Can FIFA name an American woman (who isn’t Alex Morgan)?

The current global perception of the USWNT and American women’s soccer is weird

There’s this concept in behavioral psychology called the Law of the Instrument. It’s also called Maslow’s Hammer after Abraham Maslow and you will have maybe heard his version of the idea: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Basically, the concept is that the tools you have bias what solutions you can identify to a given problem, or even what kind of problem you think you have. If you take “tools” to be a metaphor for, like, “personal worldviews and experiences” then this becomes a useful concept for understanding lots of different things, including international soccer voting bodies. 

On Monday evening, the annual The Best FIFA Football Awards1Soccer executives are Not Good At Naming Things took place in London, and several awards for the best soccer players in 2023 were given out, including a women’s team of the year. This is officially called the FIFPRO World XI, as voted on by around 6,000 professional women’s players from around the world.

This is pretty much just a list of players who were good at the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand — plus Alex Morgan. On one level this is not surprising: International soccer awards voting bodies love to over-index World Cup performance, regardless of if they’re composed of players, coaches, or journalists. For example, in World Cup years the Ballon D’Or almost exclusively goes to someone who was in the top 3 for the World Cup Golden Ball.

International soccer bodies also love Alex Morgan. This most recent Best XI Award is her sixth. Alex Morgan has had an incredible career, and is also charming and charismatic and people like inviting her to their awards ceremonies. Her best soccer is probably behind her, but she still manages moments of greatness every now and then.

However! For all of her historic achievements, Alex Morgan was not particularly good in 2023. She scored just two goals in 15 national team games, and just five non-penalty goals in 18 NWSL games. And if we’re  over-indexing the World Cup, Morgan struggling at that tournament was a huge subplot to the USWNT’s early exit. My challenge to the FIFA awards going forward: For $1 name an American woman who isn’t Alex Morgan.

So what is Alex Morgan doing on this list? Well, if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail, and if all you have is a set of assumptions of where good soccer is played and who the best American players are, every “Best Player” list looks like an opportunity to include Alex Morgan.

To put it more cleanly, there are two basic “hammers” — judgement-clouding biases — at play that make everyone put Morgan in these lists, rather than any of her USWNT teammates or even another non-American players.

The first is the fact that for the first three decades that women’s soccer has been an internationally organized sport, the United States has been by far the dominant global team. The team has won four World Cups, and even in cycles where they don’t win the whole thing they come pretty close, this past year being the exception. 

If you’re going through the same exercise that the 6,000 professional players who voted for the FIFPRO Best XI did, and picking three players each from goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders, and attacking, it wouldn’t be insane to assume that one of those women should probably be an American. 

But the second, hammer — the second habit that is clouding people’s judgment — is that people are very unclear on the hierarchy of women’s club soccer right now. This is maybe less clear from Alex Morgan being in the Best XI and more clear from Alyssa Naher being the only other NWSL player who even made the shortlist.

Global women’s soccer is in a weird spot at the moment, as the traditional European men’s soccer powerhouses catch up to the United States in terms of international talent and the relative strength of the domestic leagues. This year’s World Cup was sort of an encapsulation of that: The United States went out in the Round of 16, and the eventual final was between two UEFA countries who you wouldn’t be surprised to see contest the men’s final.2Just kidding, England was there and can you imagine the England men’s team playing in a World Cup final? I can’t.

In men’s soccer there is a very clearly established hierarchy of club achievement: The best teams in the world are in the Champions League, followed by the English Premier League, followed by some ever-changing order of the German Bundesliga, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, and French Ligue 1.T3he official names for many of these leagues include sponsored branding, but that doesn’t seem particularly important to me. When you can’t just vote for one of the best players on the team that won the men’s World Cup for the Ballon D’Or, the best player on whichever team won the last Champions League usually does the trick.

It’s less clear that this is the case in women’s soccer. The women’s Champions League is probably the highest level of club competition in the world, but is the Women’s Super League that clearly better than the NWSL? Is La Liga F? World Cup winner Esther González, who moved from Real Madrid to NY/NJ Gotham FC this year, doesn’t think so. Below, blown up to a giant font for emphasis, is what she said in an interview late last year:

“One of the biggest differences with the Spanish league, which is a great league, is that here (in the NWSL) all the games, absolutely all of them, are like a Champions League game at the highest level.”

But still: Doesn’t hearing club names like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Lyon, Manchester City, scratch a certain part of your brain that associates those clubs with the highest possible level of soccer?4Lyon’s men’s team is extremely bad this year, so maybe not them.  Manchester United carries more weight than Racing Louisville, even though it is entirely possible that Racing beats United head-to-head. 

So here’s a basic hypothesis of how voting went down: There isn’t any publicly available information on who exactly the 6,000 women’s soccer players are who voted for this Best XI, but based on sheer numbers of professional teams it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume they are largely in Europe. And these people are professional soccer players! They’re really busy, and they’re not going to stay up until 3 a.m. in London or Munich or Gothenburg to catch a Portland Thorns game. 

If you’re one of those voters, then, you’re left with the those two basic assumptions among the voters: That we should probably vote for at least one American somewhere, and that it’s not necessarily worth knowing who the best players in an American pro league are. And ultimately this means people just check off the most famous and recognizable USWNT player. 

Not that any of this is too serious: Individual awards in soccer are quite silly, and ultimately it’s not that important for professional women’s soccer players who are busy trying to scrape together a living playing the game to also have incredibly wide-ranging knowledge about the pro leagues in other countries. 

But it would be nice if FIFA — the supposedly global governing body of the sport — did a better job of recognizing leagues outside of Europe, particularly when those leagues are arguably as good as those on the continent.

Every time that “Alex Morgan” is used as basically “placeholder American” it becomes more clear that as much as the global soccer community is able to accept that the USWNT has been historically successful, they are not quite ready to pay attention to soccer that actually takes place in United States. And if we really want to give out awards to the best women’s soccer players in the world, it would be good to find a way to celebrate literally anyone who is playing professional women’s soccer stateside.

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