ORLANDO, Fla. — It is a question that literally could have gotten their goat, er, GOAT.
They could have been annoyed.
They could have been dismissive.
They could have just laughed it off as some goofball sports columnist asking a dumb question at the team’s annual Media Day.
Instead, the Orlando Pride lived up to their nickname; they were glowing with Pride when I asked them on Thursday who is the real GOAT (Greatest Of All Time)?
Who is the true GOAT?
Who is the lead GOAT?
Who is the goatiest GOAT?
Is it Marta — the Pride’s Brazilian superstar midfielder?
Or is it Michelle Akers — the Pride’s new assistant coach, the UCF legend and a pioneer of the U.S. Women’s National Team who blazed the trail for women’s soccer players around the globe?
“I’m going to go with co-GOATS,” says the Pride’s new head coach Amanda Cromwell with a smile splashed across her face.
“It’s different generations,” says Pride midfielder Gunny Jonsdottir. “You have a GOAT in Michelle Akers who kind of started the movement for women’s football and is so important to where we are today. And you have another GOAT in Marta who has kept it going and pushed it even further.”
How cool is it that we are in the midst of Women’s History Month and we have the two greatest women’s soccer players in history representing Orlando’s only professional women’s sports team?
Cromwell describes the surreal feeling she sometimes gets when the Pride are in training and she looks over and sees Akers instructing Marta.
“I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s GOAT on GOAT!” Cromwell says.
Oh, sure, you could make a legitimate GOAT case for Mia Hamm — the two-time FIFA World Player of the Year whose marketability took the women’s game to another level — but I’m not buying it. Call me a biased Orlando homer if you want, but in my mind this is a two-GOAT race — Michelle vs. Marta.
Marta has won the FIFA World Player of the Year award an unprecedented six times. Akers never won FIFA World Player of the Year, but only because FIFA didn’t hand out the award for women when Akers was in her prime. If FIFA had handed out the annual award, an argument could be made that Akers might have won it most every year for about a decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s. In 2002, after her retirement, she was named FIFA’s Female Player of the Century.
Akers was a member of the inaugural U.S. Women’s National Team; she scored the first goal in USWNT history; she led the national team to its first World Cup title and its first Olympic gold medal. She also won the U.S. Soccer Female Athlete of the Year an unprecedented five straight times.
Comparing Akers’ greatness to Marta’s is like comparing Bill Russell’s greatness to that of LeBron James. Russell and Akers played in an era when their sports weren’t as globally popular as they have become today. And, of course, we are all prisoners of the moment. As time marches on, yesterday’s GOATs are put out to pasture.
“I’m an old GOAT, but Marta is the GOAT,” Akers says. “As a player, I viewed myself as meat and potatoes, but Marta is filet mignon with all of the rare and exquisite side courses. My game wasn’t fancy; Marta’s game is much more complex. She’s just a beautiful player. She’s brilliant. She has an incredible mind and sees the game eight moves ahead. At practice sometimes, I just dream about what it would have been like to play with her. What kind of player could I have been had I been on the same team as her?”
Of course, the opposite would also be true. How many gold medals and World Cups would Marta have if Akers had been her teammate? Marta, as you might expect, doesn’t want to get into the singular GOAT debate; she just says she’s ecstatic to have a fellow-GOAT Akers as part of Cromwell’s coaching staff.
“[Akers] doesn’t talk a lot, but when I look at her, I can just tell she is observing us very closely and she’s always coming up with something interesting to make us better,” Marta says. “I’m so happy to have her here with us. It makes us more hungry, more motivated to do our best.”
As for who is the true GOAT — Marta or Michelle — nobody is willing to answer the question definitively.
“It’s just an honor that I get to show up to work and be in their presence every day,” Pride goalkeeper Erin McLeod says
Adds defender Megan Montefusco: “I feel really lucky to be on the same pitch as both of them.”
On the week of International Women’s Day and in the midst of Women’s History Month, we should all feel an incredible sense of Orlando Pride that we have such greatness — such GOATness — living, coaching and playing in our midst.
