The USWNT Faced a New Kind of Uncertainty in the 2023 World Cup and Lost
The Americans have tactical problems to solve, but as the team completes its transition from the Alex Morgan–Megan Rapinoe generation to the Sophia Smith–Trinity Rodman generation, it also has deeper questions to answer
Let us begin with the ritual shrieking into the void.
[Utters a piercing cry.]
[Utters a second piercing cry.]
[One hundred thousand years pass. Human civilizations crumble. New civilizations arise. A lizard flits behind a rock. Over the desert, strange birds gaze with unfeeling eyes upon the ruins of our temples.]
[Utters a third piercing cry.]
OK. I feel a little better. Hope you do too.
What did we just watch? Is “watch” even the right word? “Watch” feels too normal. Too neutral. To say we “watched” the U.S. women’s national team lose on penalties to Sweden in the round of 16 of the World Cup makes us sound passive and indifferent. “I watched a raindrop slide down the window.” This was not like that. This was physical. This was terrible. This was like, Hey, you know your eyes? Those weird, round organs in your face? Now they’re cortisol bombs.
This was like, The body keeps the score … and that score is 5-4 in a penalty shoot-out … and Megan Rapinoe missed.
Hang on a second.
[Emits a fourth piercing cry.]
Forget “watched.” What did we just endure? Take the last scene first. Lina Hurtig, the seventh and final Swedish player to step up to the penalty line, blasts a hard, low shot to the right of Alyssa Naeher, the American goalkeeper. Naeher gets a hand on it. The ball sproings up in the air. OMG, OMG, YES, the body cries, busily keeping score. TWENTY BILLION HAPPINESS POINTS. But the ball, thanks to some hostile quirk of physics and in-stadium air currents, falls back down toward the goal line rather than away from it.
Naeher’s still on the ground. What does she do? She gets a hand to the ball again.
Naeher just blocked the same shot twice. How do you even do that??? The body is tossing around happiness points like confetti at a wedding. We’re still alive.
But it’s not enough. The ball maybe kinda just barely scooches over the goal line on its way down. No one’s sure what’s happening. The referee goes to the video. “Fate shall yield / To fickle Chance,” John Milton once wrote, “and Chaos judge the strife.” To which I might add: yep.
We’re linking arms (figuratively). We’re covering our eyes (literally). The cosmic order of the universe depends on the American women making the semifinal—they’ve never failed to reach the semis, ever, at any previous World Cup—but the cosmic order of the universe is drunk. The referee, France’s Stéphanie Frappart, comes back. She gives the goal. Boom. Game over. Cue the crying, the gnashing, the press conferences about U.S. coach Vlatko Andonovski’s job security (not great, you have to think), and the exuberant Swedish celebrations (a beautiful and well-earned expression of spontaneous joy, definitely not a choreographed attempt to harm me personally).
Again, that was just one moment. I simply cannot stress enough that this match was made up of several thousand moments. Many of them felt like this one: wild happiness turned to frustration at the last possible second. The USWNT outshot Sweden by more than 2-to-1—22 shots to nine—and lost. They had 11 shots on goal to Sweden’s one—and lost. They had 58 percent of the possession. They had nine corner kicks to Sweden’s three. And they lost.
“I feel like we dominated,” Alex Morgan said after the game. “But it doesn’t matter.” The USWNT did, and it doesn’t.
“It’s a sick joke,” Megan Rapinoe said, describing what it felt like to end her storied World Cup career with a missed penalty. Pretty much.
“Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell,” John Milton once wrote. Honestly, very cool of Milton to give dialogue to the soccer ball.
The principal architect of the U.S. defeat was the Swedish goalkeeper, Zecira Musovic, who—and I don’t want to get tediously analytical here—fucking owns. My Lord, what a goalkeeping performance. Just blocking shot after shot, doing it in bulk, as if crushing dreams was cheaper on the Costco plan. Rapinoe and Sophia Smith must be two of the most confident athletes on the planet. They both missed their penalties. Who knows, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Musovic’s relentless brilliance had gotten into their heads. You know a goalkeeper is good when she’s psyching attackers into missing one-on-one shots from just 12 yards out.
Musovic was the clear player of the match. But there’s been an aura of awkward self-sabotage around this American team all tournament long, and it was hard to escape the sense that the U.S. had, to some extent, or maybe even to a large extent, done this to itself. A lot of commentators have been yelling a lot of things about the odd vibe around the team. Maybe you followed the Carli Lloyd controversy? Let’s agree right now, you and I, to not spend a single second of our one wild and precious life debating whether the Americans “lacked passion” or “didn’t come to play” or whatever. I can’t tell you whether they lacked passion, because I can’t see into Morgan’s soul. If I could, I would copy and paste her soul’s UI settings into myself and solve most of my own problems.
Still, it was impossible to escape the feeling that some new kind of uncertainty had crept into the culture of the USWNT. The culture of sports as a whole has been in the midst of a generational paradigm shift, as the driven, win-at-all-costs warrior mentality of older athletes has slowly given way to a newer, more forgiving outlook that prioritizes mental health and overall well-being. The USWNT, always a flash point for debates at the intersection of sports and society and under enormous pressure to be “inspiring” (whatever that means) at all times, never quite seemed to find its identity within this shifting context. The players danced and signed autographs, to Lloyd’s fury, after the dispiriting 0-0 draw with Portugal that earned them a pass to the knockout rounds. The players also clearly wanted and expected to win this tournament.
The question is: Do you reach greatness when you’re happy, or do you reach happiness when you’re great? Either path can surely get you to your goal, but only if you know which path you’re on. This team seemed uncomfortably suspended between both. The team has tactical problems to solve, but as it completes its transition from the Morgan-Rapinoe generation to the Smith–Trinity Rodman generation, it also has deeper questions to answer. For most of the last 25 years—through the equal-pay fight, through the anthem debates, through multiple international tournaments—the biggest part of the team’s identity has been based on winning. That’s gone, at least for now. There may not be many silver linings hiding in this American World Cup experience, but that the USWNT has lost its glow of invincibility, if only temporarily, might at least give the team the opportunity to figure out who it wants to be next.
