San Jose hired Gavin Wilkinson as a soccer executive after Major League Soccer granted him a so-called restorative clearance — and did so without any involvement from the NWSL, the league most directly scarred by the misconduct findings that ended his career in Portland. The arrangement has exposed a fault line in how American professional soccer handles accountability when men's and women's leagues share ownership but not governance.
Wilkinson was fired by the Portland club in 2022, two days after the Sally Yates report became public. That report, commissioned by the NWSL, documented a sweeping failure of duty across the league — front offices that ignored or enabled the abuse and harassment of players. Portland's dual structure, overseeing both the Timbers and the Thorns, placed Wilkinson at the center of that reckoning.
That MLS moved to rehabilitate his standing without consulting the NWSL is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is a statement about power. The NWSL has spent years fighting to be taken seriously as a professional league in its own right — with its own standards, its own players' union and its own hard-won mechanisms for player protection. To have a figure pushed out in direct response to that league's investigative process quietly cleared and rehired through a parallel men's-league process undermines precisely the institutional seriousness the NWSL has worked to build.
The term "restorative clearance" deserves scrutiny on its own. Restoration implies repair — but repair to whom, and verified by whom? If the NWSL, its players and its leadership had no seat at the table when MLS evaluated Wilkinson's fitness to return to professional soccer, then the process wasn't restorative. It was a workaround.
San Jose's decision to hire Wilkinson is a business call, and clubs make those. But the NWSL's exclusion from the clearance process is the more consequential issue. The league cannot be treated as a subsidiary when its players bear the consequences and an afterthought when its abusers seek reinstatement. That asymmetry isn't sustainable — and the players who pushed for the Yates investigation in the first place will not let it stand quietly.