Neil W. Blackmon
The United States began the decade reigning Olympic Champions and will close it as reigning World Cup champions. In between, they played an epic World Cup final in 2011, captured another Olympic gold medal (London 2012), and won the first of two consecutive World Cups.
As they turn towards a new decade, and look to Tokyo 2020 and the chance to become the first team to “unite the belts”, let’s take one final look back at the decade that was by selecting a best eleven that defines a decade of American dominance.
We’ve taken some liberties with formation to get what we think are the best 11 in, but after three years of Jill Ellis’s tinkering, allow us some liberty, please!
Goalkeeper: Hope Solo
Solo may be a lightning rod off the field, but between the lines, there’s no questioning her dominance.
Solo spent the early portion of the decade widely regarded as the best goalkeeper on earth and saved her best soccer for the 2015 World Cup, where she went 540 minutes without conceding a goal.
She was more or less summarily dismissed from the USWNT after calling the Swedish team “a bunch of cowards” after the US tumbled out of the 2016 Rio Olympics in the quarterfinals, but still finished her US career with over 200 caps and 102 shutouts.-
Solo’s legacy will always be complicated. She saw her reputation tarnished by various high-profile off-field issues, from her 2007 FIFA World Cup selection self-pity party to domestic battery allegations.
But those issues should be viewed fairly, which requires the more than tacit recognition that Solo has also moved the needle in a positive manner off the pitch too. It was Solo, after all, who spearheaded the original EEOC complaint against US Soccer and her lawsuit against the US Soccer Federation related to equal pay for what Solo called “the exact same work” was filed before the USWNT lawsuit of more notoriety, which was filed in March 2019. Solo has also been an outspoken critic of the “pay for play” model which she argues, with much justice, denies or serves as a serious economic barrier to soccer access to many underserved and underrepresented portions of the US population.
Whatever her complicated legacy off the pitch, she was a force on it, and the easy choice in goal.
Fullback: Kelly O’Hara
The Georgian has been a national team fixture for so long it’s hard to believe she’s only 31 years young.
A longtime youth national team fixture, O’Hara’s 125 senior-team caps have all come this decade, beginning in 2010. An injury replacement on the 2011 FIFA World Cup roster, O’Hara is one of a handful of American players to have found her way on all three FIFA World Cup teams this decade, and she put the exclamation point on a semifinal win over Germany, scoring her first international goal in the process, at the 2015 World Cup.
In 2019, O’Hara was one of the best American players in France, overcoming injury concerns to help solidify an American backline that had been a supreme concern for the United States entering the tournament.
This was an easy choice.
Center back: Becky Sauerbrunn
If you were to write a list of the three most important players to the USWNT this decade, you’d have to include Sauerbrunn, who burst back onto the national team scene in the autumn of 2010 and never looked back.
Sauerbrunn performed admirably in a spot-start in the 2011 World Cup semifinal, replacing Rachel Buehler, who was suspended on cards, and was a key defensive reserve on the Gold medal winning American team in London.
By 2015, Sauerbrunn had blossomed into a team leader and unassuming star. Alex Morgan called her “the best defender in the world” after her dominant 2015 World Cup, a point that from a technical standpoint (positioning, understanding of time, tactics and space) remained difficult to argue throughout the decade.
A captain and the undisputed anchor of two World Cup winning American defenses, Sauerbrunn joins Alex Morgan nd Carli Lloyd as one of the three best American players of the decade.
Fullback: Crystal Dunn
Dunn, who plays higher up the field as an attacking midfielder, wing and forward, traditionally, for her professional club, had greatness thrust upon her by Jill Ellis and the national team when the US went looking for a fullback in the last World Cup cycle.
Dunn was sensational at the 2019 World Cup, where she stood toe-to-toe with the likes of Lucy Bronze, Lieke Martens and other opposing fullbacks and wings and held her own repeatedly.
But what makes Dunn so impressive is the way she performed at such a high level while playing a different position, with an entirely different set of demands and obligations, as the ones she was routinely called upon to perform at the club level. That’s remarkably challenging at any level- and it’s a testament to the player Dunn is that she could do it exceptionally well for both club and country.
Defensive Midfielder: Julie Ertz
This was a tougher call than you’d think, but Ertz gets the edge over Shannon Boxx, a more pure number six who was integral to the 2011 World Cup finalists and 2012 Gold Medalists. Ertz is the right choice anyway, having played a decisive role in two World Cup championships.
Sure, she only moved to the midfield after the 2015 World Cup, but how many players parlay a midcareer position switch into becoming one of the best players in the world at their new position?
Ertz did that and more on her way to being named the 2019 US Soccer Women’s Player of the Year earlier this month, a final plaudit in a year where she played the seek and destroy role on a World Cup champion.
Lauren Holiday says goodbye in Orlando in the autumn of 2015. The US midfield took nearly four years to recover.
Midfielder: Lauren Holiday (Cheney)
Way back in the late autumn of 2015, as the USWNT was putting the wraps on their Victory Tour, I saw Lauren Holiday walk off a US field as a player for the last time.
I asked Jill Ellis what Holiday (née, Cheney) meant to the US, and what they’d need to do to replace her. Here’s what Ellis told me:
“Lauren is going to be hard to replace.” Ellis said, pausing and smiling. “I’ve been a mess all day. She’s a remarkable human being, first of all. Then there’s the soccer. Her tools and her skillset are remarkable. She has the intangibles, competitiveness and leadership. Lauren is going to be hard to replace,” Ellis said.
Whether asked to play as the number ten, a dominant eight or the USWNT number six, Cheney did it all and did it well.
She was the engine of two World Cup teams- one a finalist and the other a champion, and then she exited, still at her pinnacle, stage left, the rare athlete to leave while still one of the world’s best.
Her position on this squad was an easy decision.
Midfielder: Carli Lloyd (Captain)
Ahead of the 2012 London Olympics, Lloyd was a role player without a surefire role. Then Shannon Boxx picked up an injury, and Carli Lloyd scored two goals in the Gold Medal game against world champion Japan:
That was only the beginning of the decade of what safely could be called “The Decade of Carli.” Of course, Carli knew it. In 2014, I asked her how she thought she could top scoring game-winners at back to back Olympics.
“That’s just the beginning for me, for this team. My goal is to be a machine. Everything I do, everything I train for, my mental preparations. The idea is to be the best player in the world and that’s what I believe I can be.”
She was right.
At the 2015 FIFA World Cup, she dominated the knockout stages, leading the US to a final, once again contested vs. Japan.
Then, she scored a hat trick in fifteen minutes, sealing it with THIS SILLINESS FROM HALF-FIELD, which is probably the defining moment in US Soccer this decade, if we’re being honest and fair.
That performance propelled her to a deserved FIFA Player of the Year award, but she wasn’t done making history.
She won another World Cup, becoming the first player on the planet to score in six consecutive World Cup matches in the process.
Take a bow, captain. This decade was there for the taking, and you seized it.
Wing: Heather O’Reilly
O’Reilly, or HAO to her teammates and most folks, accumulated 231 caps in a fourteen-year national team career and was a fixture on the early, very successful US teams this decade, as well as a member of the 2015 World Cup champions.
A tireless worker and brilliant crosser of the ball, her last gasp cross in the 2012 London Olympics to Alex Morgan- who HAO helped nickname “Baby Horse”- was HAO’s defining moment of the decade, and the Americans don’t win gold at those Olympics without the perfectly placed ball.
For consistency and leadership, she edges out the musical and magical game of Tobin Heath for this spot.
Wing: Megan Rapinoe
Megan Rapinoe, American hero, reigning FIFA World Player of the Year and self-described “walking protest”, wasn’t just the hero of the 2019 FIFA World Cup.
She was a star for an entire decade, from the moment she delivered this absurd ball and broke Brazilian hearts at the 2011 World Cup:
Rapinoe was a key cog in every US team thereafter, including the 2015 and 2019 World Cup champions.
Always outspoken, gregarious, smart and fun, Rapinoe deserved to become a household name this summer and did, speaking out passionately and bravely for equality and social justice while backing up her activism with some of the better soccer of her life, especially in the clutch.
Her penalty at the one hour mark in the World Cup final against the Netherlands this summer was just the latest example of her penchant for delivering in the big moment, even if it was likely the biggest of her many huge moments.
Forward: Abby Wambach
I’m told, but no basically no one in history can confirm, that the 184th international goal is always the toughest.
Abby scored 184 before retiring at the end of the US Victory Tour in 2015 as the most prolific goalscorer in international soccer history and, finally, a World Cup Champion.
Wambach wasn’t at her best in 2015, but she did start games and contribute to that World Cup victory. More critically, the US don’t reach the World Cup final in 2011 without Wambach and certainly don’t win gold in London without her contributions. She wasn’t the player this decade she was in the previous one, but she is still an easy choice for this decade’s Best XI.
Alex Morgan’s best soccer came as the decade closed– a testament to her drive to always better herself as a footballer.
Forward: Alex Morgan
Is it possible to be a global icon and also an underrated soccer player?
It is if you are Alex Morgan.
Morgan’s successes off the field– as a fashion icon, children’s author, and leader in the fight for equal pay– sometimes overshadow what a tremendous soccer player she’s always been and the complete player she’s become.
Morgan burst onto the scene as the “Baby Horse” in 2010, a young star straight out of Cal. By 2011, she was an impactful substitute at the World Cup, a player “so gifted with pace and strength and technique” that US coach Pia Sundhage “didn’t dare confuse her with tactical instructions.”
Morgan challenged herself, getting better as a target player, passer, with her head and as a passer over a decade. She did everything you’d hope a player would do to try to get better, leaving her comfort zone in the US to play abroad, accepting a role as a solitary, tip-of-the-spear forward in Jill Ellis’s 4-3-3, playing the role of veteran leader on a NWSL expansion team.
Oh, she also scored goals. Over 100 of them this decade, to be exact, in helping the US win an Olympic gold medal and two World Cups.