The moment that may best encapsulate Alex Morgan’s time as a player happened back in March. You could hardly be blamed for missing it, though. As was often the case in a long career that Morgan abruptly announced will end this weekend, much of her impact came away from the play itself.
This moment started with the speed that was Morgan’s calling card as a youngster. Just 10 minutes into the USWNT’s quarter-final matchup against Colombia in the W Gold Cup, Morgan darted to pressure a loose Colombian backpass, nicked the ball to her teammate Lindsey Horan, and then continued her trajectory as Horan played a through ball into the box. Here, Morgan’s veteran nous took over; she positioned her body perfectly between herself and the pursuing defender, drawing a clear foul that set up a penalty kick to break the 0-0 scoreline.
A few months earlier, Morgan missed a penalty in a scoreless draw against this very Colombia team. This was a chance at redemption, and everyone on the field seemed to know it. Morgan poked the ball away from Colombia goalkeeper Natalia Giraldo and held it as if to claim the moment for herself. A cadre of Colombia players gathered in Morgan’s personal space as she stood on the penalty spot, protecting it from sabotage. Colombia’s protests were aimed at the referee, but their intent was clearly to put Morgan off her game.
She kept her cool for a while, but after several minutes her steely expression broke. Her eyes rolled and arms flailed in exasperation. Had the gamesmanship worked? Were the opponents in her head? At long last, the referee cleared the box, and we seemed set to find out.
Not so fast. With the stage fully set, Morgan surprisingly left the spot and handed the ball to Horan, who had stayed away from the ruckus and was now free to take the penalty with a clear head.
That Horan buried the kick and that the US would go on to win 3-0 is almost beside the point. In that moment and others, Morgan’s true legacy lies not with her winning plays on the field (though there were many of those), but with the way she used her own gravity to make the job easier – and conditions better – for her colleagues.
Morgan saw more than enough early in her professional journey to know that the job needed improvements. Like other American players of her generation, she played through a remarkable evolution of the women’s game in the United States, starting in the alphabet soup of leagues that preceded the NWSL, where chronic underinvestment made for low pay and unprofessional working conditions even as the national team captured mainstream American eyeballs every two years with the Olympics or the World Cup.
Morgan was already a celebrity by the time she was allocated to the Portland Thorns in the NWSL’s inaugural season in 2013, having made her USWNT debut in 2010 while still in college at Cal. In 2011 she became the first player to score a goal and add an assist in a World Cup final. In 2012 she went viral with a last-gasp winner in the Olympic semi-final against Canada and later led the team to gold. Companies rushed to her with endorsement deals, fans ordered her No 13 jersey by the truckload; Morgan was a defining face of a USWNT generation that would go on to be the program’s most successful ever.
With so much attention in her direction, it would have been easy for Morgan to stay on the sideline for the struggles that defined much of the rank-and-file of women’s soccer during that period. Instead, she did the exact opposite. Her reputation was trusted enough among teammates that when Thorns teammate Mana Shim decided to tell the league about alleged inappropriate behavior and sexual coercion from former head coach Paul Riley, Morgan was the strongest voice in Shim’s corner. She searched for an HR contact early on, advocated to league officials, and supported Shim and Sinead Farrelly in numerous other ways as revealed by Meg Linehan in The Athletic in 2021.
The end result: Numerous investigations, a reckoning about a number of inappropriate coach behaviors throughout women’s professional soccer, and the adoption of the NWSL’s very first anti-harassment policy in 2021 – a policy that Morgan was instrumental in advocating for on behalf of players.
For Morgan, on-field success went hand-in-hand with her role as an advocate.
In 2019, Morgan scored her 100th international goal and was joint-top scorer at the World Cup, while also being among the USWNT players that filed suit against the US Soccer Federation, demanding equal pay between the men’s and women’s national teams. That fight ended with a $24m settlement and a landmark collective bargaining agreement that guaranteed equal pay.
In 2020, she gave birth to her daughter Charlie, and thereafter worked behind the scenes to ensure that players in the NWSL and USWNT would no longer have to choose between motherhood and their professional career. Support staff and accommodations for caregivers were written into CBAs, as was parental leave. When Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir filed suit against Lyon for withholding pay during her parental league, Morgan spoke up in support.
In 2022, Morgan won the NWSL Golden Boot and reclaimed her spot in the national team ahead of the 2023 World Cup while also serving on the bargaining committee for the NWSL Players’ Association. Just last week, that body agreed to a new CBA with the league that improves working conditions and makes the NWSL the first top-flight US league to abolish the college draft.
In her video announcing her retirement (and her second pregnancy), Morgan took care to mention that to her, “giving her all” for soccer included these off-field moments just as much as the trophies, goals, and adulation. She marveled that recently, for the first time, her daughter Charlie said that she wanted to be a professional soccer player when she grew up.
“It just made me immensely proud,” Morgan said. “Not because I wish for her to become a soccer player when she grows up, but because a pathway exists that even a four-year-old can see now.”
Morgan was not alone in carving that pathway, but she was visible, and that was more than enough.
