Women’s soccer has grown exponentially in the 22 years since Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra marveled at the very existence of a professional game in the USA in Bend It Like Beckham.
In the film, the main characters went off to the USA to play collegiate soccer, while the UK had only the faintest whispers that local clubs might soon field professional teams. Today, the protagonists would have several professional options without ever straying from the reach of Greater London.
And apparently, players around the globe have forgotten that the USA still exists.
Such is the conclusion of the Fifpro Women’s World XI, selected by 7,000 women’s soccer players in 70 countries. The selected team is nothing if not diverse, and it is not diverse. It is, with only two exceptions, an All-Star team composed of players from England and/or the top two teams in Spain.
The entire midfield plays for Champions League champion Barcelona: Aitana Bonmati, Alexia Putellas and Keira Walsh. Until this summer, just before the closing of the window of games the voters were supposed to consider, so did defender Lucy Bronze.
Walsh and Bronze are joined on the World XI by three of her compatriots, giving England an astonishing – if statistically implausible – five players on the team. Alex Greenwood (Manchester City) joins Bronze among the defenders, Lauren James (Chelsea) is up front, and Mary Earps (Manchester United until joining PSG in the summer) is in goal. There is no doubt that the Lionesses boast a strong lineup – but this strong?
Real Madrid have two players on the list. Defender Olga Carmona is the third Spanish player on the team along with Bonmati and Putellas. The other Real Madrid player is a slight step outside Europe – Colombia’s Linda Caicedo.
The XI has a second South American player, and she is on the shortest of shortlists in any consideration of the game’s all-time greats — Marta, who has had a wonderful late-career resurgence with Brazil and the NWSL champion Orlando Pride.
Finally, we have one player who is neither from Europe nor plays there – Barbra Banda, the Zambian forward who this summer scored the third Olympic hat-trick of her career, and needed no time to acclimate from the Chinese league to the NWSL, where she played alongside Marta in Orlando. Her exploits in the NWSL postseason alone – four goals in three games, including the stunning winner in the final – should make a strong case for her to return to the World XI next year. (The window for consideration for the 2024 award closed on the last day of the Olympics.)
Banda also landed in the top tier of the Guardian’s annual global survey of the Top 100 players in the world. But the only other player in the World XI to make the Guardian’s Top 11 was Bonmati.
The World XI has no representatives from Champions League runners-up Lyon. Nor does it include anyone from Germany, who defeated Spain to take bronze at the Paris Olympics, in which England did not take part. Nor does it include anyone from the Netherlands, who finished ahead of England in Uefa Nations League group play, eliminating the team that nevertheless placed five of its players in Fifpro’s selection.
Also omitted was a small Western Hemisphere country that somehow scrapped its way to Olympic gold along with the trophies in the other two cup competitions on the 2024 agenda …
The United States.
Other surveys are far kinder to the Olympic gold medalists. The Guardian’s survey, which had no US players higher than No 18 last year, now places Sophia Smith third, Trinity Rodman fifth, Lindsey Horan sixth, Mallory Swanson ninth and Naomi Girma 10th.
Girma was the top defender in the Guardian survey and a similar ESPN list, which ranked her second overall behind Ballon d’Or winner/Guardian No 1 Bonmati. She at least made Fifpro’s 26-player shortlist along with Horan. But Horan plays for Lyon, which means Girma is the only US player in the NWSL who made the cut.
And the only other player on the shortlist who spent the whole season with an NWSL team was Brazil’s Debinha (Kansas City). England’s Jess Carter and Australia’s goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold signed with US teams during the summer.
To be clear, the Fifpro players are by no means underachievers. Arnold, who didn’t nail down the starting spot upon moving to Portland, and Real Madrid forward Athenea were the only two players on the shortlist who weren’t ranked in the Guardian’s top 100.
But we could make a very good best XI from the players who were not selected to the shortlist, let alone the final XI. (Place in the Guardian’s Top 100 are in parentheses.) We’ve used the same slightly off 3-3-4 formation as the Fifpro XI here.
Goalkeeper: Ann-Katrin Berger (Gotham FC / Germany, No 32). Her league play (NWSL goalkeeper of the year) gives her the nod just ahead of USA’s Alyssa Naeher, who has wrapped up her international career on a high note.
Defender: Giulia Gwinn (Bayern Munich / Germany, No 26). Top defender in Ballon d’Or voting and a crucial part of Germany’s bronze medalist team.
Defender: Glódís Perla Viggósdóttir (Bayern Munich / Iceland, No. 41): Also received a Ballon d’Or nomination, which isn’t easy for defenders from national teams outside the top 10.
Defender: Tarciane (Houston / Brazil, No 55): One of the few bright spots for an atrocious Houston Dash side and a cornerstone of a Brazilian team that so nearly delivered the elusive Olympic gold.
Midfielder: Yui Hasegawa (Manchester City / Japan, No 21): We’ll get into geekdom for this one – playing a holding midfielder role, she completed the most passes of any WSL midfielder (1,251) with a breathtaking completion percentage of 89.4%, second only to defender Millie Turner. She was also third in interceptions with 39.
Midfielder: Patri Guijarro (Barcelona / Spain, No 13): No, Barcelona don’t need any help landing players in these All-Star squads, but she was one of five Barça players in Uefa’s Champions League team of the season and is No 13 on the Guardian’s list.
Midfielder: Rose Lavelle (Gotham FC / USA, No 45): When healthy, she’s the best playmaking midfielder the USA have ever had. She’s healthy.
Forward: Sophia Smith (Portland / USA, No 3): Third in the NWSL in scoring (12) and led the US team with nine goals on the year, three at the Olympics.
Forward: Trinity Rodman (Washington / USA, No 5): One of the hardest-working forwards in the game excels in both glamorous (see her winner in the Olympic quarter-final) and unglamorous duties (watch her willingness to track back on defense).
Forward: Khadija “Bunny” Shaw (Manchester City / Jamaica, No.4): Winner of the Golden Boot (21 goals) and Player of the Season in England’s WSL.
Forward: Caroline Graham Hansen (Barcelona / Norway, No 2): Last and certainly not least – the most inexplicable omission from the Fifpro lists after leading Spain’s Liga F in goals (21) and assists (19).
And we’re still omitting some terrifying scorers, including the USA’s top scorer at the Olympics (Mallory Swanson, Chicago, No 9 in the Guardian’s survey) and the first player to score 20 goals in an NWSL season (Temwa Chawinga, Kansas City/Malawi, No 19).
Fifpro stresses that its awards are special because players vote on them. But players are as susceptible to media hype as anyone else. Within a league, in which every team plays every other team, players can evaluate everyone eligible for any award. That’s not possible in a 7,000-player voting pool.
In the past, the spotlight may have shone too exclusively on the United States, who won the first Women’s World Cup (1991) and first Olympics (1996) before the sport broke into public consciousness with the USA’s World Cup win on home soil in 1999. But it seems that spotlight isn’t getting wider. It has simply moved across the Atlantic.
