It is named for Sally Yates, the King & Spalding partner who led the investigation who had previously served as acting United States Attorney General.
The independent investigation was commissioned by the USSF on October 2, 2021, following a report by The Athletic about then-Portland Thorns manager Paul Riley's sexual harassment and coercion of players Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly.
[1]: 2 [2][3] Investigators identified and reviewed more than 89,000 relevant documents, created a hotline for anonymous reporting of relevant information, and conducted more than 200 interviews of current and former coaches, front office staff, owners, and players from eleven current and former NWSL teams, NWSL employees, player labor union representatives, USSF personnel, and representatives from the United States Center for SafeSport.
[1]: 4 The report documented allegations of sexual and emotional abuse by former managers of the NWSL and noted failures at team, league, and USSF leadership levels in addressing player concerns.
[4] The report alleged that the USSF took no action after United States national team players submitted allegations of abusive behavior by Riley directly to then-USSF president Sunil Gulati and then-manager Jill Ellis, who had forwarded the complaints to USSF then-chief executive officer Dan Flynn, NWSL then-executive director Cheryl Bailey, and NWSL then-general counsel Lisa Levine.
It also alleged that Bailey, Gulati, Flynn, USSF counsel Lydia Wahlke, and USSF chief operating officer Jay Berhalter took no action after responses to an anonymous player survey repeated the complaints; and that Plush, Gulati, Flynn, and Levine again took no action after directly receiving a player's detailed report of Riley's behavior, including details omitted by the Thorns from its investigative report, in 2015.
[5][1]: 3–4 The report noted that failures by teams, the league, and the USSF contributed to the continuation of misconduct, which endangered additional players after the fact and further encouraged retaliation against whistleblowers.
[10] The Yates Report recommended several actions for teams, the NWSL, and USSF to take toward improving transparency, accountability, rule clarity, player safety and respect, feedback mechanisms, youth soccer measures, discipline, and its interaction with SafeSport.
In October 2022, journalist Sally Jenkins wrote a column in The Washington Post that criticized SafeSport as "a false front … little more than another coverup operation, a litigation-avoidance ploy and bottomless pit into which to dump complaints and disguise inaction.