The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  Players report getting injured more and recovery time taking longer when they play on artificial turf. Some studies have supported this perception, while some have been inconclusive. But when Sydney Leroux posted a photo of her legs covered with bloody scrapes from slide tackling on artificial turf, it was a clear example of why there’s a consensus among soccer players. Kelley O’Hara responded to Leroux’s photo: “You should probs tweet that to FIFA.”

  It may be less of an issue in other sports, but in soccer, turf can be especially hard on a player’s body.

  “Not only are they long-lasting injuries, but there are long-term effects of playing on turf,” Alex Morgan once explained. “The achiness, taking longer to recover than on natural grass, the tendons and ligaments are, for me at least, I feel more sore after turf. It takes longer to recover from a turf field than natural grass.”

  For this reason, some players with leverage have refused to play on artificial turf. When superstars Thierry Henry and Didier Drogba joined MLS clubs after careers in Europe, where artificial turf is rare, they refused to play at venues without natural grass. Grass also offers a better quality of ball movement and natural bounces, while artificial turf can negatively affect the flow of the game. In other words, soccer is meant to be played on grass, and that’s especially true during a World Cup, the most important tournament in the sport.

  When Canada’s bid, which included artificial turf fields, was selected by FIFA for the 2015 World Cup, the decision flew under the radar at first.

  “You get used to just saying, Oh, that’s kind of messed up, and you go on with your day,” Heather O’Reilly says. “But sometimes it takes people to make a big deal about it.”

  With the help of attorney Hampton Dellinger, the national team realized they should try to stand up against the decision. They brought in players from other national teams around the world, including Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and others to sign a letter asking FIFA and the CSA to reconsider using artificial turf.

  When that didn’t work, they filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, arguing the decision to play the tournament on artificial turf was gender discrimination under Canadian law. After all, no men’s World Cups had ever been played on artificial turf, and the upcoming men’s tournaments had been planned to be on grass through 2022.

  “The reality is, the men would never play the World Cup on field turf,” Abby Wambach said after the complaint was filed. “So for me, it’s a women’s rights issue—it’s an equality issue.”

  Of course, FIFA treating the Women’s World Cup like it was less important than the men’s event wasn’t new.

  Take, for instance, the prize money that FIFA offered the winners. For whoever won the 2015 World Cup, a $2 million team prize was on the line. If that seems like a lot, it shouldn’t—the German men’s team won $35 million for winning the 2014 World Cup. That’s roughly six cents on the dollar for the women. The last-place men’s team at the 2014 World Cup earned $8 million, four times what the winner of the 2015 Women’s World Cup would earn.

  FIFA may have been a so-called not-for-profit organization that was heading into the 2015 Women’s World Cup with around $1.5 billion in cash reserves, but FIFA secretary general Jérôme Valcke argued the women would have to wait 13 more World Cups to see the sort of cash prize the men get.

  “We played the 20th men’s World Cup in 2014, when we are now playing the seventh Women’s World Cup,” Valcke said. “We have still another 13 World Cups before potentially women should receive the same amount as men.”

  In other words, only at the 2067 Women’s World Cup would the women be eligible to win as much money as the German men’s team did in 2014.

  The prize money certainly said something about FIFA’s priorities, though. The same week the 2015 Women’s World Cup kicked off, United Passions debuted in movie theaters. It was a propaganda film that FIFA produced about itself and bankrolled for around $30 million. That’s double the total amount of prize money FIFA made available to all teams participating in the 2015 Women’s World Cup.

  The film earned less than $1,000 in its debut weekend in North America, for the worst box-office opening in history, and it went down as the lowest-grossing film in U.S. history. Almost all the millions of dollars FIFA poured into making the movie was lost. The film has a 0% rating on the popular movie-review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, and a New York Times review called it “one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory.”

  And remember the uncomfortable encounter at the team hotel between the Americans and Brazilians after the 2007 Women’s World Cup semifinal? That would never happen in a men’s World Cup.

  That’s because FIFA assigns different hotels and training facilities to each men’s team, to serve as a base camp throughout the tournament. The women don’t get base camps—they jump from city to city and from hotel to hotel during the World Cup, and they usually end up bumping into their opponents, who are given the same accommodations. American coach Jill Ellis said she almost walked into the German meal room at the World Cup once.

  “Sometimes you’re in the elevator with your opponent going down to the team buses for a game,” Heather O’Reilly says. “It’s pretty awkward.”

  FIFA may have not shown they cared about the Women’s World Cup much, but the lawsuit the women filed over artificial turf looked promising. A group of 13 U.S. senators, all Democrats, wrote to FIFA, urging the organization “to begin good faith negotiations with these athletes, free of retaliation and with the equal treatment that they deserve.” Celebrities, including Tom Hanks and Kobe Bryant, amplified the cause.

  But when the players’ request to fast-track the issue was rejected by the Human Rights Tribunal in late 2014, it became clear there probably wouldn’t be enough time to resolve the issue before the tournament was set to start. Four months before the kickoff of the World Cup, the players withdrew the case so they could focus on preparing for the tournament.

  “We regretted that we didn’t step up earlier in the process,” O’Reilly says. “But we were glad we brought it to light because hopefully it will never happen again. You could say we lost, but in the grand scheme of sports, it will always be better because we put our foot down and said, This isn’t good enough.”

  The 2019 Women’s World Cup in France will be on grass, and the players believe FIFA will think twice before trying to put another tournament on artificial turf.

  * * *

  On December 6, 2014, the players filed into a meeting room at their hotel in Brasília, Brazil. The World Cup in Canada was still six months away and the team was preparing, but they didn’t know who they were preparing for. That’s why they were in this room: to watch the 2015 Women’s World Cup draw live.

  The draw, like always, started by placing the host country, Canada, and the five other best teams into six separate groups. This would ensure that the best teams, plus the host country, wouldn’t need to face one another until the knockout rounds. Then, one by one, teams from different regions throughout the world were randomly selected into the groups.

  The Americans were seeded into Group D. Then they started learning their opponents.

  The first team drawn into Group D with the Americans: Nigeria. The Super Falcons, as Nigeria is known, had proven to be the top team in Africa after having recently won the Women’s African Football Championship just a couple of weeks earlier. Most concerning, however, was that the national team was largely unfamiliar with Nigeria, having last played them back in 2007.

  “Nigeria was a wild card,” Becky Sauerbrunn says. “I had never played Nigeria before.”

  Then, Australia was called as the next opponent of the group. The national team players looked at one another with some concern. After all, if Nigeria was a mystery, Australia was anything but—the Americans knew how fast and energetic the Australians were and how much effort it took to beat them. The Matildas, as the Australian team is known, was the best non-seeded team in their confederation.


  Finally, the players watched on the screen as the last ball for Group D was chosen out of the bin and the little strip of paper was unfurled: Sweden. The entire room erupted with groans and laughter. The Americans shook their heads in disbelief. Sweden was the toughest team that could’ve been drawn into Group D and, unlike Australia and Nigeria, the Swedes had beaten the Americans many times before. Ashlyn Harris jokes that her reaction was a quick one: “Oh shit.”

  After the initial laughter in the room, then came a smattering of claps and shouts of “All right, let’s do this!” The players now knew their fate, and they had to prepare for it.

  The coach of the Swedish team was Pia Sundhage, the woman who just three years before had coached the Americans to an Olympic gold medal and knew as well as anyone what their weaknesses were.

  Deservedly, Group D was quickly nicknamed “The Group of Death” because it contained the toughest combination of teams in the entire tournament. With the American players knowing their fate, the march toward the Group of Death began—if the national team wanted to win its first Women’s World Cup since 1999, this was how they had to do it.

  Luckily, the national team knew they had Hope Solo. Prosecutors in Solo’s hometown had successfully been granted an appeal—a rare and unusual step for a misdemeanor—and it brought her assault case back to life. But the trial wasn’t scheduled to proceed until September, well after the end of the World Cup.

  The story stayed in the news, however, as ESPN dug further into the details of the arrest and aired a documentary about it right before the World Cup started. But the legal issues themselves wouldn’t keep Solo off the field, and if the Americans wanted to win a World Cup, they were going to need her.

  Expectations were certainly high. In Winnipeg, where the national team was set to play its first two group games, the hotel occupancy rate was 100 percent for the dates of their games due to Americans flocking north. Some USA fans were forced into unusual accommodations, like college dorm rooms or sleeping in cars, just to watch the U.S. team in the World Cup.

  The pressure was on. American fans expected their team to step up and were about to flood Canada.

  * * *

  By the time the group stage arrived for the 2015 Women’s World Cup, there was one question everyone wanted to answer: Can the USA still dominate?

  After all, women’s soccer was now the best it had ever been. More federations were investing in their women’s programs and the competition was better overall. Being faster or fitter wasn’t going to be enough anymore, but the Americans still relied on a direct approach that focused on outpacing and outmuscling opponents. The 2015 World Cup would also be the most grueling iteration of the tournament because it had expanded from 16 teams to 24, adding an extra round of knockout games to the competition.

  The group stage in Canada didn’t provide any reassuring answers.

  The Americans did score first in their opening match vs. Australia, but it was a half-chance from Megan Rapinoe that took a lucky deflection. Before that, Hope Solo had been called on to make a spectacularly acrobatic save. They eventually routed Australia, 3–1, but Solo was the hero of the match more than any of the goal-scorers.

  “Hope came up absolutely huge for us,” Rapinoe said afterward. “I think she had three saves that nobody else in the world could make.”

  A pair of tight, unconvincing outings next against Nigeria and then Sweden were concerning. The Americans couldn’t control the midfield, the possession was sloppy, and the attack wasn’t clicking. If they could beat Nigeria by only 1–0, and if they could only settle for a scoreless draw versus a Sweden team that looked out of sorts, how could they possibly advance through the knockout rounds?

  “It wasn’t clicking at the beginning and we knew that,” defender Ali Krieger says. “We’re not stupid. You understand how you’re playing—you can see it and you can feel it. But we were like, We still have to win.”

  The Americans may have looked unconvincing, but it didn’t matter—they topped Group D anyway. True to the team’s identity, they found ways to get results. The Group of Death, however, turned out to be a Group of Disappointment—Sweden, the USA’s most-feared opponent, looked underwhelming and missed the right balance of defense and offense.

  By winning the group, the Americans headed down a favorable path where they faced a low-ranked Colombia, but again they played poorly. On paper, a 2–0 win in the round of 16 should’ve looked good, but in truth the match was a slog that turned in the USA’s favor only when Colombia’s goalkeeper was ejected with a straight red.

  A sampling of headlines from news outlets after that match:

  • Lackluster Efforts at World Cup Bound to Catch up to Americans (USA Today)

  • The U.S. Women’s National Team Is a Shell of Its Former Self For the Win (a USA Today blog)

  • Clueless Coach Threatens to Torpedo World Cup (New York Post)

  • USA Faces Flak for Dated Tactics (Reuters)

  • What’s Going on with the USWNT? (Empire of Soccer)

  • The US Women’s World Cup Team Has a Goal Problem (Newsweek)

  Jill Ellis maintained a positive attitude in her postgame press conference, saying that she was “pleased” with the win—but that only added fodder for the loudest critics of the team. Michelle Akers, the retired legend who won the Golden Boot in the national team’s 1991 World Cup win, told reporters: “If she is pleased with the way we played tonight, then what the hell is she doing coaching our U.S. team?”

  It was clear something wasn’t working. The Americans were struggling to play the ball through the central midfield to create dangerous scoring chances in front of goal. Luck was turning their way, but luck usually runs out at some point.

  Ellis, for her part, never read or followed any of the criticism. Instead, the entire team stayed in what she called a “bubble” where outside forces couldn’t affect them.

  “I don’t read stuff when we win, and I don’t read stuff when we lose. Why? Because I was there,” Ellis says. “I know how it felt, and I know what it looked like. The only people I worry about and care about is the players.”

  The questions about their lackluster performances had started to become routine for the players passing through the mixed zones after practices and games in Canada. The players uniformly said the same thing: They know they can play better, they are not worried, and, no, they don’t listen to what the critics have to say.

  But with Carli Lloyd, who stuck to the same message as her teammates, there was a hint of frustration. Lloyd is the kind of player who wants to take a game by the scruff of the neck and win it all on her own. She hadn’t been able to do that.

  “We’re just following the direction of our coaches, the coaching plan, doing everything they ask of us,” Lloyd said after the Colombia game. “At the end of the day, I’ve got full faith and confidence in everyone that we’ll find our rhythm. We’re working, we’re grinding—the effort’s there.”

  The Americans didn’t know it yet, however, but that win over Colombia was serendipitous in an unexpected way. Yellow cards given to both Lauren Holiday (née Cheney) and Megan Rapinoe meant that Jill Ellis would be forced to change her tactics. The team was about to fix all of its midfield problems.

  A blessing in disguise was about to save the USA’s World Cup. It was about to unleash Carli Lloyd.

  Up to that point in the tournament, Lloyd had been asked to play alongside Lauren Holiday in an ill-defined central midfield partnership. Neither one of them was a defensive midfielder, and neither one of them was an attacking midfielder. They were expected to split those duties between them on the fly. That not only led to gaping holes and poor positioning in the midfield, but it restrained Lloyd, who throughout her career was best as a pure attacking player who could push forward without restraint.

  With China up next in the quarterfinal and Holiday suspended, Ellis turned to 22-year-old Morgan Brian and asked her to play as a holding midfielder behind Lloyd. It was so
mething Brian had never done before—Brian, like both Holiday and Lloyd, spent her career as an attacking player. The game figured to be decided by how well that roster choice played out.

  The first half against China certainly looked better from the Americans, even though China had bunkered as the most defensive team the Americans would face. The U.S. had plenty of scoring chances and China had none, but the match remained scoreless at halftime.

  In the huddle before the second half, Abby Wambach shouted loud enough for live television cameras to hear: “We start fast and we keep the faith! In the first 10 minutes, we get a fucking goal!”

  It took only five minutes. Lloyd, pushing high toward the goal, put her head on a cross that China’s goalkeeper couldn’t get a hand on. The player who scored game-winning goals at the 2008 Olympics and the 2012 Olympics finally had her first goal in the run of play during the 2015 World Cup. She insisted she was far from done.

  “I don’t want to just be a participant in the World Cup,” Lloyd told reporters, almost defiantly, after the win over China. “I want to have a legacy. I want to have people remember me and let my play do the talking.”

  Morgan Brian credited Lloyd with leading the way in the attack.

  “The coaches told me to hold a little more and let her do what she needs to do,” Brian said. “That way Carli feels like she can attack more, and that’s good because we needed that.”

  Looking back on it now, years later, players credit the change in the midfield—a change spurred by yellow-card suspensions—as being the turning point.

  “Sometimes there are these pairings on the field that work better,” says Ashlyn Harris, the backup goalkeeper at the World Cup. “It doesn’t matter how great you are. We all know Carli Lloyd is one of the best of all time—every time she’s on the field, she’s making things happen. But if she’s not connecting and pairing with other people there, now you have two players who aren’t playing at their best. Sometimes you have to make changes to get those great connections on the field.”