On May 23, Alexia Putellas led FC Barcelona to its fourth Champions League title in six years. Only three days later, the captain announced she was leaving the club. After 14 years with the Catalonian team, she decided it was time to start a new chapter. The news had a real impact across women’s soccer. Fans were celebrating their team’s most recent achievement and all of a sudden had to mourn the departure of their captain.
But far from being resentful, teammates, journalists, and supporters inundated social media with tributes. Despite not being a La Masia product, the midfielder had become inseparable from the club’s identity, and after everything she gave to the club, fans felt she had won the right to decide where her future lay.
Just days before, Wolfsburg’s captain, Alexandra Popp, played her last game with the Wölfinnen. After 14 years with one of the best teams in Germany, and winning every possible title with them, the striker decided she wanted to continue her career with her heart’s club, Borussia Dortmund, a team that sits in the third division. When she was subbed out in her farewell game, players from both teams formed a guard of honor while she was showered with applause by fans and players alike.
In both cases, it was tough for the fans to digest the news; they wanted their club talismans to stay forever. Still, they accepted the players’ decisions and understood they needed to seek a new challenge.
While Putellas and Popp’s exits felt earned and somewhat expected, Katie McCabe’s exit from Arsenal was a whole different story. After signing with the Gunners in 2015, the Irish captain spent more than a decade at the club until she announced in late May that she wasn’t renewing her contract. The fans received the news with sadness, but that feeling rapidly turned to anger when they found out McCabe, formerly one of Arsenal’s captains, was signing with their London rivals, Chelsea.
Christine Sinclair is one of the rare examples of a player who stayed with the same club for more than 10 years until she retired. After the NWSL launched and she signed with the Portland Thorns in 2013, she never envisioned going anywhere else, not even after retiring. “When I am done playing, I’m not going to walk away. I don’t see myself leaving Portland,” she wrote in her memoir Playing the Long Game.
The NWSL can provide a few more examples of one-club women besides Sinclair, and one of those is Gotham FC’s Mandy Freeman. This is her 10th season with the club and she has seen it all, from difficult beginnings to markedly better times now.
“It’s a little crazy to look back on all of the years, realize how long it’s been, and go over all the memories and emotions — the ups and downs of the league, what the club was before, but I’m truly grateful to be able to play this long. Not everybody has this long a career, let alone with one club,” she told the Equalizer back in May.
For franchise players, staying put in just one club may have been motivated by more than just loyalty, especially in Sinclair’s case. In the early years of NWSL, marquee players’ focus wasn’t only on the sport but also on helping to build a league from scratch. Nobody wanted another league to fold in the United States, so the faces of the league had to bear the responsibility of being marketable enough so people would invest in them. Staying with just one club wasn’t just an act of loyalty, but of surviving. The market was small, so the good opportunities were few and in need of protection.
Women’s soccer has grown tremendously since 2013. Leagues are expanding, viewership is increasing, record signings are becoming common, and players enjoy more and better rights than ever before. That results in many players, especially marquee players, having more and better job options ahead of them all over the world, which makes it hard for them to stay in one club forever. The feasibility of loyalty has changed.
The fact that McCabe was offered a long contract at her new club shows how much leverage players in their thirties now have, whether they stay at their longtime clubs or move to a new one. Pernille Harder and Magdalena Eriksson, for instance, both signed a three-year extension with Bayern Munich at the end of 2025. More recently, winger Guro Reiten signed a nearly four-year contract with Gotham.
Putellas’s next move may very well become another example of this. The Catalonian is 32 years old, and the world is at her feet, with reports of different leagues around the globe offering her contracts. Wherever she goes, Putellas’s contract is going to be big. After all, she’s not only valuable on the field but also one of the most marketable active players.
Where players once felt obliged to build roots with their club’s community because the sport didn’t have a strong financial infrastructure, today’s superstars are part of an ever-growing market. Staying in a club for an entire career — what many would understand as loyalty — has become an increasingly expensive privilege.
We are starting to see what happens when the sport gives the players the freedom to choose. Fans will have to recalibrate their expectations of player loyalty in turn.
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