On Wednesday, U.S. women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes named her 18-player roster for the 2024 Olympics this summer as well as four alternates who will travel with the squad in France. USWNT stalwart striker Alex Morgan was nowhere to be found.
Instead, Hayes opted for youth, with eyes toward developing the game in the U.S., naming the youngest Olympic roster for the USWNT since 2008, when the team won gold in Beijing, China. The decision was bold and a little shocking considering Morgan’s long reign as both a leader and face of the team, but not one that the newly-appointed Hayes can’t justify.
“I saw firsthand not just her qualities, but her professionalism. Her record speaks for itself,” Hayes said. At the same time, she acknowledged the constraints of the 18-player roster, with spots for only 16 field players.
The current roster has an average age of 26.8, four years younger than the team that went to Japan for the previous Olympics in 2021 and had to settle for a bronze medal. More stark, though, is the difference in caps per player — at those pandemic-delayed Games three years ago the average was 111; for this team, it is only 58.
“Looking through the cap accumulation of the team, there’s been a lack of development, of putting some of the less experienced players in positions where they can develop that experience,” Hayes said. “I think it’s important that we do that to take the next step. So I’m not looking backwards.”
The Athletic’s Meg Linehan and Tamerra Griffin discussed Morgan’s exclusion and analyzed the entire roster on the dedicated women’s soccer podcast Full Time with Meg Linehan. Listen in full to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or read the edited conversation below.
Why was Alex Morgan left off the Olympic roster?
Tamerra Griffin: After much anticipation, we have our 18-player, plus four alternates, roster for the Olympics in France. Roster drops always feel like a mini-holiday in the women’s soccer community, because we all know what’s coming. Everyone is seated. We know who these players are. Meg, obviously the biggest headline of the story is actually who wasn’t on this roster: Alex Morgan. What were your first reactions when you saw that?
Meg Linehan: We knew the starting forward line of this team no longer included Alex Morgan. So the question was, was she in contention for a role as a substitute? Obviously, we now know the answer, but Hayes also did not select Morgan to be an alternate, the alternate is Lynn Williams in the forward position. I described it as finally ripping off the band-aid. There has been such a journey for this team. I feel like I’ve been writing about it for three years, like an entire cycle of the swapover from veteran talent to youth. And it’s like this was the last major piece to that puzzle. So my first thought was: ‘She did it.’
Griffin: I remember after those friendlies against South Korea (at the start of June), just thinking about, even in the form that Alex was in, having to manage injuries and wanting to stem off potential additional injuries, thinking about what she offered the team in that role. I think probably the most notable was the fact she’s able to absorb both pressure and physicality.
Morgan has shifted from a goalscorer to someone who can pull defenders in and absorb pressure (Harry How, Getty Images)
Linehan: That has been ‘the Alex Morgan role’ since 2019, essentially: sacrifice her body, pull defenders, and set up other players. It’s not necessarily a goalscoring position for her anymore.
Griffin: That being said, when I think about her contributions, I don’t think they even carry the same significance now that they have in the past, because when we look at the other players named to this front line, particularly Sophia Smith, Mallory Swanson and Trinity Rodman, Hayes, in her press conference going over the Olympic roster, talked about the natural telepathy between Swanson and Smith. We see the impact that they have, the intuitive way in which they play, it’s fluid. It almost feels like they are speaking a different dialect of language. And it’s great because that makes them that much more lethal collectively, but it’s also hard to kind of get into that conversation if you don’t know how to speak that language, and that’s sort of how I’ve been feeling about Alex the last few games.
Linehan: I also just think other teams know that that’s her role now, right? How do you drag defenders if everybody knows that’s your role? There is that sort of fluidity and the three of them are good at playing off of each other, but then take a step back and whether it’s Jaedyn Shaw at the 10, Cat Macario at the 10, Rose Lavelle at the 10, there is this sense that you’ve got a forward line that’s essentially four players deep at that point.
For me, the two biggest reasons Morgan would have been considered for this roster were not necessarily tied to what she offers on the field. I think they were about intangibles. I’ve had this conversation with athletes that are Olympians in other team sports, who have always spoken about how you need a big veteran presence. This is something I find fascinating, because it does transcend sports, where you want that one key person where, even if they’re on the bench, they are there as that leader, that sort of calming presence; someone that could go in the dying moments of a game and you trust that person to make something otherworldly happen. I do think Morgan still has a lot of that weight to her, whether that goes back to the 2012 Olympics or not.
But you listen to Hayes in her press conference on Wednesday and it’s very clear that that did not justify her inclusion on the roster. Hayes clearly respects Morgan as a person, as a player. She respects her legacy, but that is not in her vision for this Olympic team right now.
Griffin: Absolutely. When you think about an 18-player roster, versatility has to be within your top three priorities. I think that is one of the reasons we saw Crystal Dunn listed where she was. You can play her anywhere. She is like a dream roster player for a tournament like the Olympics, but Crystal also brings her own veteran experience. She’s only one cap off Lindsay Horan, who’s the most-capped player. You have other players like Alyssa Naeher, Rose Lavelle and Emily Sonnett, who also have experience playing in these big tournaments and can offer that grounding presence you mentioned.
Linehan: I do think at some point you also have to let Lindsey Horan be captain. If you have named Lindsay Horan captain, then Lindsay Horan needs to be captain, and not have this presence that’s either beside her at the same level but not with the title. We’ve also heard from Hayes during the South Korea friendlies that Naomi Girma may be next in line, so allowing Girma to develop as a leader plays a part in it as well.
Girma also plays alongside Morgan on the San Diego Wave in NWSL (John Wilkinson, Getty Images)
Griffin: You could choose to be conservative just because it’s a big tournament, it’s going to have a lot of visibility, or you could choose to sort of put your head down, stay focused on the big picture and work toward that (development of the next generation).
Linehan: But we’ve seen what happens when a head coach is conservative, right? Vlatko Andonovski had been conservative with both the 2021 Olympic roster and the 2023 World Cup roster. We saw the results of that and what happened. I think there was this sense of, again, ripping the band-aid off. It’s going to be deeply unpleasant in the moment and then expose you up to air and healing and moving forward. It’s all the same.
You cannot let history and legacy determine the team’s future. There’s a way to both honor everything Morgan has done for the USWNT and understand also that Hayes has made a decision and we don’t know right now if it’s going to be the right one or not. We also have no idea what Morgan would have done in the Olympics if she was going.
Should Korbin Albert be included?
Griffin: Someone who was very much on the bubble for reasons that have to do with her performance on the field and her activity off of it is midfielder Korbin Albert. I have so much to say about this, and I’ve had time to gather my thoughts because this has been an ongoing issue now for a few months. Meg, what statement do you think U.S. Soccer, and Hayes specifically, is making with this decision to include Albert on the roster?
Linehan: I asked Hayes about Albert and I’ve got some skin in the game on this conversation. So I asked her about Albert and she went much longer than I anticipated. It is worth listening to her full answer.
Hayes came into this situation after the original incident had happened, after the fallout. So it is a little bit different than a coach who has managed this from the beginning.
I understand the instinct to want to defend a young athlete. I will be completely honest, the part where I really struggle is: yes, I think we’re being a little reductive by saying ‘social-media activity’ as a shortcut. It’s been so long since this started that we all kind of shorthand what happened because it’s the fastest way. I think sharing those posts did result in harm to queer communities, but also the part that I still struggle to get over is that a current player of the USWNT had liked posts about a player getting hurt. That’s the part I truly struggle to get over. That’s the part where, ‘How are you on this team?’. I’m only scratching the surface here. Something happened externally and was public, the conversations with the USWNT have been kept internal. We are being told, time and time again, that Albert is working on herself, and that part has not really been made public by her.
Griffin: I think that’s a huge problem, honestly. Because when you look at the USWNT, what they’ve been able to accomplish, the history they’ve made, the risks they’ve taken to fight for equality, to shed light on the joys of representing and belonging to and fighting for marginalized communities to pivot this way, and as you said, off the back of a very blatant interaction with a social media post that showed support of a player experiencing harm, the same player, Megan Rapinoe, who was at the forefront of so many social-justice movements, and somehow I feel like that is not the thing that gets discussed.
Albert adds a depth option in midfield for the U.S. (Harry How, Getty Images)
Everything is getting couched under ‘social-media activity’. The issue I take with that is social-media activity, as a phrase, has sort of been used as a shield to the values that informed the social-media activity. Hayes mentioned having conversations with Albert about the implications of making certain decisions around social media, but are those conversations also including the implications of having those beliefs in the first place? Beliefs are the root of the problem, and I don’t think we can expect real sustainable change or progress to be made if we’re not addressing the root of the problem.
And yes, we’ve heard work so many times whenever we discuss this that the work is being done in private. I respect privacy, but at some point you are going to have to both embrace what this team means, and has meant, to queer communities, and the responsibility that they embraced in this moment. It’s not just about wearing a Pride jersey, that is the manifestation of a lot of work. I’m not seeing that and that concerns me.
Linehan: It is a very messy situation. And when we talk about it, it is hard to get into this level of nuance beyond a longer format conversation. My job also is to report the news. So my job is to say, ‘Here’s what Hayes said’, and not necessarily throw my personal opinions in there. But I do think that when this first went down and Rapinoe saw it and reacted on social media, her big focus was, ‘I need you to think about the real-world implications of what your words are doing on this world.’
I think this impulse for Hayes to say, ‘I want the fans to embrace her’ is putting the onus on the wrong people. The fans will embrace her when they see that public accountability finally happen. You cannot just say, ‘Hey, everybody. Please be nice to Albert right now and don’t boo her, because she feels really bad and she’s really struggling.’.
We’re missing steps six through 10 that need to happen before Albert is going to be embraced like that. And I think we shouldn’t rule that out. I think there may be a universe in which she says, like, ‘Hey, listen, this is what I did. And this is what I learned.’ It’s going to be a slow thing and you cannot force it.
Griffin: The problem with that is that the more time this takes, the higher the expectation I think a lot of people are going to have about the extent of the work that she does publicly. People need to see that and they deserve to see that.
But this is all off-the-field stuff. To be honest, I still have questions about whether you can separate the two, I personally don’t, because I believe the personal is political, but since we have discussed off the field, we also need to talk about her performances on the field and whether those even merited a spot on this roster. I’ve watched her at PSG (France’s Paris Saint-Germain) and she’s been impactful. For country, she’s solid. Her contributions haven’t inspired much excitement for me, but I am confused, even when we’re just looking at form, how she was able to make this roster.
Linehan: Hayes talked about Albert’s versatility. She could play any three of the midfield spots. Her best position is the No 8 role, according to Hayes, so I think she is kind of there as a direct replacement for Lindsay Horan. I do think that the other factor in this is Sam Coffey being maybe a little bit questionable. To be fair, Sonnett can also slot into that defensive midfielder role. So I do think that they already had a little bit of coverage there, but in my brain, I think that’s how it got justified.
Coffey was named to the Olympic roster despite recent minor injuries (Brad Smith, Getty Images)
Coffey has been dealing with this week-to-week ankle injury. They want to make sure that the midfield is as strong as possible. When you have Morgan out of the picture and Dunn listed as a forward, that does offer you an extra midfield spot. I had Albert as one of the alternates.
With Olivia Moultrie also injured, that is actually probably who I think it would have also been an option. But, again, the injury picture for the USWNT is always a factor. So, when you think about who the midfield alternates are (Croix Bethune and Hal Hershfelt), neither of those players have actually stepped on the field for the USWNT. Albert having 11 appearances, playing Gold Cup, playing in SheBelieves, I do think she ultimately becomes the only option for that final midfield spot.
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(Top photo: Brad Smith, Getty Images)
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