It is a dark day for women's soccer in America. Women's Professional Soccer is no more.
WPS has stopped operations permanently and is dissolving after three seasons, the league announced on Friday.
"We sincerely regret having to take this course of action," said T. Fitz Johnson, owner of the Atlanta Beat and chairman of the WPS board.
The league's folding is the final development in what has been an unsteady number of months. WPS and former franchise magicJack owner Dan Borislow were embroiled in a legal dispute after the league terminated the franchise last October, leaving WPS with only five teams.
Even so, the league was given provisional 2012 sanctioning by U.S. Soccer only to suspend the season in large part to the legal dispute with Borislow. The league announced that the dispute with Borislow was settled on Friday as well, with the two sides coming to a confidential agreement outside of court.
As a result of the league's folding, the majority of players for the U.S. women's national team are without clubs, though some have signed on with teams in the W-League. Hope Solo, Alex Morgan, Sydney LeRoux and Megan Rapinoe, for example, are all with the Seattle Sounders women. The league only lasts through mid-July, however, and the national team players involved in the W-League will miss most of the season for the Olympics before returning to the United States from London without teams to call their own.
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What do you think of this development? Sad that WPS is gone? Did you think it was inevitable? What do you think it means for the future of women's soccer in the USA?
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