Lindsey Horan just wants to talk about football

It's USWNT captain Lindsey Horan's last morning in the United States before she flies back to France to rejoin Lyon, her club team. She spends it in a hotel lobby, tucked away at a table, talking The Athletics for an hour about her time as a manager of a team that is in the spotlight, how she sees her role in this time of transition, and above all one thing:

“Can we think about football?”

Horan was speaking almost exactly five months after he was named national team captain alongside Alex Morgan by then-USWNT head coach Vlatko Andonovski (Horan gets the armband if both are on the field at the same time). The role is the fulfillment of a life goal, but it also seems like a natural outcome, given how often and how intensely she thinks about the game.

Her first five months in that leadership role were full of notable exits: her World Cup team, Andonovski's and the retirements of Megan Rapinoe and Julie Ertz. It ended with a big addition: US Soccer's announced hiring of Emma Hayes as head coach.

Horan, now 29 years old and with 139 national team caps to her name, is part of an intermediate camp: too experienced to be a newcomer, and too new to be on the way back. It is her generation – which also includes Rose Lavelle, Emily Sonnett and others – that must keep the team's signature fire, that USWNT DNA, burning, even as the team undergoes a serious rethink after its worst-ever World Cup finish .

“We have to continue with that,” she says of herself and her fellow intermediaries. “You have to be with this team for a while to know what it takes… it is one of the most competitive national teams to be a part of.”

No one on the team is talking about starting from scratch. They just need more ways to win. More than mentality or fitness level, more than a 'never-say-die' approach. That's what Horan said her early conversations with Hayes were about. And that's why she wants to talk about football, and how the USWNT can bounce back – not just by playing better, but by thinking more.

“We've been so successful for so long in a certain way of playing, attacking and passing,” Horan said. “We've had individual brilliance. We've had footballers on the field and real players who want to play and it all fit together, otherwise it would always work out, or our DNA would take us to this place where we came out on top because that's how our mentality was. it is well.”

The game is changing, and Horan recognizes this. She praises Portugal's level of play at the World Cup, the investment in the game in Spain and other European countries, and the high level of emerging American talent (particularly citing 19-year-old San Diego Wave forward Jaedyn Shaw). . If there was a theme for Horan and the rest of the USWNT in that final camp of the year, it was a repetitive one: No one really knows this team's ceiling.

“Even in the last few games you don't see many glimpses of that, but it's the end product, that stays that way throughout the game, that gets everyone on the same page, not just four or five players,” she says. “If you can develop that more, and it's inherent to every player in the team, do you want to play the combinations, all these things? No idea what this team can do.

“Then there is the mentality aspect, where if the football doesn't go well, we know we can go crazy. to go. We have players on the pitch who are faster, stronger and more capable at the back, and we are going to get them out, right? The world will be very afraid.”

Those words could cause an uproar. In 2019, Ali Krieger suggested that the USWNT substitutes could take on and beat several other teams at the World Cup, and it was a huge point of contention for a team that received far more criticism from across American culture even as it was celebrated for its third time. consecutive title.

“We have to be one of the most talked about teams,” Horan said. “We are always under the magnifying glass of everything we do or say.”

Individual players can be victims of that magnifying glass just as much as the team. There is a clear, but understandable, frustration from Horan with the way her own performances are understood, even by the USWNT's own fan base. To illustrate her point, Horan points out that many viewers take a television commentator's analysis at face value.

“American football fans, most of them are not smart,” she says. “They don't know the game. They don't understand. (But) it's getting better.”

She pauses for a moment and senses that those words will also cause a stir.

“I'm going to piss off a few people,” she continues, “but the game is growing in the US. People are more and more knowledgeable, but people often take what the commentators say, right? My mother does it!” She bursts out laughing. “My mom says, 'Julie Foudy said you had such a good game!' And I'm here just saying, 'I was fucking today.'

When you play with Lyon in France, Horan says, things are different.

“From what I've heard, people understand my game a little better, a feeling for my football and the way I play,” she says. “It's French culture. Everyone watches football. People know football.”

However, none of that compares to Horan's experience at the 2023 World Cup. The outside commentary, including from her own former teammate Carli Lloyd, the entry into stadiums in their tailor-made suits; the tone used in interviews; the body language. Everything was scrutinized. This time, however, the lecture was accompanied by poor performance and poor results.

Horan says she wasn't bothered by the outside criticism, but found that no one other than the players could understand what it was like to be on that team. Ultimately, she says it felt “perfectly fine” that people would find something to talk about.

“If you don't support it on the field, people will come and talk about what you're doing, where your priorities are,” she says. “Like, 'Are you getting ready for the game? Do you care more about this…?'

Horan again returns to a small, seemingly innocuous detail: the traditional photo of the starting team before the match. In the NWSL, more and more teams have started using the opportunity for various pranks; something that Horan's European teammates bring up as an example of Americans not taking their business seriously. It's clear that it gets under her skin too.

“I want professionalism,” she admits. “Those little things, they really annoyed me. I don't think I could, and maybe I'm wrong in saying that, I don't know. It just bothers me. We put so much into this game, and sometimes it seems like a joke.”

She's quick to point out that if it works for others, she won't be the one to shut it down. That's not what she's trying to say. It's just that for her, at the end of the day, it's about football.

“We have to get back to football. Football is the most important thing,” says Horan. “So maybe we should turn some of those things off for now. We have to focus on the game, we have to focus on being the absolute best we can be.

As captain, Horan can help make that happen. It's a role she's clearly grown into, even if she's struggled to understand it in the months between Andonovski's departure and Hayes' hiring.

Hayes has not officially started yet and will only coach in matches after her job as Chelsea head coach ends along with the European season in May. But Hayes' visit with Horan and the rest of the team in December helped clarify the process, Horan says. It also gave Horan a chance to open the lines of communication, to admit that sometimes she didn't feel like she was in full control, that she hadn't been given the reins.

“I always felt like I was someone who could really touch any player, get the best out of them and make them the best they could be,” Horan said. “I'm not going to be like the rah-rah speeches, all that nonsense. Becky (Sauerbrunn) and I are probably a bit similar in that way. I'm probably a little crazier on the field. I want to make sure I am the leader I want to be, and no one is trying to make me something different.”

Before Andonovski gave her the bracelet — a move made in part because longtime captain Sauerbrunn missed the World Cup due to a lingering foot injury — Horan told him that getting the bracelet wouldn't change her, or how players could talk to her. What it would change, she told him, is the tone it would set. She wanted to be a role model.

“I'm not going to be a coach's captain, I'm going to be a player's captain,” she told Andonovski. So if that wasn't what he wanted, then he shouldn't make her captain.

Horan has made good on her word since interim head coach Twila Kilgore stepped in, leaning on Morgan, Lavelle and Sonnett to make them part of the transition process. She has also empowered the team's relative newcomers. Normally reserved 23-year-old center back Naomi Girma said Horan “encouraged me to find my voice.”

“A lot of these new young players will be playing big, crazy roles, even in these Olympics,” Horan says. “How on earth do we get the best out of them to put us on stage? It was a crazy place, but this is a very exciting role for me because I felt like this is what I have to do.

The team has four months until Hayes takes over, and six until the Olympics. The sprint is in full swing for this huge group project to get the team back to the top, before looking ahead to 2027 and a World Cup that could be hosted at home. Every voice matters to Horan, from Horan to Lavelle to Morgan to Girma to Shaw and many more.

“We have to do everything we can to improve, make each other better and meet the standards,” says Horan. “We have to change every bit of culture we had before the last World Cup and the Olympics because we have to win. And that starts now.”

(Photo: James Gilbert/Getty Images)