Here's what it costs to compete for a national title in women's soccer

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

We’ve been working every day to not only secure as many financial reports from D1 athletic departments as we can, but also to reformat that infomation so we can better analysize it.

While we don’t yet have every D1 MFRS report (more on that in a second), I do think we have enough to begin to share some of that data. You’ll be able to follow our future stories breaking down this financial data with the “FY25 FOIA FUN” tag we’ve created.

Before I start sharing some tables and charts about reporting spending in college soccer, let me take a second to go over our methodolgy, and explain exactly where these numbers come from.

Every D-1 and D-II school files an itemized athletic department budget report with the NCAA, called the MFRS report. This report breaks down how athletic departments generate and spend money, itemized by sport. It’s not a perfect data set, but it’s the closest thing we have in college sports right no.

We obtain these documents by filling hundreds of Open Records Requests. Because of those requests, and because of our data analysis, we’re able to compare spending across more than 175 schools.

The data you’ll see referenced here, and in all future newsletters in this series, comes from the Total Operational Expenses line item from that report. That number includes all the money a school spends on coaching salaries, administrative salaries, scholarships, travel, software, recruiting, and all sorts of other operational expenses. It does not include athlete revenue share payments. The numbers we are talking about here are not the “salary cap” for each team.

This data also comes from FY25, aka the 2024 women’s college soccer season, when UNC beat Wake for the title. Data for the 2025 season (the one that Florida State won) will appear in the FY26 MFRS data.

And finally, we can only obtain data from schools that respond to open records requests. Private schools, like Santa Clara, BYU, Northwestern, etc do not have to respond to FOIAs, and thus do not publish their MFRS reports. A few public schools, like Pitt, Temple, UCF, Delaware and Delaware State, are except from state open records laws. Several other schools have not yet responded to our repeated requests, either because they limit FOIAs to in-state residents (so we have to pay a stand-in), or because they’re simply very slow at responding to requests.

We are currently missing data from Air Force, Alabama State, Alabama A&M, Alcorn State, Army, Arkansas Pine-Bluff, Buffalo, Colorado State, Coppin State, ETSU, Georgia Tech, Florida, FIU, Indiana State, Jackson State, Jacksonville State, MTSU, Morehead State, Morgan State, North Alabama, NCCU, Prairie View A&M, Texas Southern, Troy, South Alabama, South Carolina State, South Carolina Upstate, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Greensboro, UC-Santa Barbara, UL-Monroe, UMBC, UT-Chattanooga, Tennessee State, and UT-Martin. If you happen to have the FY25 MFRS report for any of these schools, I’ll happily give you free premium Extra Points in exchange (and/or give you any of ours).

Got all of that? Great.

Now, for some good news:

We’re in the process of making dramatic changes to the Extra Points Library, from building an entirely new technical infrastructure to adding way more features around data analysis. Beyond just publishing the full table of everyone’s budget, we also wanted to understand if raw spending actually mattered that much.

Is there a correlation between total expenses and say, W-L percentage? What about RPI? Is there a stronger correlation between on-field success and any specific line item spending?

Well, we threw all that data into the computer, and this is what we got:

We also found a strong relationship between reported coaching salary spending and scholarship spending and RPI, but the strongest correlation was with total expenses. These relationships become much weaker when tracking winning percentage.

The total operational spending for the top 25 RPI squads came out to about $2.8 million a year.

That certainly doesn’t guarantee success. Programs like Nebraska, Missouri, Ole Miss, Michigan and LSU all spent between $2.6-$3 million and missed the NCAA Tournament. UNC, the school that won the whole thing, was 16th in total spending. Soccer is a sport that can have some more random outcomes, especially once you get to penalty kicks, and there are no sure things.

But based on this data, if you want to compete for national titles, it certainly looks like your operational budget needs to be in the $2.5ish range.

Here are the top 15 total spenders for women’s soccer in FY25. I’ll share the rest of the data, plus some new, fancy #analysis, after the jump: