With a week until players start reporting for preseason, it’s the perfect time to see how the Boston Legacy and Denver Summit are doing with their roster building — especially considering they are the first expansion clubs who will have to build out their roster without any type of Expansion Draft. 

In order to offset the lack of Expansion Draft, the NWSL allowed the clubs to receive a number of assets in both 2025 and 2026

  • Each team has access to $1,065,000 in allocation money to begin spending on July 1, 2025, with 50 percent of funds provided by the league. Teams have until Dec 12, 2027 to utilize all funded allocation money (if the league salary cap increases, available allocation money will be increased pro rata)

  • Each team will spend against a $605,000 transfer fee threshold in 2026 (same as other teams), but will have an additional $968,000 valid from January 1, 2025, through the conclusion of the 2026 secondary transfer window

As a reminder, when preseason starts, teams are able to have 40 players in camp, but midway through they need to drop down to 32, and then need to be in the 22-26 player range by the time that the final roster is due ahead of the regular season opener in March. 

Boston has been leading the charge of signings and actually as of January 8th, had 22 players signed, making them technically roster compliant. Denver is a bit behind with only 11 right now — which does align with the fact that their sporting decisions (GM, Head Coach) were also lagging behind Boston. *It would not be surprising if there were a good number of player announcements coming from Denver in the next week. 

Both clubs have been mostly utilizing signing free agents (whether within the NWSL or outside) and are not obviously utilizing the extra cash they have for the net transfer fee. As a reminder, transfer fees paid between teams only need to be disclosed between two NWSL clubs, and as a rule are not reported in external transfers. 

Additionally, both teams will start with seven international spots, and can trade for more, but are allowed to have more than their allocated number until the final roster compliance date. At the moment, Boston has five in use, while Denver only has one.