Whenever a team falls short of expectations, there is always a chorus of opinions about what went wrong. A section of the fans thinks the players have suddenly lost their talent, while some analysts argue it was purely tactical, and that the coach was too strident in their beliefs. And, when it comes to the U.S. women’s national team, you will have bad-faith actors who believe the team lost because it was “too woke” or didn’t act correctly in the face of bad performances.
But, as with many things in life, it’s more complicated than any one explanation.
The USWNT aren’t heading home from Australia because the players danced after drawing with Portugal, nor is the team out because the U.S. is abruptly at a talent deficit compared to the rest of the world. The fact of the matter is that as good as the USWNT have been over the past 30 years, this was bound to happen eventually.
A handful of moments during the Americans’ penalty shootout loss to Sweden in the round of 16 on Sunday perfectly encapsulate how chaotic and humorously dark soccer can be sometimes. The USWNT had looked much more structured than in previous games of the tournament, with the introduction of Emily Sonnett to the starting XI proving to be a surprising masterstroke by manager Vlatko Andonovski. The U.S. attack looked to have gotten its verve back, too, and if not for an outstanding performance by Swedish goalkeeper Zecira Musovic—who recorded an eye-popping 11 saves—the Americans would likely be moving on to a quarterfinal meeting with Japan. But as the momentum swung firmly toward the U.S. and the game crept toward extra time, Andonovski provided the first moment of chaos.
Why did he decide to substitute Trinity Rodman, possibly his best forward in that game, for Lynn Williams in the 66th minute? Fans had been clamoring all tournament long for Andonovski to be more proactive with his subs, but surely it made more sense to bring on Williams for Alex Morgan. Morgan is a USWNT legend, but at 34, she’s approaching the twilight of her career. Sophia Smith could have moved to the 9 position with two speedy forwards on either side to really put pressure on the Swedish defense.
Nevertheless, the Americans continued to push toward breaking the deadlock with promising chances, but it would be another Andonovski decision that truly sparked ire among USWNT fans. Although he had opted to bring on Megan Rapinoe for Morgan in the 99th minute, finally pushing Smith into her preferred central striker role, his last batch of subs nearly didn’t make it onto the field.
With the USWNT manager sensing penalties were in the cards, Andonovski prepared Kristie Mewis and Kelley O’Hara to enter the match. There was only one problem: Time was running out and breaks in play were hard to come by, meaning there was barely time for Mewis or O’Hara to get on the field, let alone get a touch on the ball before taking possibly the most important shots of their careers.
Seasoned soccer fans were likely reminded of the England men’s team during the 2021 European Championships final, when manager Gareth Southgate brought on Jadon Sancho and Marcus Rashford at the dying moments of extra time. Both Sancho and Rashford, cold off the bench, failed to convert their penalties and England lost to Italy.
Putting Mewis—who was making her World Cup debut—and O’Hara under that kind of duress borders on malpractice. But Andonovski’s gamble appeared to pay off when Mewis buried her penalty and Sweden’s Nathalie Bjorn blasted hers over the bar to give the U.S. a 3-2 advantage. The Americans had one foot in the quarterfinals.
Cruel irony came back to strike the USWNT, however, as Rapinoe and Smith both missed their penalties. The misses allowed Sweden to get back on level terms before U.S. goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher surprisingly stepped up in the sixth round and smashed her penalty down the middle to give the Americans the lead once again. It would be the last advantage they held, bringing us to our final tumultuous moment.
We’ll never know whether O’Hara coming on late and not getting a touch affected her penalty, but it certainly didn’t seem to help. The two-time World Cup winner saw her shot hit the right post—the same post that saved the USWNT from elimination against Portugal—before Lina Hurtig’s subsequent shot crossed just enough of the goal line to send the Swedes into exuberant celebration.
So where did things officially go off the rails for the U.S.? It’s tempting to point at the lack of rotation in the group stages or the stringency with which Andonoski insisted on using his preferred formation as the issue that ultimately led to the USWNT’s downfall.
But, truthfully, penalties are a crapshoot, and had O’Hara’s shot been just a few inches to the left, we might not be sitting here discussing failure. The harsh reality is that it’s no longer enough to be a world power on this stage. As Colombia and New Zealand proved in their wins against former World Cup winners Germany and Norway, respectively, we are now in the Anybody Can Get It Era. Your team is mostly composed of players playing at top-level clubs across the world? Great, but that doesn’t matter anymore—quite a few nations in the 32-team field have at least one world-class player, but the real improvement has come from better coaching and a willingness to adapt tactics game to game. Germany and the USWNT have combined to win six of the eight women’s World Cups, yet they’ll both be on the couch watching other nations move on to the World Cup quarterfinals.
And with the USWNT’s exit, there will be unending questions about what this means for the future of the team. We always seem to be wondering how the Americans will meld a new generation while not necessarily pushing out established veterans. We’ve seen it when Naeher took over for Hope Solo, or when Morgan and a cadre of other forwards had to step up when Abby Wambach retired. Moments of transition can be hard, but the USWNT has always recovered and been just as dangerous.
With Rapinoe and Julie Ertz officially hanging it up after this World Cup and other aging players like O’Hara, Morgan, and Naeher likely winding their international careers down, it can be scary to think about handing the U.S. youth the reins at such a young age. At least it would be if the young Americans weren’t already so good.
Smith, whose 23rd birthday is in a few days, was playing in her first World Cup and has already shown in the NWSL that she’s more than capable of adapting her game and being a world-beater for years to come. Rodman, 21, was possibly the USWNT’s best forward on Sunday and will continue to grow into her game. Alana Cook, 26, probably should have been starting in central defense over Ertz anyway, and there are worse options than having Casey Murphy (27) and Aubrey Kingsbury (31, still sort of young for a goalkeeper) waiting in the wings to take over the no. 1 shirt.
That’s to say nothing of other notable young players like Alyssa Thompson, Savannah DeMelo, and Ashley Sanchez, who all had limited playing time because of players ahead of them in rotation. So the hand-wringing about where this team will go without its veterans seems a bit hyperbolic.
It’s true that the other countries are catching up, as they should be. The U.S. passing Title IX in 1972, a year after England lifted its ban on women’s soccer and nearly seven years before Brazil would get rid of its own ban, helped the Americans establish a base level of dominance. It was only a matter of time before the playing field evened out, and now it appears that it has.
Although some of the strongest nations in the world still don’t have a fully professional women’s league (here’s looking at you, Germany), women’s soccer has never been more competitive. England’s WSL is regularly playing its matches in men’s stadiums and filling them to capacity, Barcelona’s women’s team full of Spanish internationals is lauded as the best women’s club team in the world, and even smaller leagues like Germany’s semi-professional Frauen Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A had teams make it into the knockout stages of the women’s Champions League.
Other countries have been catching up to the U.S. because of the club academy environment, and with girls soccer in this country reportedly in crisis, it’s hard to see that stopping. Even seemingly unrelated things like Stanford being in limbo after college football’s conference realignment could have major implications on the future of the USWNT, since the program essentially acts as a feeder program for Team USA. Would Naomi Girma, Cook, Smith, and others attend Stanford if they were in high school now? We’ll never know.
But that won’t be the focus in the days after the USWNT suffered its earliest exit in a World Cup. There will be reflection from the departing players, a scramble for narratives by the media, and, ultimately, a desire in the younger players to avenge this loss.
So in short, no, this isn’t the end to the dominant force the Americans have been since the first World Cup in 1991, it’s more of a reset. With the potential of a 2027 home World Cup jointly hosted with Mexico growing and the Paris Olympics less than a year away, we could get a quick answer on where this team lies.
Andonovski likely won’t be coaching the team a year from now, but Smith, Thompson, Rodman, Girma, and the next generation are here to stay. It’s OK to be disappointed by the Americans’ showing in Australia and New Zealand, but this team, like the iterations before it, will now be forced to rebound from a disappointing tournament. The only question is whether things will look more like what happened when the USWNT lost to Sweden in the 2016 Olympics and then won the next World Cup, or whether Team USA will go out sad in back-to-back tournaments as it did in 2021 and 2023. My bet’s on the former.
