Alex Morgan Walks Away From Soccer Having Totally Transformed It
The USWNT legend announced her retirement on Thursday, capping off one of the most decorated careers in American soccer history. From her stunning goals and iconic celebrations to her long-standing efforts to grow the game, she ensured the sport will never be the same.
When Alex Morgan tweeted a four-and-a-half minute video accompanied by the words “Thank you” and a heart hands emoji on Thursday morning, I think we all knew what time it was.
It’s fitting that, after a career of stunning goals, mesmerizing runs, and iconic celebrations, Morgan tearfully dropped three massive bombs on the women’s soccer community. She is retiring, she is pregnant with her second child, and her final professional game will be September 8, when the San Diego Wave host the North Carolina Courage in a midseason National Women’s Soccer League clash.
For those of us who grew up watching Morgan, her retirement feels both abrupt and inevitable. Multiple legends in Morgan’s generation have left the game in recent years, from Megan Rapinoe and Ali Krieger to Julie Ertz and Sam Mewis. But this likely isn’t the ending Morgan would have scripted. She was controversially left off the USWNT Olympic team that won gold this summer, and her club team is a mess, to put it lightly. Morgan has missed a third of the Wave’s games this season due to an early ankle injury and has yet to score a goal in regular-season play.
Even so, it will be hard for Wave fans—and women’s soccer fans across the country—to adjust to life without her. Watching Morgan in her element, striding toward the opposing goal, was one of the most electrifying experiences to come out of the past decade of U.S. soccer. She brought a jolt of energy to the pitch and, more importantly, to the game itself.
“We’re changing lives,” Morgan said in her retirement video. “The impact we have on the next generation is irreversible. And I’m proud of the impact, in the hand I had in making that happen. In pushing the game forward, in leaving it in a place that I’m so happy and proud of.”
It would take thousands of words to run through Morgan’s litany of accomplishments, but to keep it concise: She is a two-time women’s World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medalist, a UEFA Champions League winner, and an NWSL champion. Her generation’s effect on the game is clear. Morgan became one of the most prominent female athletes on the planet and an influence for the generation of soccer players coming up behind her.
When she was taken as the no. 1 pick in Women’s Professional Soccer (a league that folded almost immediately after her Western New York Flash won the title in her rookie season) in 2011, few could have imagined just how ingrained she’d become in soccer culture—or how much the sport would change during her career. She became the face of U.S. soccer, scoring 123 times in 224 international appearances across 15 years. Morgan’s 176 combined goals and assists rank fifth all time in USWNT history, and she’s scored against 32 different countries. Perhaps the greatest stat associated with her national team career is that the USWNT never lost a game in which she scored. Along the way, she graced the covers of magazines and became enmeshed in the fight to make women’s soccer safer and more equitable at all levels.
Morgan worked tirelessly for her teammates and fellow players. She was one of the first players Mana Shim reached out to when former Portland Thorns coach Paul Riley displayed abusive and manipulative behavior toward Shim and Sinead Farrelly. And almost a year before Spain’s win in the 2023 women’s World Cup would be clouded by former Spanish football president Luis Rubiales nonconsensually kissing Jenni Hermoso, Morgan was one of two USWNT players to support the 15 La Roja women who declined call-ups to the national team because of the toxic environment that federation had cultivated. And, of course, she was one of five women to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about wage discrimination by U.S. Soccer and later one of 28 women to sue the federation for gender discrimination, kicking off a yearslong fight that landed the USWNT a landmark equal pay agreement.
Even as her influence grew beyond the field, it hardly ever diminished on it. After enduring a couple of down seasons in Orlando and embarking on a side quest to Tottenham in England, Morgan jumped at the opportunity to return to her native Southern California when the Wave joined the NWSL as an expansion side in 2022. She proceeded to win the Golden Boot during her first season, scoring 15 goals and leading San Diego to a third-place finish in the league.
Pull up a compilation of her best goals, and you’ll be spellbound by Morgan’s touch and her ability to find space. Even later in her career, when she became less of a mystifying runner and more of a target forward, her finishing remained elite. There are so many goals that will stick with fans, but her finish against Germany in the 2016 SheBelieves Cup always sticks with me. It’s not Morgan’s flashiest goal, but everything she brought to the game was displayed when she tracked the ball over her shoulder, controlled it and lobbed a defender with one touch, and then slotted it home. On her day, she was unstoppable. All the other team could do was sit there and watch her work.
Morgan brought the energy of your favorite aunt. She is a troll of the highest order. It’s still not entirely clear whether the English have forgiven her for her epic tea celebration in the 2019 women’s World Cup semifinal. And I’m sure she doesn’t have too many fans in Canada either.
But rooting for Morgan always seemed to deliver. As she prepares to play the final game of a ridiculously decorated career, it’s worth reflecting on where women’s soccer is now compared to where it was when she started.
The NWSL used to stream games on Lifetime in the middle of the day. Now it has a lucrative $240 million domestic broadcast deal, with at least 118 games airing this season and weekly studio shows across CBS, Prime Video, ION, and ESPN. And the league recently agreed to a groundbreaking collective bargaining agreement, which eliminates the draft and raises minimum salaries. All this after the first league Morgan was drafted into collapsed—and it wasn’t the first domestic league to do so—and onlookers were unsure whether women’s soccer would ever take off in this country.
When I first began watching soccer, I had only two posters of athletes in my bedroom: one of Wayne Rooney in a Manchester United jersey and one of Morgan in a USWNT kit. She has been ever-present during my lifetime as a fan, and those of so many others. The USWNT has turned over almost every great player of the last generation—Alyssa Naeher is now the only active national team player from that 2015 World Cup–winning squad who is still consistently being called up. The next generation of forwards has returned some of the pace and fun that Morgan brought to Team USA’s attack over a decade ago. But no matter how good that triple shot of espresso becomes, we’ll never see anyone like Morgan again.
