Supercomputer · NWSL

Plays the rest of the season 10,000 times and shows how often each club wins.

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The NWSL projection in a 16-team single table

The NWSL runs one table, not conferences. All 16 clubs face each other twice across 30 matches, and whoever finishes top wins the NWSL Shield, the trophy for the best regular-season record and the only thing this projection can genuinely award. There is no relegation, so the bottom of the table carries no sporting penalty.

The championship itself is decided by an eight-team knockout bracket, with the final staged at a venue chosen in advance rather than at the higher seed's ground. The two columns that matter most here are therefore the Shield probability and the chance of finishing in the top eight, which is the qualification line.

NWSL projection: common questions

Does finishing top of the NWSL win the title?

It wins the NWSL Shield, a genuine trophy for the best regular-season record, but not the championship. That is decided afterwards in the play-offs, where the top eight enter a knockout bracket running through quarter-finals and semi-finals to the final in November.

How many teams are in the NWSL this season?

Sixteen, after Boston Legacy FC and Denver Summit FC joined as expansion clubs for 2026. The larger league pushed the schedule to 30 matches per team, a longer sample than the NWSL has ever run, so projected points totals are not directly comparable with earlier seasons.

Is there relegation in the NWSL?

No. The league is a closed system in which new clubs arrive through expansion rather than promotion, so this page shows no relegation column. The only downside the model can measure is missing the top eight and the play-off bracket that follows.

▸How does the supercomputer work?

Every remaining fixture is simulated with a Poisson model: each club gets an attack rating and a defence rating from the goals it has scored and conceded this season, and the expected goals of a match come from combining one side's attack with the other's defence, plus a moderate home advantage.

Before a ball is kicked the model does not start from zero: each club begins with a prior strength built from last season's finish and the market value of its squad, with the tails capped so no extreme is absurd. That starting point hands over weight to real results as they arrive, and by around matchday ten only the actual goals are talking.

The remaining season is played 10,000 times in a separate browser process, so the page never freezes. The title, top-four, top-six and relegation percentages are simply how often each outcome happened across those 10,000 seasons, and each club's points range covers the central 90% of its simulated finishes.

What the model does not know: injuries, transfers, sanctions, European fixtures or motivation. It uses goals and only goals — which is why it is in beta.