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      A New Era of Soccer Moms Navigates a Rapidly Changing Game

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      Women have long blended motherhood and elite sports. But as soccer expands its support systems, it is also demanding ever more of its players.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?Casey Krueger, right, did not make the U.S. World Cup roster after racing to get back on the field after her pregnancy. Brad Smith/USSF, via Getty ImagesHard ChoicesCasey 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.U.S. forward Alex Morgan has made her daughter, Charlie, a fixture at her team’s games.Brad Smith/ISI Photos, via Getty ImagesMixed SupportWhile 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.Jessica McDonald brought her son to the 2019 World Cup. She knows other players who left the sport after having to choose between their soccer careers and starting a family. Pete Kiehart for The New York TimesRole ModelsThere 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.”Sydney Leroux no longer plays for the U.S. women’s team. But she said her own experience led her to push for higher pay and better support for players with children.Katharine Lotze/Getty Images‘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.Crystal Dunn and her son, Marcel.Marlena Sloss for The New York Times More

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      The Gaps Get Smaller as the World Cup Gets Larger

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      Expanding the Women’s World Cup was a good idea. Just not for the reasons FIFA thinks.Given where the journey had started and where it had led, it was no wonder that watching the Philippines win a game at the Women’s World Cup felt as if it defied rational explanation, even to those involved.Not quite two years ago, the Philippines had toiled to beat Nepal in a qualifying game just to earn a place in a low-profile regional tournament. Now that same team had beaten New Zealand — on home soil, no less — and with the whole world watching.For those who were part of that journey, the distance traveled and the ground traversed seemed too great to be feasible. It was impossible to imagine that a team that had been there could ever be here, and vice versa.“Overwhelming, crazy,” said Sarina Bolden, the live-wire forward who had scored her country’s first goal at a World Cup. Her coach, Alen Stajcic, found it hard to pitch his hyperbole. He started out at “staggering” and went from there, cycling through “miraculous and unbelievable” before landing on “mind-blowing.”The emotion, the euphoric instinct to attribute the wondrous to the divine, was understandable. The Philippines had entered the World Cup as a rank outsider. “No one expected us to win,” Bolden said. “We’re used to that.” Its team had never won a game at the tournament before. That was not desperately surprising: It had previously played only one, and that was last week. Just a few months ago, it was ranked outside the world’s top 50.The Philippines went out of the World Cup, but not before leaving its mark on it.Marty Melville/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe thing about miracles, though, is that their mechanics can be a little more mundane than they may first appear. The Philippines might have left the tournament precisely as anticipated — after the group phase, eliminated thanks to an unceremonious 6-0 defeat to Norway — but not before it left an indelible mark.Its victory against New Zealand was the greatest surprise of a World Cup brimming with them. It is just that, beneath the surface, it was perhaps not that much of a surprise at all.To watch the first 10 days of this tournament has been to experience the sensation that the world is simultaneously expanding and contracting. The Philippines beat one of the World Cup’s co-hosts, and Nigeria overcame Australia, the other.Morocco, the first North African team to reach the finals, beat South Korea. Colombia scored in the 97th minute to beat Germany, Europe’s great powerhouse. Jamaica held firm to take a point against France, a result the country’s coach, Lorne Donaldson, described as “No. 1” in its history, “for men or women.”Most of those nations will, of course, follow the same arc as the Philippines. Nigeria and Colombia apart, it is unlikely any will make it as far as the knockout rounds. The phosphene imprint of their brief, dazzling moments in the spotlight, though, will last.And so, too, will the fact that even in defeat, most of those teams making their debuts on this stage have emerged with credit. True, there have been a couple of shellackings: Germany against Morocco, both Spain and Japan against Zambia, Norway against the Philippines.Top women’s players no longer see a gap between themselves and stars from bigger nations because they know one another from club play.David Gray/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThose, though, have been isolated cases. Haiti lost only narrowly to England. Ireland has run both Australia and Canada close. The United States scored only three against Vietnam. Nobody has conceded 13 in a single game. Nobody has been humiliated. The horizons of women’s soccer are both broader and closer than ever before.“We’ve been saying this all along,” said Vlatko Andonovski, the coach of the United States. “Whether it’s Nigeria or Jamaica, South Africa and the Philippines: These are the teams that actually show how much women’s soccer has grown.”Regrettably, at some point, FIFA will seek to take credit for that. Effect will be mistaken for cause. Four years ago, with what appeared to be suspiciously little warning, global soccer’s governing body decreed that the Women’s World Cup — previously contested by 24 teams — would expand to 32, the same size as the men’s tournament (for now).At the time, the idea was met with considerable skepticism. The move was announced only a few weeks after Thailand had conceded more than a dozen goals in a game against the United States. Many suspected the expansion would turn an exception into a rule. “A lot of people were worried with the expansion that we weren’t ready for it on the women’s side,” said Randy Waldrum, the Nigeria coach.FIFA’s president, the never less than bombastic Gianni Infantino, was unmoved. “The astounding success of this year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup in France made it very clear that this is the time to keep the momentum going and take concrete steps to foster the growth of women’s football,” he said. He said he believed more countries would invest in their women’s teams if they had a “realistic chance of qualifying.”From his vantage point — on the Cook Islands, the sun-kissed paradise where for reasons that are not entirely clear he has spent a considerable part of the early stages of the tournament — Infantino would doubtless claim he has been vindicated.Morocco, like the Philippines, posted its first World Cup win in its first trip to the tournament.Brenton Edwards/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWould the Philippines have moved to appoint the experienced Stajcic, the former coach of the Australian women’s team, if it had not seen the World Cup as a realistic target? Without his presence, would his players have garnered the “tournament experience” — in a parade of competitions in both Southeast Asia and Asia as a whole — and “maturity” that Stajcic felt allowed them to hold off New Zealand last week in Wellington?“The commitment level in terms of who they brought in as a coach and the things they’re putting into the program are paying dividends for them,” Waldrum said of the Philippines. “I think that’s why we are seeing the growth.”More than anyone, though, Waldrum is well aware of the holes in Infantino’s logic. His team, after all, is still locked in a pay dispute with its national federation, which has so far withheld the players’ win bonuses; Waldrum himself has previously complained that he has been “very frustrated by the federation and the lack of support.”Donaldson, in charge of a Jamaica side that might yet qualify for the tournament’s knockout phase, could make a similar case. At least some of the expenses associated with bringing Jamaica to the World Cup were paid for by a fund-raising campaign arranged by the mother of one of its players.The expansion of the World Cup has, instead, worked despite the national associations — still, in many cases, chronically lacking in both money and commitment — rather than because of them. And it has done so because of a host of factors that have little, if anything, to do with the tournament itself.The increased professionalization of the game, particularly in Europe, has led to vast and rapid improvements in everything from conditioning to diet to tactical sophistication. The coaches, on the whole, are more experienced, more adroit, more suitable to the talent of their players.“Our preparation is a little bit better this time around,” Donaldson said. “Just the ability to have proper coaching, proper diet and the understanding of what’s going on in world soccer” had helped his team to compete despite a colossal resource gap to the game’s bigger, richer nations, he said.Haiti has left an impression on bigger nations despite not posting a win.Dan Peled/ReutersAt the same time, the whirlwind growth of the game has led to the players themselves being granted more opportunities to play competitive, elite soccer, as the clubs of the surging European leagues — as well as the National Women’s Soccer League in the United States — cast their nets ever wider in the hunt for talent.Waldrum’s squad with Nigeria, for example, contains a host of players employed in France and Spain, including Asisat Oshoala, the Barcelona forward. Ireland’s team is drawn, in large part, from the teams of England’s Women’s Super League.As many as 14 of Haiti’s squad currently play in France — not all for clubs like Lyon, as the teenage midfielder Melchie Dumornay now does, but professional, committed clubs nonetheless. Even the Philippines, the ultimate underdog, has called up only three players from its domestic league. The majority of its team plays, instead, in Sweden, Norway and Australia.“Some of these players are getting a chance now to go and play in some of the top leagues, and they’re taking it,” Donaldson said. “You can see it, the Jamaican players, the Haitian players. They’re developing.”And as they do so, the players they have encountered — the ones who might once have seemed so distant — become just a little more familiar. They know they belong on the same field, because they have done it before. The horizon, the one that seems so broad, is far closer than it might appear. What looks, at first glance, like a miracle, a bolt from a clear blue sky, is really nothing more than the landfall of a gathering storm. More

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      Megan Rapinoe Is Not Going Quietly

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      Sitting on the bench as her United States team played at the Women’s World Cup last week, Megan Rapinoe was sure that she was in the wrong spot. She was just as sure that her coach, Vlatko Andonovski, should see that, and fix it.“I’m always shocked when I don’t play,” Rapinoe said with a laugh, joking with reporters on Sunday about her uneasy new role: reserve. “Every player who starts thinks they should play,” she added. “And everyone on the bench thinks they should be on the field.”What else was Rapinoe supposed to think, having come to this World Cup as a marquee player who had been a game changer in its last three editions? For the first time in 12 years, Rapinoe, the outspoken and accomplished leader of the U.S. team for the past decade, is watching the World Cup instead of starring in it. In the first U.S. game at this tournament, a 3-0 victory over Vietnam that was her 200th appearance for the United States, Rapinoe came into the game as a substitute for the final half-hour. In the second game, she did not play at all, even as her team struggled to create space and scoring chances in a 1-1 tie with the Netherlands.Rapinoe, 38, expected this World Cup to be a sort of changing of the guard, of course. She is the oldest player on the team, and on the eve of her team’s departure for New Zealand she announced that this would be her final World Cup and her final professional season.She will never be happy about sitting out, she said. But she also knows she has a role to play.Rapinoe speaking with reporters on Sunday.Abbie Parr/Associated Press“Ultimately, we’re at the World Cup — this is where everybody wants to be, whether you’re playing 90 minutes or whether you’re a game-changer or whatever,” she said. “I think it’s a lot similar to what I thought it would be, bringing all the experience that I can, all the experience that I have, and ultimately being ready whenever my number is called up.”She is, she said, embracing her new role. Maybe the United States needs a player — a player like her, was the clear implication — who gives “20 minutes in two games that wins the team the tournament, or wins a team a game that gets it to the next round.”The United expects to have a long road yet at this World Cup, and no one — including Rapinoe — wants it to be a weekslong eulogy to her career. But Rapinoe’s teammates are already mourning her departure, no matter how many minutes she plays here. When Kelley O’Hara, the defender who has played with Rapinoe at the past three World Cups, was asked days before the tournament started to consider what it will be like when Rapinoe is gone, she broke into tears.“She’s done such incredible things for this team and for the world, so to be able to see the up close and personal Pinoe, and be close to that has been really special,” O’Hara said. “I hope that we all send her out on a high.”“This is where everybody wants to be, whether you’re playing 90 minutes or whether you’re a game-changer or whatever,” Rapinoe said.Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesAlex Morgan called Rapinoe a special player, one the team can still count on. “She makes things happen out of nothing,” Morgan said. “We’ve seen that time and time again.”It is unclear if Rapinoe will have many more chances to make something out of nothing at the World Cup. Andonovski has committed to his new lineup, so much so that he declined to make changes even as it struggled to find a goal against the Netherlands. But Rapinoe made it clear that, from her seat, the United States missed out on controlling its fate against the Netherlands.The team could have set itself up to claim first place in its group if it had beaten the Dutch, most likely locking in an easier path in the knockout rounds. It still controls its destiny — a win, especially a big one, over Portugal on Tuesday would achieve the same result. But Rapinoe knows as well as anyone that World Cups are won or lost by the finest of margins. On the biggest stages, she said, the smallest details can matter, and so she will keep working, keep pushing to play.Rapinoe and the rest of the U.S. reserves who didn’t play against the Netherlands had time to consider their fate as they gathered at training the day after the match. The starters were back at the hotel, resting, as is usual after a game. For Rapinoe, the substitute, there was training. It was a hard lesson, she acknowledged, but also an opportunity.“You cry in your shower or you cry with your friends in the sauna,” she said. But after that, you have no choice but to make the best of it.Marlena Sloss for The New York TimesRapinoe reminded everyone on Sunday that she is not any less of a competitor than she was in her first World Cup, in 2011, the tournament in which, she said, she “announced herself.” In the quarterfinals that year against Brazil, it was Rapinoe who delivered a last-second ball from midfield to Abby Wambach, who scored the header that saved the Americans from a humbling early elimination. The U.S. went on to reach the final.Pressure-filled moments like that remind Rapinoe of where the United States stands in this World Cup. And while she might not be the go-to player anymore, she still has a lot to offer, she said. Watching from the sideline on Thursday, she said, she spotted “some really simple fixes” that she was more than happy to share with her teammates and her coaches.On Sunday, Rapinoe was quick to emphasize that just because she is OK with her role as a sage and helpful veteran, that doesn’t mean she is going any easier on the younger players during practices.Every day in training, she said, her job is to try to take one of theirs. “And that makes them better,” she said. “That makes me better. That makes the whole team better.” More

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      Savannah DeMelo’s World Cup Trial by Fire

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      DeMelo had never played for the United States women’s team when she was named to the World Cup roster. Thrust into a starting role, she’s doing her best to fit in.Savannah DeMelo said the reality that she was playing for the United States in the Women’s World Cup finally hit her as the fans in the stadium counted down the final 10 seconds before her first match. She only started to get truly comfortable, though, once people starting kicking her.The hair pulls and the shoves and the elbows? Those were just a bit of welcome familiarity for DeMelo, one of the most fouled players in the National Women’s Soccer League. “I’m used to getting kicked,” DeMelo said.It is all the rest that is still new: the global stage; the sky-high expectations inside and outside the U.S. team; the constant pressure to not let down a squad that has won the last two World Cups. DeMelo, after all, had never played a game for the United States before she was named to the World Cup roster last month.Her inclusion, as the least experienced of the 14 World Cup rookies on the U.S. roster, was one of the biggest surprises of the Americans’ run-up to the tournament. But it has been her presence in Coach Vlatko Andonovski’s starting lineup, and the role she has been asked to play as a midfield orchestrator and instigator, that could prove pivotal as the United States tries to navigate its way through the knockout rounds of the tournament.Buda Mendes/Getty ImagesDeMelo’s first start, against Vietnam, was only her second game for the U.S. team.Buda Mendes/Getty ImagesJackie Groenen and the Netherlands offered a sterner, more physical test.Marty Melville/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNamed as a starter in the United States’ first two World Cup games, DeMelo, 25, has been a reliable fit for the position normally filled by Rose Lavelle, who arrived at the World Cup still working her way back to full fitness after an injury-marred spring.While Andonovski manages Lavelle’s minutes — he has said he prefers to have her finish games than start them, for now — DeMelo took her place in the U.S. games against Vietnam and the Netherlands.“Rose brings a creativity to the team, a fluidity,” said Andi Sullivan, who has started alongside both Lavelle and DeMelo for the national team. “And for me, having played with her for a long time, I know where she’s gonna be.”But Sullivan added that DeMelo has been a seamless replacement, “and I think it’s been awesome have both Rose and Savannah play in that position, because they both bring such awesome qualities on the ball, on the dribble, interchanging positions.”DeMelo has started in the position normally occupied by Rose Lavelle, whose match fitness has rendered her a substitute in the first two games.Andrew Cornaga/Associated PressAndonovski saw a place for DeMelo in his team months ago.He first called her into camp last year, both to reward DeMelo’s performances for Racing Louisville, where she had been one of the league’s top players as a rookie, but also, perhaps, to see how she fit within the group of World Cup winners and eager rookies he was assembling to take to New Zealand and Australia.Coach and player kept up a regular exchange of text messages and critiques through the winter, the first sign for DeMelo that she might have a shot to win a place on the World Cup team despite her relative inexperience. The problem, she knew, was that she might not have a lot of chances to show the national team coaching staff what she could do.In January, she said last week, she realized there would only be one camp before the World Cup, and she remembered that Andonovski had told the team he would be closely watching their performances in club games. So she resolved to follow some advice her father, a soccer coach, had always repeated about “controlling the controllables.” She vowed to focus on her play for Louisville, and “make it almost like they couldn’t not take me.”The goals followed, five in 12 games this season. But when DeMelo and the rest of the team got an email setting the day when Andonovski would call them individually to tell them if they had made the World Cup team, all her stresses came back. The news, though, was exactly what she wanted to hear.Keeping her place in the lineup, though, is not a given. The U.S. has struggled to finish its chances in its first two games, and Andonovski spoke last week about “how can we help the players that are in a position to finish, giving them a little bit of service, whether it’s finding them on the right step or the proper foot, the final touch — the service before the finish.”That creativity is what Lavelle has offered in her two relief appearances. She brought an urgency to the Americans’ attack in the opener against Vietnam, when she entered after the first hour. She did the same against the Netherlands, when she replaced DeMelo at halftime, restored some bite to a midfield that was being bullied and outplayed, and delivered the assist on Lindsey Horan’s tying goal.Andonovski has been purposely vague about when Lavelle might be fit enough to go 90 minutes. Instead, he has preached the value of getting game-time minutes for his inexperienced starting lineup, a preference so strong that he only made one of his five available substitutions as his team pressed for a winning goal in its draw against the Netherlands on Saturday.Lavelle had replaced DeMelo by then, and she may offer do the same on Tuesday against Portugal, perhaps even earlier. The team will find out the lineup on Monday night. But DeMelo said she won’t be looking over her shoulder.“The reason I’m here is just to be myself,” DeMelo said, “so that’s what I kind of want to bring to the team.” More

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      How Lindsey Horan Got Mad, and How That Got the U.S. Even

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      Lindsey Horan’s tying goal against the Netherlands saved her team at the World Cup. But it came from a dark place she knows well.Lindsey Horan was still curled up on the field when she decided, enough already.Enough of getting kicked by players from the Netherlands. Enough of letting the Dutch dictate the game. Enough of the United States women’s team, the two-time reigning world champion, not playing its best at this Women’s World Cup.Horan and her team were an hour into a physical match against the Netherlands filled with sharp elbows and powerful shoves, and they were losing it by a goal. Now Horan, a United States co-captain, had just been hip-checked hard by a Netherlands counterpart, Danielle van de Donk. So after several minutes of being examined by medical staff, and another moment of being lectured by the referee for shoving van de Donk, Horan did exactly what her teammate Julie Ertz had just begged her to do.“Just score this goal,” Ertz had whispered as they lined up to await a corner kick from Rose Lavelle, “to shut everyone up.”And that’s just what she did. As Rose Lavelle’s corner screamed into the penalty area, Horan sprinted for the precise spot where it would arrive. “An absolute dime,” she called the pass from Lavelle. She jumped to meet it, snapped her head and sent the ball straight into the net.“I don’t think you ever want to get me mad because I don’t react in a good way,” Horan said. “Usually, I just go and I want something more. I want to win more. I want to score more. I want to do more for my team.”Horan’s goal lifted the United States to a 1-1 tie with the Netherlands, with one more group match game to play for each team. At the moment, the teams are tied with four points from a win and a draw, but the United States holds a slight edge on goal difference because it beat Vietnam by three goals and the Netherlands beat Portugal by only one.The winner of the group will be decided after the third and final matches in the group, which will be played simultaneously on Tuesday. The U.S. will face Portugal, and the Netherlands will play Vietnam.The United States will enter that game with a new spring in its step, and Horan is the main reason for that. All it took, it turned out, was a bit of rage.“That’s when you get the best football from Lindsey,” Horan said of herself.She is not the first U.S. women’s player, of course, to take it upon herself to personally change the team’s trajectory at a World Cup, to will it to victory on soccer’s biggest stage. Think Megan Rapinoe in 2019, or Carli Lloyd in the 2015 final, to take two recent examples. In each case, and in Horan’s on Thursday, a key player suddenly came to personify the team’s history and legacy — four World Cup titles, four decades atop world soccer — and turn the momentum her team’s way.Horan and Danielle van de Donk of the Netherlands, whose foul led to shoves, shouts and the only U.S. goal.Buda Mendes/Getty ImagesOn Thursday, even Horan’s teammates sensed something was about to change. Forward Alex Morgan said when she saw the referee pull Horan and van de Donk aside after the two exchanged shoves and heated words following the foul, and just before the corner kick that ensued, she “felt like something was going to happen.”United States Coach Vlatko Andonovski said the response was typical of Horan.“She gets fouled, kicked, hurt and obviously it’s a very difficult moment,” Andonovski said. “And instead of crying about it, she just goes and makes a statement and basically that shows everyone in the world the direction that the game is going to take.”Andonovski said he was especially proud that Horan and other veterans had continued to press for a winning goal after Horan tied the score, showing the younger players on the U.S. team how to take control of a game. Horan and players like Ertz and Lavelle, he said, “carried the younger ones, or in a way showed the younger ones what this game is all about.”One of those players, the 21-year-old Trinity Rodman, said she had been impressed by Horan’s ability to “flip a switch” and go “from trash talking to putting a ball in the back of the net.”It may have been why Andonovski chose to make only one substitution in Thursday’s game, sending on Lavelle for Savannah DeMelo at halftime to try to inject some energy into the U.S. midfield. He refrained from making more changes, he said, “because I thought we had control of the game, I thought we were knocking on the door of scoring a goal.Horan, center, celebrating her goal.Buda Mendes/Getty Images“We were around the goal the whole time,” he added, “and I just didn’t want to disrupt the rhythm.”It was only after Horan’s goal, though, and after being outplayed in the first half, that the United States began to look crisper and more determined.Andonovski suggested the final 30 minutes, not the first 60, were representative of what he and fans could expect as the team moves deeper into the tournament, and as the connections between players young and old start to get more familiar.“What you saw in the second half is what you’re going to see going forward, as a baseline,” he said. “I think that we’re just going to get better from game to game, and we’re going to be a lot more efficient as well.” More

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      Sophia Smith Has Been Ready for Her World Cup Moment

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      In the weeks before the Women’s World Cup, Sophia Smith admitted that she wanted to be the first United States player to score a goal in the tournament. Of course she did. Like every great athlete, she has long envisioned herself as a star.Growing up in Colorado as the youngest of three girls, Smith spent years trying to keep up with her sporty sisters. She was the sibling relegated to the middle seat of the car, the one who tagged along at basketball practices, the baby yearning to be noticed.Yet even as a young teenager, Smith said, she knew she was destined for something bigger. She told her parents that she had the talent and drive to be a “special” soccer player. Maybe the best ever. It hardly seemed like a long shot: She was not prepared, after all, to settle for anything less.“I’m a winner,” Smith said in an interview before the World Cup. “I have to win. It makes me sick to lose anything. Card game, anything. When it comes to soccer, I just find a way.”On Saturday in the United States’ 3-0 victory over Vietnam, Smith showed — yet again — that there was something to her gut feeling that she would be great.In her first World Cup game, Smith scored the U.S. team’s first goal of the tournament. Then she scored its second. Later, she had the assist on its third. And even then, she thought her day could have been better.“We could have scored several more goals,” Smith said. “Myself included.”It was a remarkable debut, which reinforced the view of many that Smith, 22, could leave Australia and New Zealand as the tournament’s breakout star. In a team filled with promise — eight United States players made their first World Cup appearances against Vietnam — Smith once again hovered high above the rest. Not that her teammates didn’t try to keep up.At times, it seemed as if every player on the U.S. team could have scored a goal or two, or three. Savannah DeMelo, making her first World Cup start and only her second appearance for the national team, had two great early chances. Rose Lavelle — finally back on the field after a long injury layoff — had at least two more after entering as a second-half substitute, including one shot that looked bound for success until it ricocheted off the crossbar.Not even Alex Morgan, the star forward in her fourth World Cup, could match Smith. Morgan missed a penalty kick in first-half injury time when her low shot was stopped by the Vietnam goalkeeper, Thi Kim Tranh Tran.Julie Ertz, left, and Alex Morgan battling Vietnam goalkeeper Thi Kim Thanh Tran.Rafaela Pontes/Associated Press“You know, we can always put more away,” said Morgan, who added that she was happy with the victory but not with her penalty attempt. “But I think the way the first World Cup game goes is not the way the last one is going to go.”U.S. Coach Vlakto Andonovski acknowledged that his team — which is trying to win an unprecedented third consecutive World Cup title — should have converted more of the two-dozen-plus chances it created, and said he would have liked to see more efficiency in those critical moments in front of the goal. The U.S. team has only several days to make those adjustments before it faces a much tougher test against the Netherlands, but Andonovski said that was plenty of time for his players to study what went wrong and to get back to its usual scoring rhythm.The deadline is soon. The Netherlands, a team the U.S. defeated in the 2019 World Cup final, surely won’t allow as many chances, and it surely will make the U.S. work harder on defense.Andonovski had little doubt, though, that the United States would be ready for the match on Thursday (Wednesday night Eastern). He said he was encouraged by how his team played against Vietnam, considering the 11 starters had never played a game together, and six of them — including Smith — had never played a World Cup match at all.“I’m sure the nerves had something to do with it,” he said of the substandard finishing. “So I’m not worried about it.”He added that he was encouraged by the style of soccer that the team played, and pleased with all the opportunities it created. Smith was just as upbeat. Once the team loosens up a bit and gets more touches and strings together more passes, she said, it will “settle down and feel more confident.”She did admit, though, to feeling nervous before the game, a sensation that she said was a first for her.That means she didn’t feel nerves when she helped Stanford win an N.C.A.A. championship in 2019, which included her scoring a hat trick in the semifinal. Or when she entered her first professional game with the Portland Thorns, in 2020, and scored after only three minutes.The World Cup, though, is another level entirely, even against Vietnam. Smith is at a new point in her career now, with new emotions and higher stakes. But ever since she was a kid, she has been ready.“Whoever scores, whatever the score is, a win is a win,” she said in the days before the Vietnam game. “And if it takes me scoring a lot of goals for us to win, I’ll do that.” More

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      Lionel Messi Ventures Into Charted Territory

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      The Argentine star’s signing is seen as a way to push soccer into the American mainstream. But it’s already there.Tempting Lionel Messi to the United States could not solely be a matter of money. The money had to be right, of course. It had to be competitive. It was, Jorge Mas knew, perfectly possible that his attempt to persuade Messi, the greatest player of his generation, to sign for Inter Miami would fail because of money. But it would not succeed because of it. Not exclusively, anyway.Nor, really, could Mas rely entirely on the other selling point he had identified as a possible advantage. Miami would appeal to Messi’s family, that was true. He and his wife, Antonella, already owned property there. His sons liked it. There was a strong, proud Argentine community in South Florida that could provide him with the maté and the facturas and the asado he required.And while Miami could not offer Messi complete anonymity — he would still be mobbed when he went to the grocery store — it could offer him a version of normalcy in which it was theoretically possible for him to go to the grocery store in the first place. That, Mas was sure, would be appealing, but it could not be the whole appeal.Instead, over the yearslong span of his courtship of Messi — Mas has said that he first hatched the idea in 2019, and has spent no little time since manifesting it into being — he chose to emphasize something else.This, he repeatedly told Jorge Messi, the player’s father, agent and maven, was his son’s chance to leave a unique legacy. “When, in the history of a sport is there the possibility of changing the sport of a country?” Mas asked Jorge Messi. His son, Mas said, had the “opportunity and ability to change soccer in the United States, in the largest commercial market in the world.”This week, Mas at last had the moment that vindicated not only all of his labor, but the nature of his pitch. In the pouring rain at the DRV-PNK Stadium in Fort Lauderdale, he could finally present Messi not just as an Inter Miami player, but as what he called “America’s No. 10.”True, there is work to be done. Soccer stadiums are called things like the Parc des Princes and San Paolo. It is wholly unacceptable that Messi might retire at something called the “DRV-PNK Stadium,” particularly considering that it is in Fort Lauderdale.But still, Mas sensed that he was standing on the cusp of something epochal. For soccer in the United States, he said, there would always be “a before and an after Messi.”Lionel Messi with the team that brought him to America: Jorge Mas, Jose Mas and David Beckham.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressThis is, of course, a leitmotif in the story of soccer in the United States. It is a sport in constant search of its moment of ignition. At some point, the theory runs, the world’s game will assume its natural position at the top of the American sporting pyramid. Mas, doubtless, is sincere in his belief that the arrival of Messi will — at the very least — accelerate that process.It goes without saying, too, that soccer in the U.S. still has plenty of room for growth. Some of those areas are tangible, or at least demonstrable: Attendances — not helped by the fact that some teams in Major League Soccer do not play in soccer-specific arenas — and audience figures and sponsorship revenues can all increase substantially.Mexico would doubtless claim to be home to the highest-caliber domestic league in North America. M.L.S. certainly has some way to go before it can consider itself a peer of Ligue 1 in France, say, let alone the Premier League.And some of categories for growth are more intangible. Soccer does not yet have the grip on the American psyche that the N.F.L. can muster, for example. It is not as central to the culture as the N.B.A. It does not command the same sort of affection as baseball. It still feels, in many ways, far younger and far newer than it really ought to feel, especially this deep into its ascendant phase.For all that it is agreed that soccer in the United States needs to grow, though, at some point it is probably worth pausing and reflecting on what the actual target might be.Soccer, like all European cultural artifacts, has long been obsessed with cracking America, the place that has come to be seen as its final frontier. And plenty of people in the U.S. have spent vast swaths of their time working out how to make soccer happen. Nobody, though, has quite defined what success might look like.Messi needed no introduction in Miami.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe landscape into which Messi descended this week, for example, is vastly different from the one David Beckham — his forerunner turned employer — encountered when he arrived in Los Angeles in 2007. At that stage, M.L.S. consisted of only 13 teams. Toronto F.C. marked the league’s first, ginger outreach into Canada. It was still not uncommon to hear discussion of whether the entire business would survive.Messi, on the other hand, finds himself entering a competition that now sprawls across much of a continent, from Vancouver to New York, Montreal to Miami. M.L.S. now has 29 teams, with a 30th, based in San Diego, set to be drafted into the league in 2025. It has an innovative, potentially lucrative streaming deal with Apple TV+ that served as a core part of the league’s pitch to Messi. The question is not whether M.L.S. will pull through. It is whether it has been a little too eager to acquiesce to all of those teams and all of those cities lobbying for expansion.Far more significant, though, is the game’s imprint on the United States as a whole. Soccer is now the second-largest participation sport in the United States, behind only basketball. One Gallup poll found that more people regard it as their “favorite” sport, whatever that means, than would say the same about ice hockey. Last year, the FIFA video game outsold Mario Kart and at least one edition of Call of Duty.Will Ferrell, Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera and LeBron James all own portions of teams, either at home or abroad. Soccer is referenced on Modern Family and (the dearly departed) “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” It is hard to find a picture of Drake not wearing some team’s jersey. Kim Kardashian single-handedly taught millions of Americans about the greatness of Vincent Candela and Aldair when she was pictured wearing a vintage Roma jersey. That is not an afterthought: It is what cultural cut-through looks like.All five of Europe’s major leagues have television deals in the United States. NBC has, in no small part, used its multiyear Premier League offering as a backbone for its Peacock streaming service. Fox, ABC, ESPN, Paramount, CBS, Univision and Discovery all broadcast soccer.Messi made his Inter Miami debut on Friday night.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressRobert Lipsyte, once a titan of these pages, might have bemoaned last week that European soccer does not have the same “emotional” impact to someone in Brooklyn as the fate of the Nets or the Mets might, but the evidence would suggest there are plenty of people who might disagree with him.By many measure, in other words, soccer has made it in America. It has the toehold in the United States that it has always craved. To borrow from the wrestling parlance of last week’s newsletter, the sport has got over, and spectacularly.That the sport does not perceive it that way — that it still feels as if this is a land to be conquered — might be to do with sheer, naked greed. Or it might be to do with just how accustomed it is to a monopoly position. Across most of the world, soccer is inarguably the national game, the sport of choice, by such a distance that everything else pales in comparison.In those countries where it encounters resistance, then — in the United States and Australia, with their established quadrumvirates of major sports, in particular, as well as India and Pakistan, where cricket remains king — anything less than total obliteration of any opposition is treated as failure. Soccer confuses popularity with primacy.That approach, though, is infused with futility. The Women’s World Cup this summer will, ideally, make more Australians like soccer. It will not make anyone turn away from Australian Rules Football to do so. Messi’s presence in the U.S. will expand the sport’s cultural reach. It is unlikely to affect viewership for the Super Bowl.It is not a zero sum game. You do not only have to like one sport. Soccer can get bigger in the United States, of course. Messi’s glamour, his star power, the brilliant white heat of his talent will help pull in new viewers and, slowly, turn them into fans. There are always more hearts and minds to win, more eyeballs to retain.Much of the work, though, has already been done. The change has already happened. Soccer has made it in the United States. As Mas might put it, we left the before behind long ago. We are already in the after, and have been for some time.Cruel BlowSam Kerr’s Instagram post, published only a couple of hours before Australia’s opening game at the World Cup on Thursday, was written in what can be recognized as the striker’s straightforward, matter-of-fact style. She had picked up a calf injury. She would loved to have been available for the match with Ireland. That would not be possible.The aim, surely, was to project an air that this was — to use the technical term — no biggie. Kerr did not want to be a distraction from a game her country has been anticipating for years. Still, her absence will have sent a shiver of anxiety through those fans heading to Stadium Australia. This was supposed to be Kerr’s tournament, after all, her chance to stage a “Cathy Freeman moment” of her very own.Of substantially greater concern, though, was the statement published not long afterward by Australia’s medical staff, the one that said Kerr would miss the first two games of the tournament. That would be just about tolerable: Tony Gustavsson’s team should be good enough to see off Nigeria, just as it had Ireland.Sam Kerr will miss at least the first two games at the World Cup.Carl Recine/ReutersThe really bad news was in the fine print. The extent of Kerr’s injury will be assessed only after Thursday’s meeting with Nigeria in Brisbane. There is no guarantee, in other words, that Kerr will be fit in time to play in the group stage at all. It is not an exaggeration to say she will struggle to be in peak condition much before the tournament’s final rounds. And that is far from a worst-case scenario.That is, of course, devastating not only for Kerr, but for Australia as a whole. In the buildup to the tournament, she has been more than willing to absorb expectation, to shoulder the burden of hope. It is to her credit that it does not seem to faze her in the slightest.And yet that role carries with it a cost: It is not just the country that has a tendency to look to Kerr for inspiration, but the team itself. Australia with Kerr is a potential world champion; Australia’s case without her is not nearly so convincing. Its fans know that, and so do its players. They, more than anyone else, will be hoping that the tone of her message was meaningful, that the injury really is no biggie.Psychological EdgeAs the World Cup has drawn closer, that part of The New York Times’ sports department that is based in Europe — all three of us — has been cleft into factions.One is very much of the view that the United States will, ultimately, lift a third World Cup in a row over the course of the next month. One believes that is hopelessly optimistic, and has taken to making dread prophesies of round-of-16 exits at the hands of Sweden. (Tariq has claimed, again and again, that “predictions are the preserve of the hubristic and the small-minded.”)These groups do not align along national grounds. I have no vested interest in the U.S.’s success: As demonstrated by my outright refusal to use the word “cleats,” I am not American. It is clear that this iteration of the national team is not as strong as those that emerged victorious in 2015 and 2019.Alex Morgan, standard bearer (in person) and statue (in New York).Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesIt is, instead, effectively two teams slightly clumsily stitched together: one from yesterday, taking part in what is in some senses a valedictory tour, and one for tomorrow, fizzing with energy and rich with promise. Teams that win tournaments exist in a Goldilocks zone, neither too young or too old. The Americans are both.And yet — with the U.S., there is always an “and yet” — the U.S. retains a psychological edge over almost every opponent it faces. Particularly during World Cups, it has an aura, the sort that can only be acquired over a generation, or more.Teams do not have to beat the U.S. as it is; they have to beat the U.S. as they perceive them to be. They have to overcome their own admiration of the jersey, as much as the players that now fill them. That is a powerful advantage for the U.S. Whether it will be enough, of course, neither faction knows, not really.CorrespondenceIt has been an educational week in the inbox. Michael Markman reminded me of something I did know, once, a long time ago: “The grammarian term for a base word that functions as either a noun or a verb is a gerund,” he wrote. (I had always assumed it was a participle that served as a noun, but I am willing to be corrected.)Someone only identifying as Red, meanwhile, informed me of something that I did not know at all. (And, I think, had no real reason to know.) What has come to be termed “generational wealth” lasts only for three generations, they wrote, in reference to Jordan Henderson’s looming move to Saudi Arabia. “That is the average of new wealth for the past 200 years.” I mean, whichever way you look at it, three generations is quite a long time. Maybe not a monument more everlasting than bronze, but definitely not bad.There were two subjects that dominated, though. One was your sincere, and sincerely appreciated, concern for the fate of this newsletter, and the mutually educational space it has fostered in the last few years. I won’t reproduce them out of deep-seated bashfulness, but suffice to say they were received with immense gratitude.And the other was the validity of parallels between soccer and professional wrestling (a vague existential uncertainty generates quite an exciting, devil-may-care freedom, I have found.) “Is the prime example of this not the transfer market?” asked Todd Reid, knowing the answer to his question was, “Well, yes.”“It consumes as much, if not more, energy and coverage than matches themselves,” he wrote. “And add in the Saudi Arabia story line, and it’s a morality play set on the global stage, discussed and debated whether or not anyone ever actually watches a Saudi League match or not.”There was a welcome reminder from Richard Duran on generalizations, too. “Not everyone reads the constant chatter about transfers, wages, Saudi involvement. I choose to enjoy soccer while the clock is running and it is still a beautiful game.” This is an admirable approach, and a legitimate correction. To some extent, though, how the industry that surrounds soccer presents the sport is as significant as how people choose to consume it.And finally, Mark Harris has arrived, asking for a little bit of self-reflection. “How ironic that you don’t perceive that you are one of the prime instruments in pushing the behind the scenes stories over the actual sport,” he wrote. “Read the last year or so of your articles and tell me if I’m right.”This is a charge I probably cannot deny, admittedly, but I’m going to take it as a compliment. Nobody has ever called me a prime instrument before. Not even when they’re really angry with me.That’s all for this week, and for a little while: Remember, this newsletter will graciously cede the limelight to our daily World Cup briefing for the next few weeks. You should subscribe. We know, after all, that you like soccer and you like receiving newsletters. It’s basically a product designed with you in mind. I’ll be writing it sometimes. But you should subscribe anyway. More

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      With Women’s World Cup’s Expansion Come the Soccer Games of a Lifetime

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      Vietnam, one of eight nations playing in their first Women’s World Cup, will face the U.S. this week. Its presence highlights the growth of women’s soccer, but also the challenges that remain.When Vietnam fielded its first women’s national soccer team in 1997, its players wore oversized jerseys made for men. At times, the team had to travel an hour and a half from Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, to reach an available training site. Some players pushed carts on the street and sold bread to sustain their nascent playing careers.In the years after the Vietnam War — called the American War here — ended in 1975, economic reform took precedence over sports. The Vietnam Football Federation, which governs soccer in the unified country, was not established until 1989. In its early days, soccer was widely considered a game for men, too hard and demanding for women to play. With little money available, the sport hardly seemed a desirable career choice for girls. But that did not matter in most cases: Many parents were reluctant to let their daughters play.“Society didn’t accept the existence of such a team,” said Mai Duc Chung, 74, Vietnam’s women’s national coach then and now.A quarter of a century later, Vietnam is one of the dominant teams in Southeast Asia. This month, it will play for the first time in the Women’s World Cup, starting with a game against the United States, the two-time defending champion, on Friday night (Eastern time) in Auckland, New Zealand.Mai Duc Chung has coached the Vietnam women’s team for more than two decades.Vietnam’s arrival is the culmination of its nearly decade-long plan to develop women’s soccer, in part through expansion of the World Cup field from 16 to 24 and now to 32 teams, making this year’s tournament the largest in history. That growth is giving opportunities to nontraditional powers: Eight nations in this year’s tournament, fully a quarter of the field, are participating for the first time.This will be the biggest soccer moment for Vietnam and the other first-timers, a group that includes teams as diverse as Haiti, Ireland, Morocco and the Philippines. It will mean increased visibility and funding, enhanced professionalization of the sport and additional financial rewards. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, has promised at least $30,000 in prize money to each player participating in this year’s tournament.But that same growth will bring inexperience and the prospect of severe competitive imbalance when the newcomers face off against the world’s best teams. It was with great fulfillment that Vietnam qualified ahead of its fiercest rival, Thailand. But gratification comes with burdensome pressure to avoid embarrassing performances, like losing by 13-0 to the United States, as Thailand did in the last Women’s World Cup in 2019.Vietnam’s players are paid about $850 a month to represent the women’s national team.FIFA’s improved bonus structure for World Cup players will mean a $30,000 payday for each one.“We witnessed the fiasco, and it’s a lesson learned for Vietnam,” said Huynh Nhu, the team’s star forward. She spoke through an interpreter, as did others interviewed for this article. “Thailand suffered such a big loss, they just kind of fell backward, and their fighting spirit is no longer there. No matter what happens against the United States and other powers, we will keep fighting.”Participating in the Women’s World Cup represents great national pride and international sporting achievement for Vietnam, a country that has won only one Olympic gold medal (in air-pistol shooting, at the 2016 Rio Olympics) and has never qualified for the men’s World Cup, and where men’s soccer is better known for regular episodes of corruption and match fixing.But similar pride and similar hardships overcome are echoed across the other debutantes in this year’s field. Ireland’s captain, Katie McCabe, grew up playing on boys’ teams, encouraged by an older brother and parents who now watch her play for the London club Arsenal. Haiti’s players navigated a national system in which federation officials have been accused of coercing young players into sex, and Morocco’s overcame profound traditional biases and frequent family objections to become the first team from a majority Arab country to qualify.“No matter what happens against the United States and other powers, we will keep fighting,” one Vietnam player said.Vietnam’s team has come as far as any of them. Once shunned, or simply ignored, the Vietnamese women are now national names. They were welcomed by their country’s prime minister after earning their World Cup place in a qualifying tournament in India last year and were given a parade on a double-decker bus through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. Their World Cup matches will be broadcast live to their fellow citizens on various platforms.More than any Vietnamese player, Huynh Nhu, 31, represents possibility and inequality that coexist in her country and, effectively, for women’s soccer worldwide. She is the first female player from Vietnam to play for a club team in Europe, having scored seven goals in the recently completed season for Lank F.C. Vilaverdense in Portugal’s top division. After the World Cup, Huynh Nhu is expected to extend her contract with the club, which has reportedly offered to double her salary to 3,000 euros (about $3,200 per month).That is a stark contrast to the average salary of $200 to $300 per month in the semiprofessional women’s league in Vietnam. On an annualized basis, those salaries remain below the country’s per capita G.D.P. of $3,756.50 a year, according to the World Bank. Players often take second jobs to supplement their incomes. Before moving to Portugal last season, for example, Huynh Nhu operated a business selling coconuts in her rural hometown in the Mekong Delta.She said that she now had corporate affiliations with Visa, Coca-Cola and LG electronics. And she is the face of the unprecedented news coverage and sponsorship attention currently being lavished on the Vietnamese women’s national team. While away from their clubs and training and participating in international competitions, members of the national team can earn about $850 a month, according to Mai, the national coach. (Journalists said money was deducted for meals and housing.)Mai with a photo of the first Vietnam women’s national team in 1997.Players have also been awarded bonuses by the Vietnamese Football Federation and sponsors for recent triumphs. Not all bonuses are known, and it remains unclear exactly how much of the bonus pool is divided among the players and the coaches. But the publicized pool is equivalent to $8,000 apiece for winning the Southeast Asian Games in May for an eighth time and, according to journalists, $15,000 or more for qualifying for the World Cup. Bonuses are not always financial, either; they can also include motorbikes and cars.Those figures are “very modest” compared with what top male soccer players can make in salary and endorsements in Vietnam, said Cao Huy Tho, an executive, former sports editor and longtime advocate for gender equity at Tuoi Tre, a leading newspaper in Vietnam. But “it’s very meaningful, life-changing for the women, because most of them come from very poor backgrounds.”Huynh Nhu’s family, for instance, is building a three-story home, which includes a shrine to her career and appears to be the tallest in the area, in her hometown, Tra Vinh.Women in Vietnam’s national league who do not play on the national team endure a far more modest existence. League attendance is extremely low, roughly 100 to 300 people per match, journalists said, leaving many businesses reluctant to sponsor teams.The parents of Huynh Nhu, Vietnam’s top forward, keep a display of memorabilia from her career in a room in their home.When a team representing Son La Province in northwest Vietnam struggled to maintain sponsorships in recent years, its players’ monthly salaries plummeted to as low as $130 or even $70 — much less than could be earned doing factory work. Some players left for better-paying jobs, and Son La is no longer in the league. Last year, as the club faced disbanding, its coach, Luong Van Chuyen, lamented to an online newspaper that he had only four players available. The others, Luong said, “quit to return home to get married and to become workers.”The issue of disparate treatment of female soccer players reached the highest levels of government after Vietnam qualified for the Women’s World Cup. In greeting the returning players, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh called them “diamond girls” but also noted that they still faced prejudice in playing what many still consider a man’s game, as well as hardships resulting from precarious incomes and lack of security in retirement.“We need to pay more attention to women’s football,” Pham said, calling on soccer officials, government agencies and sponsors to help develop a sustainable model for the sport. It is unclear what steps, if any, have been taken to pursue that goal.Soccer was introduced to Vietnam in 1896 during the French colonial period. The country claims to have fielded Asia’s first women’s team, which played briefly against men in the early 1930s. After the Vietnam War, though, an unofficial prohibition of women’s soccer existed into the early 1990s, according to Cao, the journalist who began covering the sport later that decade.Nguyen Thi Bich Thuy, commonly known as Bich Thuy, 29.Huynh Nhu, 32, the captain of the team. Her new goal is to score in a World Cup.To circumvent the ban, Cao said, a sympathetic pharmacy executive in Ho Chi Minh City transported female players to matches against men’s teams by hiding them in cargo trucks covered with tarpaulins. When a women’s national team was officially formed in 1997, Nguyen Thi Kim Hong was one of the players who sold bread to maintain their careers.“It was our passion only; money was never the purpose for the first generation,” said Nguyen, now 51 and the goalkeeper coach for the women’s national team.Even some of today’s current stars faced resistance from their parents when they began playing. Nguyen Thi Bich Thuy, 29, was the youngest of three children, and though her father had been a soccer player, her parents worried that if she moved away from home in central Vietnam, “nobody will mother you anymore.” Eventually, she said, her father became her biggest supporter.In February 2022, after Vietnam’s bid for World Cup qualification nearly imploded as the coronavirus ravaged the women’s team, Bich Thuy scored the most important goal in the country’s history — a deft touch with her right foot and a decisive and historic shot with her left in a 2-1 playoff victory over Taiwan, which FIFA refers to as Chinese Taipei. She dedicated the goal to her father, who died in 2016.Vietnam players in Hanoi. Their first game at the World Cup will come against the United States, the two-time defending champion.“I’m still feeling it now, like a dream,” Bich Thuy said of the goal. “My father always expected a lot of me. I’m sure he would be happy to see that.”Huynh Nhu, the team’s star, had more unconditional support from her parents. Her father, a former player, began coaching her when she was 3 or 4. Her mother worked in a market in rural Tra Vinh and brought home a soccer ball at Huynh Nhu’s request. Her father said he had attached the ball to a rope to keep her from kicking it into a canal outside the home. Now she leads Vietnam’s national team, with the aim of scoring a goal in the World Cup. That may be, for now, a more achievable goal than expecting to win a game in a group that includes the United States, the Netherlands (the 2019 World Cup runner-up) and Portugal, a fellow debutante that lies just outside the top 20 in the latest world rankings.Told that the benefactor of Thailand’s team at the 2019 Women’s World Cup, one of the richest women in the country, had exhorted her players by saying, “If you score, I’ll buy you a $5,000 Chanel bag,” Huynh Nhu laughed.“I look forward to having such a billionaire in my country,” she said.Linh Pham contributing reporting from Tra Vinh, Vietnam.Players on the Vietnam women’s team walking to their training field in Hanoi. More