women’s player in history, won her first NWSL title while her mother was in attendance for the first time. Rookie sensation and MVP candidate Barbra Banda scored the game’s decisive goal. It was a good day for the NWSL, and women’s soccer, but it did not remove the season’s blemishes. None are bigger than the pending lawsuit against the San Diego Wave and the league itself, which alleges multiple forms of discrimination and negligence.
On July 3, a former Wave employee named Brittany Alvarado went public with a statement on Twitter. She accused team president Jill Ellis and the Wave of fostering an abusive environment, and the NWSL of improperly addressing the abusive leadership under Ellis. The Wave went on the attack, denying wrongdoing and threatening legal action. A week later, Ellis made good on the threat, and sued Alvarado for defamation.
In October, Alvarado and four other plaintiffs sued the Wave and the NWSL. The 45-page legal filing makes alarming allegations, including an explicit description of sexual assault of a plaintiff by a Wave employee. Ellis is not a defendant in the lawsuit, but her name comes up several times, where she is accused of making inappropriate sexual remarks during team functions, and humiliating an employee about their immigration status and living situation. “Specifically, San Diego Wave employees told the NWSL that directors routinely left Ellis’s office in tears,” the lawsuit filing said. “The reason for the tears was not a mystery as the entire organization could often hear Ellis’s yelling in her office. The NWSL did not act on these complaints of abusive and toxic workplace culture, allowing the behavior to continue to fester.”
The lawsuit details complaints that were made about the Wave and Ellis to the NWSL as far back as 2022. Between 2022 and 2024, the league commissioned two investigations into the Wave, and has maintained that neither investigation found any violations of league policy. Responding to questions about the allegations by Alvarado in July, a spokesperson for the league said, “The NWSL has previously received reports of misconduct in the San Diego front office. Those reports were investigated by an independent third party and we are satisfied with the results, including the finding that there was no violation of league policy in connection with the reported conduct.”
Alvarado and the other plaintiffs have argued in their lawsuit that those investigations were “biased, and discounted by the league, leading to a failure to address systemic issues within the organization.”
According to the lawsuit, Alvarado first reached out to the league in 2023 via the anonymous reporting hotline, but her complaint was improperly handled. Her complaints, though new, were assumed to be part of the ongoing 2022 investigation. They were not. It wasn’t until February 2024 that a second investigation was finally opened.
Since October, the league has done whatever it can to avoid questions about the lawsuit, Ellis, and what the previous investigations into the Wave did or did not uncover. NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman had avoided commenting on the lawsuit until last weekend, before one of the NWSL semifinal games. When asked about Ellis’s role in the suit, she chose to praise the Wave’s team president: “Jill Ellis is an icon in our industry. You know, she led the U.S. Women’s National Team. I think her career speaks for itself. What happened in San Diego is something that is the subject of litigation, and we’ll have to all see how things play out. I can’t specifically comment about that.”
I attended Berman’s press conference a few days before the final between Orlando and Washington, and I asked her about the possibility of opening a new investigation into the Wave. Berman sidestepped, repeating the league’s July response nearly verbatim: “Across our ecosystem, our policies and our procedures are available to everyone … we remain committed to ensuring that those policies are enforced and education exists for everyone to make sure that they know that we are here to support them in all ways that they need.”
When Berman was pressed to say if she stood by the investigations clearing San Diego of wrongdoing, she said, “The investigations that we’ve done in the past, universally, to the extent there was any misconduct identified, it was actioned.”
Publicly, we do not know what was actioned in San Diego, nor do we know what investigators discovered, as the NWSL has said they will not be releasing the findings of those reports. “Due to the confidential nature of workplace reviews and investigations, and our commitment to everyone who participates, we are not making public those findings. We will continue to take any and every report of misconduct seriously, hire independent third parties to investigate those reports, and take all appropriate actions based on the investigative findings,” a league spokesperson said in July.
Berman’s unwillingness to speak about the situation in San Diego stands in contrast to how she positioned herself upon joining the league. Berman became commissioner of the NWSL after a series of scandals led to her predecessor’s resignation, and she was charged with cleaning up the league by forcefully investigating and punishing instances of misconduct.
When she handed down those punishments, she said, “The league and its clubs have taken meaningful steps to begin this structural reform, and understand and accept the continual commitment to enhancing league standards that are necessary to build a safe and positive environment for our players, staff, fans and partners. The Board of Governors hired me with the very specific mandate to effectuate this transformation. These changes will require leadership, accountability, funding and a willingness to embrace this new way of conducting business.”
The NWSL continues to issue punishments for violations. This past July, Houston Dash goalkeeper coach Matt Lampson was fired for fraternization. In October, the league suspended Angel City FC President Julie Uhrman and GM Angela Hucles for the remainder of the season for violating the league salary cap by $50,000.
It’s hard to make any judgment about Berman’s handling of the allegations made against the Wave so long as the results of the league’s two investigations remain confidential. That’s how the league wants it, but the information vacuum draws attention towards one noticeable difference between previous instances where league investigations have led to disciplinary action, and this instance, in which they have not. That difference is the involvement of Ellis, who is a much bigger and more important figure in the world of women’s soccer than anyone else the league has previously come down on.
For now, Berman is happy to keep issuing the same old answers to questions about the Wave and Ellis, all while pushing everyone’s attention towards the future. She has expressed hope for San Diego’s next chapter, thanks to the club’s new ownership group, the Levine Leichtman family. “They have been knee-deep in trying to learn and understand the business, to learn and understand the professional environment, and I have a high degree of confidence that that club is going to be healthy and strong,” Berman said.
The Levine Leichtman family has supported women’s sports for many years. They’ve been longtime boosters of the UCLA women’s soccer team, starting with their endowment of the Arthur E. Levine & Lauren B. Leichtman Endowed Women’s Soccer Grant-in-Aid. The grant was first awarded in 2000, after Jill Ellis began coaching the Bruins.
