The Pride Need to Tie Barbra Banda to Their HIP

Is it just me, or has the off-season seemed even longer than usual this year? It feels like forever since any of the Orlando clubs played a match, and while we are getting social media pictures and videos from their respective preseasons, we are still weeks away from the season openers. The off-season just seems to keep going and going.

It reminds me of “Rapper’s Delight,” the 1979 song that is often cited (incorrectly, but that is a story for another time and website) as the first-ever hip hop song. It’s a 14-plus-minute audio experience that also just seems to keep going and going, and it starts off with one of the most well-known lines in contemporary pop music: “I said a hip hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip, hip hop and you don’t stop.”

The hips that Wonder Mike was rapping about are not the same ones that were in the news recently, as those are not hips but HIPs, as in High Impact Players — the NWSL’s new roster mechanism (introduced in December) that will allow teams to go beyond the salary cap to sign certain players to much higher salaries than previously.

Without belaboring over the details, a simple definition for a HIP is that the player must have met at least one classification from the list below:

• 2025 SportsPro Media Top 150 Most Marketable Athletes.
• 2025 Ballon d’Or voting (top 30 players).
• 2024 Ballon d’Or voting (top 30 players).
• 2025 Guardian Top 100 football players in the world (top 40 players).
• 2024 Guardian Top 100 football players in the world (top 40 players).
• 2025 ESPN FC Top 50 football players in the world (top 40 players).
• 2024 ESPN FC Top 50 football players in the world (top 40 players).
• 2025 minutes played for the USWNT (top 11 field players, top goalkeeper).
• 2024 minutes played for the USWNT (top 11 field players, top goalkeeper).
• 2025 NWSL MVP Finalists.
• 2024 NWSL MVP Finalists.
• 2025 End of Year NWSL Best XI First Team. 
• 2024 End of Year NWSL Best XI First Team .

As of December 2025, The Equalizer reported there are 102 players around the world who qualify, though that number is fluid because some of the 2024 lists will be replaced by new lists, once they are released. The Pride currently have two players on the roster who are HIP eligible: Barbra Banda and Marta, each of whom qualified under eight of the 13 possible qualifications, though in reality they went eight for 11 since Banda is Zambian and Marta is Brazilian, making neither eligible to play for the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT). Emily Sams was also eligible while a member of the Pride, but she is now a member of Angel City, so she is dead to me.

Just kidding, I will still root for Sams, but only when she is playing for the USWNT. Or if she comes to her senses and asks to return back to a club that actually has won something in the league.

The Washington Spirit signed Trinity Rodman to the NWSL’s first-ever deal using the HIP mechanism last week, making her the highest paid women’s soccer player in the world, earning more than $2 million annually according to reports. Unlike MLS, the NWSL does not release contract details, so we do not know how much more that is than the next-highest-paid players in the league, but we know that she just set the new bar, and deservedly so.

But is it deservedly so? Let’s take a look.

Let me start by saying that Rodman is one of my favorite athletes to watch across all sports. Not among women’s athletes, among all athletes. She plays with speed, power, skill, and joy, and even though she plays for a rival team in the NWSL, I root for her to succeed, because her style of play is one that every athlete should aspire to replicate. It certainly helps that she also plays (and when healthy, starts) for the USWNT, my second favorite soccer team behind the Pride, but even if she was playing elsewhere I am confident I would still be a fan. How could you not, when she makes plays like this and then gets her coach to join the celebration?

That combination of success on the field and likeability is what makes her one of the most marketable athletes in the NWSL as well, and marketability was included in the list of HIP criteria, so I think it is a quick and resounding yes, it is deservedly so that Rodman set the new bar.

But once a bar is set, another player will want to jump over it. Rodman has a tremendous mix of soccer skills and marketability, but NWSL general managers want to win championships more than just the hearts and minds of fans, so they are generally more interested in bringing in the best players than they are the most marketable players. Rodman is a great player and has set that bar very high, but now every GM in the league has a target they can use to try to acquire a new player by pulling a Jerry Maguire and showing them the money.

Rodman might not have many peers in the marketability space, but let’s take a look at a few players on the soccer side. Just for fun we’ll call them Player B and Player M, to see if they match up with her and might want a similar salary. Here are their stats per 90 minutes from the combined 2024 and 2025 seasons with their NWSL ranks included in parentheses:

*data from what’s still available on fbref.com (goal contributions, plus/minus), as well as FotMob (chances created (a.k.a. key passes), FotMob rating) and American Soccer Analysis (goals added).

You did not need to be a Bletchley Park-level codebreaker (deep cut for the history buffs) to figure out that Player B is Banda and Player M is Marta. Banda compares quite favorably to Rodman, exceeding her performance in nearly every category, and while Marta lags behind the other two in a few categories (reminder, she played those seasons at 37 and 38 years old and is the oldest player in the league), she surpasses both of them, and the rest of the soccer world, in the categories of heart and, you know, being the greatest of all time. That, however, probably will not translate into the Pride signing her to a HIP deal at this point in her soccer career, even though there is no player in soccer who more perfectly fits the definition of high impact than Marta.

Banda does not have Marta’s global profile or status, but at 25 years old (she will turn 26 in March) she is already a superstar, with high-level achievements already in the Summer Olympics and World Cup for Zambia, a goals-scored-per-90-minutes ranking of fourth in NWSL history (0.62 per 90), and she played a pivotal role in helping the Pride win the NWSL Shield and the NWSL Championship during the 2024 season. The injury she suffered during the 2025 season did not completely derail the Pride’s season, but the offense was not the same without her in the lineup — one of the main reasons that the Pride came up short in their quest to win back-to-back titles.

When she was acquired in 2024, Banda reportedly (again, it would be ideal for the NWSL to actually release this information instead of forcing people to use words like “reportedly”) signed a four-year deal worth up to $2.1 million over the life of the contract, but with Rodman’s deal now worth nearly that amount per year, it is certain that Banda’s agent has already been in discussions with the Pride’s front office about signing her to a brand new contract using the HIP mechanism.

Her current contract runs through the 2027 season, but in recent months the trends have pointed to more players wanting to go to Europe than stay in the NWSL. While that is not exclusively about money, the ability of European teams to offer whatever they want certainly has played a role in enticing players to make a move. With two years left on her contract the Pride are not at risk of losing Banda imminently, but there are few strikers like her in the world (she is one of only 44 women across fbref.com’s database of 16 women’s leagues who have averaged more than 0.60 goals scored per 90 minutes while playing more than 3,000 minutes in the last two seasons), and she is still in the early prime of her career.

I expect the Pride to offer Banda a HIP contract in the upcoming months, as now that Rodman’s deal has been signed, every team has a benchmark in place, and they can negotiate with the agents and players using that deal as a starting point. Banda’s statistical performance and age is similar to Rodman’s, though the Pride will likely offer her a lower amount as she does not have the same commercial profile. There are no hard and fast rules to defining “commercial profile” or “marketability,” so it is more about perception than anything, but I think the Pride will discount something off of Banda’s offer, even though a good argument can be made that Banda delivers more on the field than Rodman.

Hopefully, the Pride’s front office and Banda can come to an agreement on a new contract in the near future, and when they do, it will only be right that we all shout out HIP HIP hooray!

Vamos Pride!