Alex Morgan retires with a relentless record of victories on and off the pitch | Alexander Abnos

TThe moment that best sums up Alex Morgan’s time as a player came in March. But you can hardly blame yourself for missing it. As has often been the case in a long career that Morgan abruptly announced would end this weekend, much of her impact came from the play itself.

The moment began with the speed that was Morgan’s calling card as a youngster. Just 10 minutes into the USWNT quarterfinal against Colombia in the W Gold Cup, Morgan darted to apply pressure on a loose Colombian backpass, picked the ball out to teammate Lindsey Horan, and continued her trajectory as Horan played a through ball into the penalty area. Here, Morgan’s experienced nose took over, positioning her body perfectly between herself and the pursuing defender to create a clear foul that earned a penalty to break the 0-0 scoreline.

A few months earlier, Morgan had missed a penalty in a scoreless draw against this Colombian team. This was a chance for redemption, and everyone on the pitch seemed to know it. Morgan tapped the ball away from Colombian keeper Natalia Giraldo and held it as if to claim the moment for herself. A group of Colombian players gathered in Morgan’s personal space as she stood on the penalty spot, protecting it from tampering. Colombia’s protests were directed at the referee, but their intention was clearly to throw Morgan off her game.

She remained calm for a while, but after a few minutes her steely gaze disappeared. Her eyes rolled and her arms flailed in annoyance. Had the game worked? Were the opponents in her head? Finally the referee cleared the penalty area and it looked like we were about to find out.

Not so fast. With the stage all set, Morgan surprisingly left the spot and passed the ball to Horan, who had stayed clear of the commotion and was now able to take the penalty with a clear head.

That Horan buried the kick and the U.S. went on to win 3-0 almost doesn’t matter. In that moment and others, Morgan’s true legacy lies not in her winning plays on the court (although there were many of them), but in the way she used her own gravity to make the job easier—and the conditions better—for her colleagues.

Morgan saw more than enough early in her professional career to know the court needed improvement. 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 led to low wages and unprofessional working conditions even as the national team captured the attention of the mainstream American audience every two years with the Olympics or the World Cup.

Morgan was already a celebrity when she was assigned to the Portland Thorns for the NWSL’s inaugural season in 2013, after making her USWNT debut in 2010 while still in college at Cal. In 2011, she became the first player to score a goal and provide an assist in a World Cup final. In 2012, she went viral with a last minute winner in the Olympic semifinal against Canada and later led the team to gold. Companies rushed to her with sponsorship deals, fans ordered her No. 13 jersey by the truckload; Morgan was a defining face of a USWNT generation that would become the most successful program in history.

With so much attention focused on her, it would have been easy for Morgan to remain on the sidelines of the struggles that marked much of the grassroots women’s soccer during that era. Instead, she did the exact opposite. Her reputation was trusted enough by teammates that when Thorns teammate Mana Shim decided to tell the league about alleged inappropriate behavior and sexual coercion by former head coach Paul Riley, Morgan was the strongest voice in Shim’s corner. She sought out an HR liaison early on, advocated with 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 with some of the inappropriate behavior by coaches in professional women’s soccer, and the implementation of the NWSL’s first-ever anti-harassment policy in 2021 — a policy Morgan played a key role in advancing on behalf of the players.

For Morgan, success on the field went hand in hand with her role as an advocate.

In 2019, Morgan scored her 100th international goal and was the top scorer at the World Cup, while she was among the USWNT players who filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, demanding equal pay between the men’s and women’s national teams. The fight ended in a $24 million settlement and a groundbreaking collective bargaining agreement guaranteeing equal pay.

In 2020, she gave birth to her daughter Charlie and has since worked behind the scenes to ensure that players in the NWSL and USWNT no longer had to choose between motherhood and their professional careers. Support staff and caregiver benefits were written into CBAs, as was parental leave. When Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir filed a lawsuit against Lyon for withholding pay during her parenting league, Morgan spoke out in support.

In 2022, Morgan won the NWSL Golden Boot and reclaimed her spot on the national team for the 2023 World Cup, while also serving on the NWSL Players’ Association negotiating committee. Just last week, that body approved a new CBA with the league that improves labor standards and makes the NWSL the first major U.S. league to eliminate the college draft.

In her video announcing her retirement (and second pregnancy), Morgan noted that for her, “giving it your all” for soccer included those moments off the field as much as the trophies, goals and adulation. She was surprised when her daughter Charlie recently said for the first time that she wanted to be a professional soccer player when she grew up.

“It just made me so proud,” Morgan said. “Not because I want her to be a football player when she grows up, but because there is a path that even a four-year-old can see now.”

Morgan wasn’t the only one blazing that trail, but she was visible and that was more than enough.