As the 2025 regular season wraps up, here’s a look back at how teams have performed year over year looking at playoff, championship winner, and last place trends. 

Looking year-over-year—while taking franchise moves into account—it is clear that there is a lot of variability (unless you’re looking at the unfortunate consistency of Racing Louisville). 


NWSL Regular Season Finishes* (no 2020 regular season occurred)

Diving deeper into how last place teams finished following ending a season at the bottom of the table, outside of the NWSL’s inaugural season, it’s a fairly recent trend how much teams have been able to turn things around in a single season. One of the things that likely comes into play there is that in 2020 there wasn’t a full regular season—so the 2021 data point can likely be questioned—but after the 2021 season national team allocated players did not continue and free agency started to peak its head into the league. 

Taking a slightly different look at the winners over the years, making playoffs in the year previous is not a bad indicator of the chance of winning the NWSL Championship. The only exceptions to this come from the 2016 Western New York Flash that finished the 2015 regular season seventh out of nine teams, the 2021 Washington Spirit after finishing fifth in 2019 and then the weird 2020 Challenge Cup bubble, 2023 Gotham FC after finishing last in 2022, and 2024 Orlando Pride who finished one place out of playoff contention in 2023. 

Delving further specifically into playoff turnover, until the 2023 season at least half of the playoff teams made the playoffs the year prior. The 2023 stat is even more surprising considering in 2024 the playoffs expanded to eight teams as the league itself expanded to 14 teams. An even crazier stat of this is that of the 8 original teams (including the franchise moves), both Portland and North Carolina (then Western New York) have only missed making playoffs once in team history. 

With only three regular season matches left in the 2025 season, there are only two out of the 14 teams eliminated with Kansas City having clinched the Shield in record time. The final sprint to the playoff line is in full swing.