Alex Morgan: Farewell to One of the USWNT’s All-time Greats
15 years after making her senior debut for the US Women’s National Team, Alex Morgan would announce that she was hanging up her cleats for good. Last Thursday, Morgan announced her retirement from professional football. The move was quite the shock that caught many people by surprise and that initial shock took some time to process.
The news became more palpable, however, once it was revealed that Morgan was pregnant. Already a mother to daughter Charlie, Alex will soon have another child and Charlie Carrasco will become a big sister. And it is quite fitting that just as one phase of life comes to an end, a new one begins. There could not be a more poetic ending for a player that wrote stanzas across the pitch and used her magic to turn them into aphorisms.
The prolific forward’s style of play was a perfect example of this. She wasn’t the flashiest player. After all, she didn’t have the dribbling skills of let’s say, Garrincha. However, what she was was consistent and that came through her direct style of play. That directness led to her being a consistent player who got the job done.
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Morgan was also a team player, willing to make the necessary sacrifices to help her team win. Whether assisting on defensive duties or dropping deep to receive the ball in the midfield, her spirit of sacrifice was instrumental to helping her teams win games.
And that style of play led to Morgan winning two World Cups and scoring 123 international goals. She also won a gold medal with the US in 2012 thanks to her well-timed header. Morgan also won the UWCL with Olympique Lyonnais and the NWSL Championship with the Portland Thorns.
She also helped her last team, the San Diego Wave, win the Shield and Challenge cup within the same year. She’s also won quite a few individual awards, including the NWSL’s Golden Boot, and twice being named the US Soccer Player of The Year.
While her style of play might have been deceptively simple, it was actually more complex than it appeared to be. Alex’s style of play revolved around making smart runs to get into scoring position or to draw defenders towards her, thus freeing up space for her teammates.
This requires a certain amount of knowledge to get it right as it entails understanding the potential, defensive strategies teams will employ against you, and adjusting your positioning to make runs to create space and opportunities for yourself and your teammates. This would also lead to her being offside many times, mainly due to outspeeding the competition.
And that is, in essence, a perfect summation of Alex Morgan. She is a leader who leads both by example and through her actions as well. And those actions included a lot of selfless advocacy on behalf of others. This was demonstrated through her behind the scenes work as Morgan was a driving force to the ousting of Paul Riley as the Portland Thorns head coach for alleged sexual misconduct and coercion of former players.
One of the people who brought these revelations forward was Mana Shim. Shim also happened to be a friend of Morgan’s and she did everything she could to help her friend out. This included filing a report that also exposed multiple leaders at both the league and club level for how they mishandled accusations that were made seven years earlier by her former Thorns teammates, Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly. Morgan used her platform to both call out those who ignored the concerns of Shim and Farrelly and to aid them in their fight as well.
In Morgan’s words, she states that “I couldn’t find an HR contact […] I couldn’t find an anonymous hotline. I couldn’t even find an anti-harassment policy that might lay out exactly what he was doing that was reportable.”
So instead, she took it upon herself to become the HR department and helped her friend report Riley to the NWSL. Although Shim was failed by the system which lacked the infrastructure to give her the support she needed, Morgan helped put in place the changes that would allow others to report the abuse they were experiencing to the league.
Paul Riley would later be banned for life from the NWSL for abusing his players and he still holds a lot of resentment against Morgan because of this. Riley and then former owner, A few, former, Portland Thorns staff members even fostered rumors of Alex being a ‘difficult’ locker room presence whose ego overshadowed the other members of the team. Morgan was willing to swallow this bilious and poisonous pill just to keep her friends’ safe.
She then followed this up by being the lead plaintiff in the equal pay lawsuit, which the USWNT players filed three months before the 2019 World Cup. Morgan did so knowing her name and global recognition would draw more attention to the case and increase the pressure on the U.S. Soccer Federation.
Her involvement went well beyond that, as according to Becca Roux (executive director for the USWNT Players Association) Morgan would sit in and participate in calls with attorneys and advisers. She would also peruse over documents and return them with edits and notes.
Morgan also championed LGBTQ rights and promoted small Black businesses during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. She was also quite vocal in showing her support towards other players suffering injustices, including Jenni Hermoso in 2023. As Bryce Miller wrote in the Union Tribune, “You didn’t choose yourself. You chose everyone.”
And everyone else is better off with the choices she made.
It’s also hard to accurately describe Alex Morgan’s impact on the soccer landscape. When Morgan first began playing soccer, she would, like so many other kids in the region, make so many trips to San Diego, the youth soccer Mecca, to play a few games. The kid from Diamond Bar, in nearby LA County, would then make the city her home in 2021, as she engineered a move to the NWSL’s newest franchise, the San Diego Wave.
Morgan would be more than just a passing transplant in this city. Unlike some previous athletes who were paid millions to play for the city’s teams, Morgan actually endeared herself to the local San Diego community. This would include doing outreach and charitable work with underprivileged children and buying tickets to have them watch her play games at the Torero and the Snapdragon.
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She would also routinely praise the city and show her support for the local sports teams, most notably the San Diego Padres and the San Diego State Aztecs. In turn, they would turn around and show their support to her and the Wave by showing up to the team’s games.
There was also no air of inauthenticity to her embracing the city. Instead, she genuinely seems to like us. And as a beaten down sports town whose sporting successes have been few and far between, to have someone of Alex’s caliber embrace the City of San Diego meant the world to us. After all, champion caliber athletes normally don’t settle here. Or at least, they don’t win titles in this town. In fact, they tend to leave us and find sporting success elsewhere.
It was rare that an athlete of Morgan’s caliber would willingly choose to call San Diego home and her doing so immediately endeared her to the local residents. Now, she has cemented her place in the stars and joined the constellation of the city’s most beloved athletes.
She became a goddess in a pantheon that included the likes of Tony Gwynn, Trevor Hoffman, Manny Machado, and the homegrown hero himself, Junior Seau. She was also one of the few women’s athletes in a mythos whose heroes had mainly been men. And like Gwynn, she too, came from Los Angeles, only to end up falling in love with the town down the I-5 and making it her home.
In my new era 💅 pic.twitter.com/fyFl2QnptN
— Alex Morgan (@alexmorgan13) April 2, 2023
While playing for the Wave, the team managed to break all sorts of records during their first two years of existence, including being the first expansion team to make the NWSL’s playoffs during their first season, winning a plethora of postseason awards, capped off with hardware won on the pitch, and managed to also break three attendance records along the way.
And with their successes on the field, the Wave brought back hope to a city that wasn’t used to having it. It was an audacious, addictive, and awe inspiring feeling, and one we weren’t used to having. It was also quite the potent drug but sadly, we didn’t have much time to develop an addiction to it.
Because, unfortunately, that hope that San Diego initially had with the Wave has been tainted in the past few months, due to credible allegations of mistreatment and abuse by former staff from members of the Wave’s front office. As was noted before, abusive behaviors are not uncommon amongst the NWSL teams. And like a few other teams before them, the Wave were not immune to this.
There are hopes that Alex would continue with the Wave during her post-playing career and would do so in either an administrative or ambassadorial role. However, if Morgans wants to stay away from the team for the time being, then it would be completely understandable.
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After all, having a child is stressful enough and working under these circumstances might add to that stress.
So for now, it seems like her final role with the team was that of a player. On Sunday, August 8th, Alexandra Patricia Morgan officially played her last game for the San Diego Wave. She exited the pitch at the 13th minute of the game – with 13 mirroring the chosen number of her jersey – to a rousing standing ovation from the crowd. Before then, she also missed a penalty kick, which was a wry and fitting irony to the end of her career, given her previous. spotty history with spot kicks.
Before she left the pitch for good, she passed the armband that hugged her biceps to teammate Kailen Sheridan, a symbolic passing of the torch where she declared that the future of the team was now in her hands.
“This last moment I shared on the field with you, I will cherish forever”, she told a crowd of 26,516. Many had flown in at the last minute from other parts of the country to see her play for one last time. Money was no object when it came to seeing history happen. Money was also no object when it came to sending a hero off into the sunset.
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Morgan has always been a humble person who doesn’t brag about her accomplishments. In fact, she’s more prone to praising others than herself. Her teammates showing up to her final press conference on their day off is a testament to how much they love her.
They aren’t the only ones, as millions around the world feel the same way. There aren’t enough words to describe Alex Morgan and all that she’s done both for women’s football and just for women in general.
So, we’ll end this piece with a few simple words: Thanks for everything, Alex.
By: Stephanie Insixiengmay / @statsandedits
Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Ira L. Black – Corbis – Getty Images / Jenny Chuang – ISI Photos – Getty Images