2024 Final Four the Best Such Group in NWSL History

It is interesting to me that the term “chalk” is still used to describe a bracket playing out with all of the teams favored to win actually winning, since chalk has basically been phased out of schools and now seems to just randomly show up for kids to play with on playgrounds or sidewalks and to ensure that their hands, faces, and clothes will require deep cleaning immediately afterwards, to the great exasperation of their parents. I have two young children, so I am familiar with this exasperation. Very, very, very familiar. I never know where the chalk came from, but I know that it will always end up in my bathtub later that day.

Going chalk may be an anachronistic phrase, but it does accurately describe the results from the first round of the 2024 NWSL playoffs, as the teams seeded one through four are all still alive after their opening games. During the early NWSL years, the final four was always made up of the top four seeds, as only four teams made the playoffs. However, starting in 2021, the league expanded to six teams in the playoffs, and then this year the NWSL expanded again to an eight-team field.

During the years when there were six teams in the playoffs, the top two teams received byes to the semifinals (a.k.a. the final four, written in lower case to avoid the NCAA’s trademark lawyers), and seed No. 3 played No. six and seed No. 4 played No. 5, with the winners advancing to the final four. In 2021, the final four ended up with seeds one, two, three, and four, but in 2022, it was one, two, three, and five. Then, last season, it was one, two, four, and six. This year returned to the way it used to be, with the top four teams all advancing, which is great for soccer fans but not as great for the Pride, since the top four teams during the 2024 NWSL season were all great.

How great were they? Well, allow me to show you every team and every season in NWSL history on the chart below, stack ranked by their average points earned per game for the full season, with the top four teams in 2024 all inside the red circle (I did not include the 2020 season since it was not a standard league season):

It is a little difficult to see, but there are four dots represented inside the red circle, and those four average points earned per game are 2.31, 2.15, 2.15, and 2.12. As a quick reminder, the best possible average would be 3.00. The four seasons inside that circle are not just the top four seasons of 2024 but they are also four of the five best seasons in NWSL history — only surpassed by the 2018 North Carolina Courage’s average of 2.38. One might say that North Carolina raised up that year, if one were familiar with the work of Petey Pablo.

I did not just take my shirt off, twist it around my hand, and spin it like a helicopter, but I thought about it for far longer than was necessary.

So, four of the five best regular-season records in NWSL history all happened this year, but it is not just in points earned per game that these four teams ranked among the best in NWSL history. The next chart shows a scatterplot of points earned per game and goal differential per game, with the the same four 2024 teams included in the red circle. The color coding is a little difficult to see, but the Pride are the purple circle farthest to the right, the Current are the red circle farthest to the left and the Spirit in the black circle are slightly above Gotham in the light blue in the middle.

The teams in the upper right area of a scatterplot like this are winning most of their games and winning them handily. As I know all of you remember from algebra class, a scatterplot shows the coordinates on a Cartesian coordinate system (nerd alert), sometimes referred to as the xy plane, and the 2024 Pride’s point is shown at (2.31,1.00). The 2.31 points earned per game ranks second all-time in NWSL history and the 1.00 goal differential ranks fourth. The problem for the Pride is that not only are the three other teams remaining in the playoffs teams that won a lot of games, they also won a lot of games by a healthy margin as well (goal differentials of 1.00 for the Current (tied for fourth all-time), 0.88 for the Spirit (fifth all-time) and 0.81 for Gotham (sixth all-time)).

While the 2024 regular season may not have been competitive from top to bottom, the top four teams were bunched together at the top, and those teams all had seasons that rank among the best in league history. For some context, all four teams averaged at least 2.12 points earned per game, which has now been done five times across 86 total team-seasons in NWSL history, meaning that prior to this season it had been done once in 72 team seasons. Over on the Major League Soccer side, only four teams have ever earned at least 2.12 points per game in a season, and that is across 503 team-seasons. Teams are rarely this successful in soccer, let alone four teams being this successful in the same season, as happened in the NWSL this season.

To win the title, the Pride do not have to defeat all three teams. They only need to defeat two of them, starting with the Kansas City Current. They defeated the Current in Kansas City and drew with them in Orlando. And in an odd series of events, Orlando will need to defeat Kansas City in Orlando to get to go back to Kansas City to defeat another team besides Kansas City if Orlando wants to win the NWSL Championship.

No matter who wins the final, they will have had to survive the best final four in league history, and when the final whistle blows on Nov. 23, I hope it will be the Pride who emerge victorious and have their name engraved on the NWSL Championship Trophy.

It will look so much better in gold and silver than it would have in chalk.