Clubs play regular season matches within their conferences, and top teams and wildcards can qualify for a post-season national round-robin champions' league competition.
[6] Coaches not near ECNL clubs criticize the costs of playing for the league as a barrier for development in the sport[7] and a factor in reducing the racial and economic diversity among elite United States soccer players.
[26][14] The ECNL scheduled the start of its first season during the COVID-19 pandemic for August 1, 2020, for clubs in jurisdictions that allowed youth sports.
[30] In September 2020, ECNL medical director Drew Watson organized a nationwide study of member clubs to track the spread of COVID-19 among players returning to practice and better understand the potential risks of transmission.
[31] In a separate study, Watson suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic had also increased rates of anxiety and depression reported by athletes.
[32] In a Washington Post report published February 2022, several former players of ECNL founding club Chicago Eclipse Select accused its coach Rory Dames, who also served on the league's board of directors, of sexual harassment and verbal abuse of youth players, and other abuses of power.
The report also alleged that Dames hired a coach for Eclipse who had previously been sanctioned by the U.S. Center for SafeSport for sexual harassment of youth players.
The report followed a separate media report alleging similar behavior by Dames in his role as head coach of senior NWSL pro club Chicago Red Stars, which became part of the 2021 NWSL abuse scandal and led to two separate investigations into alleged abuses within the league, including Dames.
The report included complaints of a "fear-based" environment made by players against Aaran Lines for his tenure as head coach of the Western New York Flash, and the report also noted that Lines had remained a member of the Flash organization as director of its ECNL team.
The report noted that 90 percent of directors of coaching at 129 ECNL clubs were male, and included claims by former Scotland and United Kingdom international Ifeoma Dieke, who had worked for an ECNL club and alleged that the league's exclusion of women from leadership roles was "a systemic problem".
[3] From 2017 to 2022, 70 percent of players selected in the NWSL Draft to play in the United States's top professional women's league were ECNL club alumni.