For so long, on so many occasions, it felt like Marta’s time. On Saturday the time had finally come.
The Orlando Pride, led by the 38-year-old Brazilian playmaker and led by red-hot striker Barbra Banda, completed one of the most dominant seasons in NWSL history on Saturday with a 1-0 victory over the Washington Spirit in the league’s championship match . The title marks the team’s first-ever win and Marta’s first victory in a club-level final since the 2011 WPS Championship with the Western New York Flash.
Marta was 25 at the time and already a star thanks to her dominant performance against the United States in the 2007 World Cup semi-final. Most of her teammates from that Flash team have since retired, although two of them, Alex Morgan and Christine Sinclair , which only finally did this this year. (That’s right: Marta, Sinclair and Morgan were all on the same club team at one time, all in their prime.) That match was the last played in WPS before the league folded, and Marta spent the next five club seasons in Sweden before leaving returned to the US with Orlando in 2017.
Marta’s addition should make the Pride a consistent title contender. Instead, it took almost a decade of mostly bad seasons before Marta finally found her way to the NWSL’s marquee event.
“Of course it means so much,” she said in front of a national television audience after Saturday’s win, before sending the audio crew to the beep button. “I’ve waited eight fucking years!”
Saturday’s match had just about everything you could want in a final. The setting at Kansas City’s CPKC Stadium, a boisterous crowd, the primetime kickoff, and its placement on America’s airwaves all felt appropriate and fitting for a Major League championship game. Also on the pitch, the team’s contrasting approaches made for an intense tactical battle that was a joy to watch.
The Spirit, true to head coach Jonatan Giráldez’s Barcelona roots, controlled the majority of possession and searched for chances through clever ball movement and an intelligent, if not all-encompassing, press. The Pride, known all year for their NWSL-best defense, were happy to play the Spirit straight. The back four absorbed the pressure, throwing themselves at shots and into passing lanes and looking to play straight at Banda at every opportunity once possession finally fell to them.
In the 33rd minute, that exact clash of styles resulted in a breakaway from Banda, during which she caught the attention of all four Spirit defenders behind. Marta, amazingly, went completely unchallenged. Her tame effort on goal after Banda’s pass was both a missed opportunity and a warning shot.
Four minutes later Banda was at it again. In another display of sleek movement and superb skills, the Zambian collected a well-placed ball over the top from midfielder Angelina, put Spirit defender Esme Morgan in a blender and finished with a confident strike at the near post to send the Pride to the ground to make. 1-0 ahead.
It was an incredible goal, with a no-call in the build-up. Angelina could have cleared that pass in part thanks to a full-on, two-handed push from Leicy Santos – a foul in the eyes of many, but not in the eyes of center referee Alyssa Nichols. The VAR took a look, but decided it was a judgement.
Washington kept pushing. Trinity Rodman, playing with a back injury suffered at the Olympics this summer, found space in interesting areas but the Pride defense, led by Emily Sams, stepped up repeatedly to contain the threat. The Spirit finished with a whopping 26 goal attempts, of which only five were on target, with a total xG of 1.76.
The Pride gladly took the pressure.
“What Emily has done this season is fantastic,” Orlando England head coach Seb Hines said of Sams, while also praising her centre-back Kylie Strom. “In the last 15 we have been the most consistent team when it comes to defending, and we showed that tonight.”
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It is old-fashioned but ultimately true that defense wins championships, and it is also accepted that investments usually lead to results. The 2024 NWSL Championship – and indeed the entire playoffs – proved emblematic of both concepts. The four elite regular season teams – the two finalists plus Kansas City and Gotham FC – separated themselves from the pack: there was a five-point lead between fourth-place Kansas City and first-place Orlando, but a gap of 16 points separate Kansas City and fifth-place North Carolina. The top four also formed the field of participants for the semi-finals.
It’s certainly no coincidence that each of these four arrived at that point after increased investment and/or new, entrenched properties. In the Pride’s case, the Wilf family’s 2021 acquisition saw the retention of Hines and the hiring of Haley Carter as sporting director, giving the team a direction and a level of team building that simply didn’t exist before. Then came the investment. Under Carter, and with the support of the Wilfs, Orlando paid the second-highest transfer fee ever in the league for Banda, who scored the winning goal, and Angelina, who assisted. They surrounded these difference makers with a special mix of hardworking, reliable professionals.
And at the center of it all they had an all-time great who had seen it all before; who had played in the dark days of club football in the US, who knew how special this moment was, and whose mother was in the US for the first time to see her daughter play in front of a sold-out, purpose-built women’s football stadium on a cold night in the Midwest.
‘I told everyone today: hey, we have to take this with us. We have had an incredible season. It’s just one more game, please,” Marta told CBS afterward. “I have my moments of, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing?’ But I have great players by my side who push me… they make me feel young. Not that young, but a bit young.”
Marta’s individual accolades are numerous: six Fifa World Player of the Year awards, plus several Player of the Season awards. But there was that continued failure in the club finals, the runner-up finish at the Olympics and World Cups for Brazil, and the fact that, incredibly, she had not won a senior title at club level since 2015.
Now, with the 2024 NWSL Shield and Saturday Championship, she has two.