Goals, guests and 6,561 scenarios: inside ESPN on the biggest NWSL Decision Day yet

As a player, Ali Krieger went into NWSL Decision Day focused on one result. She was Gotham FC’s captain in 2023, the first time the league played all of the final games of the regular season simultaneously. The job, she remembers, was to not worry about the other games going on.

Three years later, Krieger spent Decision Day with eyes on not one game but eight. For the first time, all of the final games of the NWSL season were aired by the same network. Krieger, now a lead analyst for ESPN, and host Kelsey Riggs Cuff anchored the coverage from headquarters in Bristol with a show that was part whiparound, part watchalong, and ultimately wholly new for the 14-year-old league.

There was no shortage of storylines. With 16 teams in action, the slate of simultaneous kickoffs was the largest in the league’s history. San Diego and Gotham were fighting for the Shield; four teams were jousting for home-field advantage; three were vying for the final playoff spots. The league simulated Sunday’s games 50,000 times and found more than 200 possibilities for playoff brackets, with 6,561 ways the results could go.

How do you prepare for the way that the story does spin? The network deployed 60-plus cameras and more than 150 staffers around the United States, plus about 20 in Bristol. Cuff and Krieger met with researchers, rewatched games and assembled a 12-page Google Doc of notes.

“You know that it’s going to be chaos. You lean into the breaking news feel of it,” Cuff said in the green room, about an hour before the games began. “And then you just sit back and enjoy it, because this is the biggest day that we have on the calendar right now, with so much on the line from top to bottom.”

First-place Gotham’s home match against Utah was the headliner on ESPN’s main channel, with the other seven on the streaming service ESPN+ and Krieger and Cuff’s studio show on ESPN2. It wasn’t ESPN’s first time producing a whiparound-style soccer studio show – the network has done so for the Bundesliga and US Open Cup – but it was the first for the NWSL.

“This is like a fresh canvas,” said Manuel de la Fe, vice-president of production at ESPN. “We’re going to paint, and we’re going to see how it comes out.”

A mantra for live television is to expect the unexpected, and the hosts quickly learned Sunday that the unexpected includes surprise women’s college volleyball upsets. A Tennessee-Missouri five-setter meant the start of the Gotham match was pushed to the ESPN2 slot, and the studio show did not actually begin until about 25 minutes into the games.

By the time it kicked into gear, there was plenty to talk about. San Diego, in second place and facing Bay FC in San Jose, scored the day’s first goal in the ninth minute; Gotham scored in their own game seconds later.

For those who prefer their whiparound shows to have the cadence of NFL RedZone’s rollercoaster, this wasn’t exactly that. Earlier Sunday, Krieger mentioned Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird’s women’s basketball watchalongs as inspiration for this show, and it called on special guests in the style of the Manningcast.