How much would it cost to dominate women's soccer?

After looking at the cost of a win in FBS last week, I thought I’d take that approach to at least one other sport - women’s soccer. Maybe it’s because my 5 year old daughter just had her first game on Saturday. Maybe it’s because I know I have alot of followers/subscribers from the women’s soccer community. Maybe because I wanted to see how applying the same methodology to a different sport would be similar/different.

Regardless, here’s a look at the cost of a win in women’s soccer. Given how much of this was replicated from last week, I’m taking the time I saved to write an evergreen article that I’ll publish later this week. Be on the lookout for that.

Pour a drink. Get comfortable. Let’s get into it.

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May not be football money, but winning costs money

Because I am the only source for team specific data from NCAA school’s annual financial reports, I always like to think of new/interesting analysis to do with it. And when I heard a podcast wonder rhetorically what the cost per win was in FBS, I knew that was something I could investigate. After doing it for football, I knew any sport could have the same methodology applied to it. So here we are.

Let’s look at the first visualization on women’s soccer and the cost to win a game.

Quick Takeaways:

• The disparity between #1 and #2 is notable - Eastern Michigan spent over $350k more/win than #2 Maryland. That’s almost a 50% increase from what Maryland was spending.

• What a difference in conference distribution. I’m not familiar with the state of women’s college soccer, but whereas the SEC/B1G dominate FBS, there is a much wider disparity in what schools are spending to win. Besides just having a MAC school at #1 and a Conference USA school at #4 (UTEP), you can see B1G school Penn State creeping to the bottom 20, much further than we saw any major two conference school slip in FBS.

Analyst’s Desk

To get to the results, first I took all the schools I had the latest (FY2024) annual NCAA MFRS financial reports for and honed in on the operating budgets of their football teams. (Note - many schools are missing because only public schools have to respond to records request, many schools charge for records, and others have other bureaucratic barriers to get the reports). Then a quick look at ESPN’s standings for the 2023 season wins/losses gave me all I needed to calculate the cost of a win per game.

One note here is that conferences are based on current, 2025 membership. This makes me think I need to start a database of historical conference membership to reference later. Will get on that.

Quick Takeaways:

• Compared to the FBS chart with the same data points, this chart is fascinating. All the schools are bundled so tightly. Maybe there was no run away dominant school and every team is huddled in the middle of the win distribution. Soccer’s longer schedule helps create the normal distribution we’d expect.

• Texas A&M being such an outlier both here and in the FBS chart is funny. That school sure seems to spend shamelessly.

• Even though a majority of the schools are bundled in the $100-300k range, you can see a bit of variance between the P4/G6 teams. It’s funny to see it when we’re talking about such a small relative amount of money, but you don’t see any of them dropping below that $200k line. In fact, the biggest operating budget in the G6 is Boise State at $178k. The lowest financed P4 team is Houston at $125k.

Analyst’s Desk

No changes to this analysis from the prior, other than not calculating a win ratio and just using the plain data.

Quick Takeaways:

• My eye goes to how many teams are above/below each conference average line. Like FBS football, there is always two or three schools in each conference above that line.

• Eastern Michigan is such an outlier - even by MAC standards they are above and beyond everyone. Granted, they only won 1 game. That isn’t helping. 5 schools had 8 or 7 ties - EMU had 6.

Analyst’s Desk

I calculated the average per-win-rate at the conference level and drew that as the red line for each conference. Then I just plotted each school individually, by conference, in descending order.

🔉 What I’m Listening To 🔉 

I’m always on the lookout for anyone breaking down college sports and especially the business side of the industry. Here’s this week’s best listens:

• Outkick - I’m not saying I necessarily agree with Cody Campbell, but this was a great interview with the man that is shaping college sports at a high level. If you don’t know much about him or his position, this is a good hour interview to hear.

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading this week’s issue.

Clearly no school is willing to spend millions of dollars to gain control of women’s college soccer - but could they? One of the interesting arguments coming out of the House settlement was that not mandating revenue sharing to any particular sport gave schools space to innovate, specialize, and focus their funds. Yes, most schools will spend most of their revenue pool funds with football and mens/womens basketball.

But part of the $20.5 million salary cap at each school can go - anywhere else. Maybe Nebraska wants to formalize their dominance in women’s volleyball and outspend every other school. Perhaps Arizona wants to reassert itself as the leader in softball and chooses to distribute a huge sum of funds to their team. The choices are endless. And what I think this analysis is showing is - it wouldn’t cost much to dominate in women’s soccer. I have to imagine each sport is going to get that one or two schools that wants to go all in and is willing to spend their pool revenue to dominate the sport. It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out.

I hope the soccer community gets a hold of this data and can make some use of it. Having just coached my first girl’s soccer game (and my daughter scored a goal!) I hope I can continue to find ways to provide useful insight into college soccer with the data I have.

Until next time,

Greg Chick, PhD

Data Analyst

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