It’s important to remember that sporting history, too, is written by the victors.
Yes, Sunday’s Round of 16 loss to Sweden at the 2023 Women’s World Cup was an ignominious end for the last remaining members of the United States women’s golden generation, the players who took the U.S. Women’s National Team to three consecutive World Cup finals between 2011 and 2019, winning the tournament twice. Two of them, Megan Rapinoe and Kelley O’Hara, missed penalties in the shootout loss. One of them, Alex Morgan, was subbed off in extra time after going scoreless in four starts this tournament. One of them, Becky Sauerbrunn, who was set to captain the team in New Zealand before a late foot injury ruled her out of the tournament entirely, was watching from home.
The defeat still stings from here, days out, the disappointment of a team that only ever underperformed this time around on the biggest of stages, of players who never rose to the levels we knew them to be capable of. There will be some kind of reckoning, a course correction that is unpleasant for some as-yet-unknown amount of people, who will lose their jobs or have to change their roles. The U.S. program has been proceeding as though everything would work itself out for too many years. It can’t afford to do so anymore.
Those are questions for the future. Right now, with Rapinoe retiring from soccer at the end of this season and the international futures of the others up in the air, should also be a time to consider the legacies of this quartet, and what it means for them to suffer their nation’s earliest-ever defeat at a World Cup in their fourth tournament together.
The short answer is: Nothing at all. These players and their teammates won two consecutive world titles, something only three teams in history, men’s or women’s, have ever done. Only two other sides have made it to three consecutive finals: the German men from 1982 to 1990 and the Brazilian men from 1994 to 2002. These are achievements that don’t get blotted out, no matter what comes after them. The players deserve criticism this time, but that criticism is ephemeral compared to what they’ve accomplished in their careers. “World Cup loser” isn’t going to stick to any of them. There’s a reason Michael Jordan got to call a documentary about his final championship season “The Last Dance” even though he came back to play two more anticlimactic seasons. Titles are forever.
And so I come to praise these four, not to bury them. The good these women did will live after them; the defeat against Sweden will be buried under the monuments to their triumphs. The chorus of misanthropes celebrating Rapinoe’s shootout miss because she once picked a fight with the former president and won it are four years too late to have any impact on her legacy whatsoever. Those who remain angry at her for bringing politics into sports are trying to close the door on a deserted barn. That horse bolted long ago. It won the Preakness then spoke out against animal testing from the winner’s circle.
Rapinoe will be remembered not just for her contributions to two World Cup wins but for the way she took a platform primarily devoted to prosaic messages of uplift and inspiration and sharpened it into one that could be wielded in service of social causes. She forced observers to confront the fact that it can be difficult to uplift and inspire those being held down by society’s injustices, among them racism, sexism, and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.
Rapinoe first knelt for the national anthem mere days after Colin Kaepernick switched to that mode of protest, well before similar gestures became widespread, even throughout the NFL. Within a few years, pregame kneeling before kickoff—albeit not during an anthem—would become the favored gesture of competitions throughout the world to support the cause of racial justice, but at the time, Rapinoe was booed by fans and scolded by her coach. U.S. Soccer passed a policy that banned the practice.
Through it all Rapinoe never appeared fazed, at least publicly, by either the abuse or the acclaim. She turned herself into a lightning rod, absorbing the attention and the vitriol she drew and using it to amplify future messages: against bigotry, for equal pay.
It’s this unflappability that defined her moment of triumph. As some of the dynamism of her youth faded with age, she replaced it with equal measures of cleverness and confidence. She became the top scorer and was named the best player at the 2019 World Cup mostly on the back of her nerve: Three of her six goals were some of the steeliest-eyed penalties you have ever seen, which is why her miss Sunday caught everyone, including her, by surprise. It was only the second penalty she’s missed in her entire career.
Rapinoe did not win the World Cup alone though. After the initial national anthem furor, she rarely stood alone either, not when criticizing the president and certainly not in the fight for equal pay. So much of this particular quartet’s success over the past decade—and yes, it is a somewhat arbitrary bracketing that could include a number of different players at various points since 2011—comes from how they complemented each other on the field and off, a fusion of skill sets and personality types that strengthened them all, making them a sort of USWNT TMNT. (This specific analogy unfortunately doesn’t work because Sauerbrunn would be both Leonardo and Donatello, and Carli Lloyd is the national team’s once and future Raphael.)
Morgan loped her way into the national consciousness as the hard-sprinting, goal-scoring “Baby Horse,” but would come to embrace the unglamorous physical play required to be a back-to-the-goal center forward, the sort that would make her predecessor Abby Wambach proud. Through this stylistic transition, as well as time off before and after the birth of her daughter, she remained the team’s golden girl, the most prominent face on magazine covers and in advertisements, though Rapinoe has nearly caught up to her in this last metric, Forbes reports. But Morgan also learned to balance on both sides of the soapbox her fame provided her. On the one hand, Morgan authored “a fun-filled middle grade series about believing in yourself and working as a team” and started a foundation that is “unwavering in our pursuit to help girls and women find confident paths forward in sport and in life.” On the other, she became one of the most vocal figures in the team’s fight to close the gender pay gap and the broader campaign for better treatment for women’s sports, and expressed hesitancy about whether the USWNT should play in states that blocked transgender children from participating in sports.
Rapinoe and Morgan were the most prominent voices in the six-year fight for equal pay, but the ultimate success of that campaign in 2022 was equally reliant on the efforts of Sauerbrunn, O’Hara, and others. Sauerbrunn served as on-field team captain, president of the newly formed United States Women’s National Team Players Association, and “moral compass” for several years of the struggle. She guided the players in the locker room and mediated with both the coaching staffs and the federation, all while serving as the team’s ultimate safety blanket in the back. The USWNT may have hardly missed her on the field in New Zealand—it did concede just two shots on target in the entire tournament—but her presence on the roster might have been indispensable anyway. Read enough quotes from her teammates about her leadership and her locker room presence, and you’re going to wind up hoping she runs for Senate one day, a fate I never would have guessed I might wish on someone I actually like and admire.
Sauerbrunn, Morgan, and O’Hara have thus far been mum on their futures with the national team. With another Olympics coming up just next year, all three could theoretically make that roster. But another World Cup in four years is far-fetched, even for an athlete as cerebral as the 38-year-old Sauerbrunn. The unrelenting O’Hara, 35, was a backup at this World Cup, as well as an emotional linchpin and occasional standards enforcer. She could continue to provide veteran leadership and good locker room presence as she approaches 40. (In the Ninja Turtles metaphor, she is Michelangelo.)
Morgan, 34, is the best bet to play a role at the Olympics next year or even the World Cup in 2027. She said after the game she had no plans to retire from national team duty. But center forward is the United States’ deepest position, and her presence in the lineup shunts the likes of Sophia Smith, Trinity Rodman, and Lynn Williams into wide spots where they look less comfortable, which was one diagnosis for why the U.S. offense looked so anemic in this tournament. After going goalless at the World Cup, Morgan will have to prove she deserves her spot over these other options, even if it’s just as a super sub. It would be silly to count her out after a tournament where lots of players struggled; she led the National Women’s Soccer League in goals last year, even as Smith was named the league’s MVP. But the decision can’t be automatic, either. The team has to experiment with new looks, too.
The U.S. is bound to have some World Cup winners on its 2027 roster—Lindsey Horan, Mallory Swanson, and Rose Lavelle are all obvious candidates—but for an outfit as dedicated to continuity and culture as the USWNT has historically been, a link all the way through the most successful era in the history of the women’s game must be an enticing prospect. However, this particular chapter of the team’s history, one that can be traced through the successes and struggles of this veteran core as they rose from greenhorns to stalwarts to leaders, has come to a close. We will remember it for far more than how it ended. The highs they reached will make sure of that.
