The Utah Royals FC kicks off the 2026 NWSL season and the team’s third season since returning to Utah on Saturday in Kansas City.
Over the last two seasons, Royals FC has finished near the bottom of the NWSL’s 14-team table — in 11th in 2024 and 12th in 2025.
Both seasons featured second-half surges, including an eight-game unbeaten streak in 2025. But neither were enough to make the playoffs — something the team wasn’t able to accomplish in its first iteration from 2018 to 2020, either.
This season, two new teams — Denver Summit and Boston Legacy — begin play. Now, half the league’s 16 teams will make the playoffs.
At the team’s media day in February, players expressed confidence in this year’s squad and the team’s goal to make the playoffs this season.
“I 100% think playoff goals are realistic with this group,” goalkeeper Mandy McGlynn said. “We’re getting on the same page, very early days and just really building the groundwork.”
McGlynn said she thinks the team will break its streak of slow starts.
“We’re going to come out of the gates a lot faster than last year, and I think as everyone saw last year in the middle of the year, we actually did have a playoff push,” she said. “But now, I think with a faster start, it’s going to be attainable.”
Defender and team Iron Woman Kate Del Fava also believes the Royals can make the playoffs — “if we do the things we need to do in this preseason and we have the structure” along with the team’s new additions, she said.
Fast forward to Thursday — two days before the season opener. Head coach Jimmy Coenraets said the team wants to compete, but he acknowledged variables that could get in the way of a playoff goal.
“I want to compete. We want to compete. The goal is to win championships,” he said. “If you want to win championships, you get yourself into playoffs, like, you have to do your best. I think the reality is that winning games is just not something we control ourselves.”
He pointed to other teams that will only get stronger upon the conclusion of the European seasons in July, specifically Lindsey Heaps joining Denver Summit and Guro Reiten, whose Gotham FC signing was announced Thursday.
“So you might be doing your job at the very highest level. The reality is there are so many variables moving around you, and that’s why right now, the only thing that we’re capable of controlling is our efforts and our intent,” Coenraets said.
The head coach added that “we want to have our best season thus far, but we don’t know what it’s going to look like realistically just because of so many variables.”
That doesn’t mean the Royals are “backing out of the ambition because we need ambition to drive and drive everything in this building,” Coenraets said. But the team is focused on “being the best version you can be” every day.
“We’re not shy about having very loud ambitions because the one thing that’s been said in this whole meeting, as well, is ownership wants to win championships. ... We want to be competing to win championships, but there is a process to getting there and we control our variables. And I think that’s why we’re not shouting at the rooftops we’re going to get to the playoffs. We’re going to work on a weekly basis just to get there.”
Utah Royals injury statuses for 2026 season
The Royals have also been hampered with injuries as of late, according to Coenraets.
He said the team is dealing with one muscle injury and four contact injuries leading up to the season opener against the KC Current.
“Everything popped up this week out of the blue because muscle-wise, we’ve never been this fit. We’ve never been this good, actually, but then some things happened and I guess everything happens for a reason,” he said.
McGlynn, who injured her finger in training with the national team, will be out for six to eight weeks, according to Coenraets.
“She had surgery, finger — not reconstruction — but they had to really do a lot of stuff at her finger,” he said.
New addition Narumi Miura is dealing with a high ankle sprain she sustained in the team’s final preseason match, a 2-2 draw with the USL Super League’s Spokane Zephyr FC.
Miura was expected to be sidelined for eight weeks but is ahead of schedule, according to Coenraets, who said Miura was walking without crutches on Wednesday five days after her injury — something that wasn’t supposed to happen until day 16.
Coenraets said Janni Thomsen “will be ready for a good 20, 25 minutes only” on Saturday, and captain Paige Cronin is dealing with rib issues that Coenraets has “never seen” before. Nuria Rábano also “has a contact injury.”
Alex Loera is the lone player on the season-ending injury list while she continues to recover from tearing her ACL last season. But Coenraets expects her to make her return “anywhere between June and July.”
Mina Tanaka and new Royal Miyabi Moriya are currently with the Japanese national team for the AFC Women’s Asian Cup and likely won’t join the club until its fourth match of the season in Boston on March 28, which will be its third match in less than a week.
New faces on the Utah Royals roster in 2026
The majority of this season’s roster carried over from 2025, but seven new players were brought in this offseason: defenders Miyabi Moriya and Kameron Simmonds, midfielders Madison Hammond, Narumi Miura and Dayana Pierre-Louis, and forwards Courtney Brown and Kiana Palacios.
“I think what’s cool about this team is we brought a lot back from last year, and the second half (of) the season we were super successful. But then obviously we made additions who’ve raised the level,” Cronin said at media day.
She added that it’s been “a smooth transition for those girls jumping in.”
“I think it brings a more adventurous side, which I’m super excited about and looking forward to this year,” she said.
McGlynn said the personnel decisions make the Royals “more dangerous, more of a weapon as a team.”
How Royals players feel about NWSL’s controversial ‘high impact player’ rule
At the Royals’ media day in February, the Deseret News also asked Cronin, Del Fava and McGlynn for their thoughts on the NWSL’s new “high impact player” rule.
The rule, which the NWSL announced on Dec. 23 as a way for the league and Washington Spirit to keep Trinity Rodman, allows each team to spend up to a total of $1 million beyond the salary cap for players deemed “high impact.”
When it was first reported, NWSL Players Association executive director Meghann Burke expressed to ESPN the NWSLPA’s opposition to the rule.
“The league is trying to control and interfere by trying to dictate which players get paid what with this pot of funds,” Burke said. “Our position is that teams — GMs, soccer ops, business folks at the team level — are uniquely positioned to make judgment calls about how to structure their rosters, how to negotiate deals.”
Burke said that calculating a player’s value to an organization “is more complicated than a handful of bullet points.”
Instead, the NWSLPA proposed the league increase the salary cap by $1 million and allow teams to spend that money as they see fit for their rosters.
“It is within the purview of the teams to make those judgment calls, and in a system of free agency like we all agreed to, that’s how it works. It’s a free market,” Burke said.
When asked for her opinion on the rule, McGlynn gave a short response.
“I think women deserve to be paid what they need to be paid, especially in professional sports, and that goes for all women in all sports,” she said.
Cronin admitted that there are aspects to the rule that she doesn’t “understand fully yet.”
“I’m curious to see how it plays out. At the end of the day, you want to maximize pay, so get a player the money they deserve,” she said.
Del Fava, who has started more consecutive games than any other player in Utah Royals history, hasn’t given the rule much thought, she said.
“For the players, we kind of just want the salary cap to almost go away so that we can just pay the players what they deserve. So if it allows players to get paid more, then I’m all for it. But I haven’t really thought of it in terms of me. But yeah, if it allows players to get paid what they deserve, then so be it,” she said.
The Utah Royals open the season against Kansas City Current on Saturday at 2 p.m. MDT. The match will be broadcast on Ion.