A New Era of Soccer Moms Navigates a Rapidly Changing Game

Julie Ertz was on the clock.

On one sunny morning in May, Ertz, a defender for the United States women’s soccer team, rolled out of bed early to dress and feed her infant son, Madden, and pack him for a trip. Then she scrambled to collect her soccer gear and headed off to a meeting with her club team, which was followed by several hours of practice.

As soon as training ended, Ertz was back in her car, hustling to deliver her mother-in-law and Madden to the airport in Los Angeles for a flight to Phoenix. At their home there, Ertz’s husband, the Arizona Cardinals tight end Zach Ertz, would take over parenting duties for several days while Julie and her National Women’s Soccer League team, Angel City F.C., played a match on the East Coast.

In the days and weeks that followed there would be more days like that one: more airport farewells and happy reunions, more training sessions and road trips, more time away from Madden and Zach. As Ertz, 31, described this crazy schedule and her daily challenges juggling roles as a soccer star and a first-time mother, her eyes filled with tears.

“I didn’t know if I’d be back,” she said of returning to soccer only months after Madden’s birth, in hopes of playing in her third Women’s World Cup. “I just didn’t know if that was going to be logistically possible. I don’t think any athlete wants to ever hang up their boots. But, you know, you become a mom and your whole life changes.”

Parenthood has long created professional hurdles for women in every occupation, but also professional consequences: lost jobs, missed promotions and even promising careers sacrificed to the realization that motherhood and full-time work can sometimes feel incompatible, as there are rarely enough hours in the day to give 100 percent to both.

That calculus is no different for world-class soccer players like Ertz and the other moms playing at the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand — a cohort that includes two other members of the U.S. team, Alex Morgan and Crystal Dunn, but also players from countries including France, Germany and Jamaica.

As professional athletes, they all had spent years taking care of their bodies, honing their performances, plotting their careers — focused, ultimately, on themselves. Having children changed that. “Now I can’t steal a nap if I wanted to,” said Dunn, who has a 1-year-old son, Marcel.

In interviews, players who chose to step away the sport to have a baby, said they did so asking themselves the same difficult questions: Will my body ever be the same? Will my focus ever be as sharp? Will I even want to return?

But as women’s soccer experiences a surge of interest and investment that has professionalized the game, raised incomes and made it harder than ever to keep a place on the world’s best teams, athletes who want children are facing a new question:

How much room is there in elite soccer for moms?

Hard Choices

Casey Krueger, a defender on the U.S. team since 2016, thought she could make it back in time for this World Cup. When she found out she was pregnant in 2021, the tournament was still nearly two years away. But after she had a baby boy last July, she worried she might not have enough time to make the roster.

An emergency cesarean section had complicated her delivery, so she hired a pelvic floor therapist to work with her and hopefully hasten her return. By April, Krueger felt she was close: During a friendly match against Ireland, she looked to be in pre-pregnancy form.

Yet she did not make the final cut. During her time off, other players had moved ahead of her on the U.S. depth chart. She is watching the World Cup from home.

“It was a risk I was willing to take,” Kreuger said in a video call, as her son wiggled in her arms, before the U.S. team was named. “But as soon as you see their precious face, you realize that they’re worth anything.”

Players worldwide are taking that risk, or at least taking control of their choices. The former U.S. midfielder Carli Lloyd, for example, said she chose not to play on into her 40s because she and her husband wanted to start a family. Another U.S. player, Becky Sauerbrunn, decided to freeze her eggs last year while she continued her career.

Germany midfielder Melanie Leupolz is playing in the World Cup after having a baby last year, but one of her former teammates, goalkeeper Almuth Schult, is pregnant with her third child and is not. Jamaica has two mothers on its roster. One, Cheyna Matthews, has three sons. In a video published before the World Cup, she choked up when describing how one of her boys always asks why she has to be away from home for “too many days.”

“We just sacrifice a lot to do what we do,” she said.

U.S. Soccer, the governing body of soccer in the United States, said there have been 17 mothers who have played on its national team in its history, starting with Joan Dunlap in the mid-1980s.

Morgan, the star U.S. striker, and her husband, the former player Servando Carrasco, employ a nanny to help care for their 3-year-old daughter, Charlie. But Morgan, 34, prefers to bring Charlie along on many of her trips with the U.S. team, at times setting up an inflatable bed so her daughter can sleep next to her in hotels.

“You basically tend to your child like every step that you’re not on the soccer field or in the gym or in a meeting,” Morgan said. “I think it just gets easier, or maybe it doesn’t get easier, but you get more used to kind of wearing multiple hats all the time.”

At times, Morgan said, the “aunties” on the team take over as unpaid babysitters because her husband or other family members aren’t always available on team trips, part of the kind of extended, unofficial family on which many of soccer’s moms rely. After one exhibition match this spring, for example, Charlie tugged at her mom’s shorts during an unsuccessful search for defender Emily Fox. “Where’s Foxy?” Charlie kept asking. “I want Foxy!”

But the aunties can only do so much. So for years, U.S. Soccer has subsidized nanny care on road trips. The initial gains were made after pressure from the team’s early mothers, but over time even more support was built into the team’s collective bargaining agreement, including daily travel stipends and paid transportation for children and their caregivers. In the U.S. camp, at least, that has made it easier for the mothers on the team to focus on their jobs.

Five mothers, a record for the program, were at the U.S. team’s training camp in April, when highchairs were pulled up to the dining tables and strollers wove paths through the team hotel. At the team’s exhibition matches this spring, the players’ children had their own suite, its door marked with a sign reading, “USA NANNIES.” Inside, the catering included Goldfish crackers and juice boxes.

Mixed Support

While accommodations for players with children have become more common, the ruthlessness of the sport still comes through sometimes, especially in Europe, where the concept remains relatively new.

“Usually, the thinking was that when you were pregnant, your career was over,” Schult told the German outlet Deutsche Welle. “So they were not prepared for having children around.”

When Iceland’s Sara Bjork Gunnarsdottir took maternity leave from her French team, Olympique Lyonnais, in 2021, the team refused to pay her full salary. So with the help of FIFPro, the global players’ union, she filed a claim with FIFA, global soccer’s governing body, and won a landmark judgment. Gunnarsdottir called it “a wake-up call for clubs.”

Sarai Bareman, the head of women’s soccer at FIFA, helped create those new rules, which mandate that clubs grant pregnant players a 14-week maternity leave paid at two-thirds salary and ensure they have a spot on the roster when they return. Now Bareman, a former player, has a young child of her own, a toddler who could be seen running around FIFA’s main hotel in Auckland during the World Cup.

Bareman said eight players had registered with FIFA to have their children travel with their teams at the World Cup, and that several others had made private arrangements. The support they receive, and their visibility, was uncommon even a decade ago.

“I think it’s very much driven by North America, because we’ve seen some very high-profile returning mothers,” she said. “I honestly feel that has influenced a lot of other female players around the world to be more publicly open about the fact that, yes, they’ve got kids, too. Their kids are there. That’s a massive, massive part of their life.”

Morgan had Charlie in 2020, and returned to the sport just in time for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, often wearing a gold ring with the word “MAMA” that she bought for herself as a reminder of her priorities. Since then, she has regularly included Charlie in her postgame celebrations on the field, carrying her around to see the fans and letting her frolic on the grass. Morgan’s 10.1 million Instagram followers are treated to regular updates on Charlie, including one last week with photos of them after they had been reunited after several weeks apart. “She made it, and my heart is full,” Morgan wrote in the post.

No amount of support, though, can ease those separations. One afternoon last week, Morgan excused herself from reporters to say good night to Charlie on a video call. But there was no answer. Charlie had already gone to sleep. “Oh, no,” Morgan said, frowning before she sighed loudly and returned to her interviews.

Role Models

There was a time, not too long ago, when players tried to play down their motherhood. Jessica McDonald, a member of the United States’ World Cup-winning team in 2019, said that in the many years before she made the national team, she would “walk on eggshells” at her clubs when it came to her son, Jeremiah.

“I remember having coaches that said, ‘Oh, are you playing like crap today because your son was up all night?’” she said. “I’m like: ‘First and foremost, my son has got nothing to do with anything that’s happening with me and my career. And how dare you try and rub that in my face?’”

It wasn’t until she started playing professionally in North Carolina, where she had an extensive family network to help her, that McDonald decided she and Jeremiah were going to be a package deal. She wasn’t making enough money to afford child care at the time, she said, so she took Jeremiah to practices and set up his stroller on the sideline. When the team took breaks, McDonald would jog over to check on him, or to give him a bottle or change his diaper.

When Jeremiah got older, McDonald decided that she no longer cared what coaches thought. She became even more proud of being a mother, she said, delighting in letting Jeremiah run around the field after her games, sometimes in his Batman or Superman costumes. Not every player, she said, found a way to make it work.

“There’s a lot of talented women out there who have thrown away their talent to be moms because they didn’t have support from coaches or enough pay,” McDonald said of players in the pro leagues that feed the national team. “And if that didn’t happen, I firmly believe that there would be more moms on the national team right now.”

McDonald did not know it at the time, but other players were watching her succeed with Jeremiah at her side, and were inspired by it. Sydney Leroux, a forward who played for the United States when it won the 2015 World Cup, was one of them.

Leroux had her first child, a boy named Cassius, 14 months after winning the World Cup. Nearly three years later, in the summer of 2019, she had her second, a daughter named Roux. After rushing back to the field in 93 days — Leroux was counting — she said she was sure she was doing everything to pick up where she left off. Until, that is, the coach of her club team explained to her that the national team was no longer interested in her. Its coaches had moved on, Leroux recalled him telling her, because “you had a bad year.”

“How do you even say someone’s had a bad year when they didn’t play one game? I was pregnant,” Leroux said. “It was obviously clear that they didn’t want to go in that direction, and they just used my pregnancy” as an excuse.

After a recent practice with her current team, Angel City, Leroux, 33, said she didn’t “care about the national team anymore whatsoever.” She is happier now, she said, because her children have given her more perspective on life.

“I feel like I have so much more to give,” she said. “I think playing just because I love it still has been the best thing that I’ve ever done.”

‘Dream to Do Both’

Even after she left the national team, Leroux said, she continued to push for the N.W.S.L. to offer higher pay and better support for players with children, including those who wanted to adopt them, because she understood the struggle: Back then, she said, she was spending more on child care than she was making from her club.

Julie Ertz said that she is “indebted to these moms who had little to no resources but wanted to dream to do both,” and the example of players like Leroux and others, including the three mothers who were her teammates at her first World Cup, in 2015, gave her the confidence to believe that she could return to the national team, and to the World Cup, less than a year after Madden was born.

But in the months as her body healed and she worked to get back into playing shape, Ertz couldn’t help but wonder if she had set her career on a new course. Was she OK with the possibility that she might drift away from the national team? Or that she might have to retire from soccer altogether if it kept her from being the best mom for Madden that she could be?

Those are questions she will continue to wrestle with as she seeks the right balance. Soccer doesn’t define her life, she said, but she admitted that “it has created me.”

“I will never be ready to ever say goodbye to the sport,” she said.