The USWNT won Olympic gold. Why did none of their players make the Fifpro XI?

Women’s football has grown exponentially in the 22 years since Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra marveled at the existence of a professional game in the US in Bend It Like Beckham.

In the film, the main characters went to the US to play collegiate football, while in Britain there was only a faint suspicion that local clubs would soon field professional teams. Today, the protagonists would have several professional options without ever moving beyond the reach of Greater London.

And apparently players around the world have forgotten that the US still exists.

That is the conclusion of the Fifpro Women’s World XIselected by 7,000 women’s football players in 70 countries. The selected team is nothing if not diverse, and it is not diverse. It is, with only two exceptions, an All-Star team made up of players from England and/or the top two teams in Spain.

The entire midfield plays for Champions League champion Barcelona: Aitana Bonmati, Alexia Putellas and Keira Walsh. Until this summer, just before the closing of the playing period, voters had to think, just like defender Lucy Bronze.

Walsh and Bronze are joined on the World XI by three of her compatriots, giving England an astonishing – if statistically implausible – five players in the team. Alex Greenwood (Manchester City) joins Bronze among the defenders, Lauren James (Chelsea) is up front and Mary Earps (Manchester United until joining PSG in the summer) is in goal. There is no doubt that the Lionesses have a strong lineup, but this strong?

Real Madrid have two players on their list. Defender Olga Carmona is the third Spanish player in the team, besides Bonmati and Putellas. The other Real Madrid player is a small step outside Europe: the Colombian Linda Caicedo.

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Finally, we have one player who is not from Europe and does not play there: Barbra Banda, the Zambian forward who scored the third Olympic hat-trick of her career this summer and took no time to acclimatize from the Chinese league to the NWSL, where she played alongside Marta in Orlando. Her performances in the NWSL postseason alone – four goals in three games, including the stunning winner in the final – should be a strong argument for her to return to the World XI next year. (The consideration period for the 2024 award closed on the last day of the Olympic Games.)

Banda also landed at the top of The Guardian’s annual global survey of the Top 100 players in the world. But the only other player in the World XI to make the Guardian’s Top 11 was Bonmati.

The World XI has no representatives from Lyon, runners-up in the Champions League. This also does not include anyone from Germany, who defeated Spain to take bronze at the Olympic Games in Paris, in which England did not participate. This also does not include anyone from the Netherlands, who finished ahead of England in the UEFA Nations League group match and thus eliminated the team that still placed five of its players in the Fifpro selection.

Also left out was a small country in the Western Hemisphere that somehow managed to find its way to Olympic gold, along with the trophies in the other two cup competitions on the 2024 agenda…

The United States.

Other studies are much friendlier to Olympic gold medalists. The Guardian’s poll, which ranked no American players higher than No. 18 last year, now places Sophia Smith third, Trinity Rodman fifth, Lindsey Horan sixth, Mallory Swanson ninth and Naomi Girma in tenth place.

Girma was the top defender in the Guardian survey and a similar one ESPN listwhich placed her in second place overall, behind Ballon d’Or winner/Guardian No. 1 Bonmati. At least she made Fifpros Shortlist with 26 players together with Horan. But Horan plays for Lyon, meaning Girma is the only American player in the NWSL to make it.

And the only other player on the shortlist to spend the entire season with an NWSL team was Brazil’s Debinha (Kansas City). England’s Jess Carter and Australian goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold signed with American teams this summer.

To be clear: the Fifpro players are certainly not underachievers. Arnold, who failed to secure the starting spot when he moved to Portland, and Real Madrid striker Athenea were the only two players on the shortlist who were not in the Guardian’s top 100.

But we could make a very good best XI from the players who were not shortlisted, let alone the final XI. (The position in the Guardian’s Top 100 is in brackets.) We’ve used the same slightly different 3-3-4 formation here as the Fifpro XI.

Goalkeeper: Ann-Katrin Berger (Gotham FC / Germany, No. 32). Her league performance (NWSL Goalkeeper of the Year) gives her the nod just ahead of the US Alyssa Naeherwho ended her international career on a high.

Defender: Giulia Gwinn (Bayern Munich / Germany, No. 26). Top defender in the Ballon d’Or voting and a crucial part of Germany’s bronze medalist team.

Defender: Glodís Perla Viggósdóttir (Bayern Munich/Iceland, No. 41): Also received a Ballon d’Or nomination, which is not easy for defenders of national teams outside the top 10.

Defender: Tarciane (Houston / Brazil, No. 55): One of the few bright spots for a horrendous Houston Dash squad and a cornerstone of a Brazilian team that came close to capturing the elusive Olympic gold.

Midfielder: Yui Hasegawa (Manchester City / Japan, No. 21): We’re going to start nerddom Before this, she played a role as a midfielder and completed the most passes of any WSL midfielder (1,251) with a breathtaking completion rate of 89.4%, second only to defender Millie Turner. She also ranked third in interceptions with 39.

Midfielder: Patri Guijarro (Barcelona/Spain, No. 13): No, Barcelona doesn’t need any help landing players in these All-Star squads, but she was one of five Barça players in UEFA’s Champions League team of the season and is number 13 on the Guardian’s list.

Midfielder: Rose Lavelle (Gotham FC / USA, No. 45): When healthy, she is the best midfielder the US has ever had. She is healthy.

Forward: Sophia Smith (Portland / USA, No. 3): Third in the NWSL in scoring (12) and led the U.S. team with nine goals this year, including three in the Olympics.

Forward: Trinity Rodman (Washington/USA, No. 5): One of the hardest-working forwards in the game excels in both glamorous (see her winner in the Olympic quarter-final) and unglamorous tasks (note her willingness to return to defense).

Forward: Khadija ‘bunny’ Shaw (Manchester City / Jamaica, No. 4): Golden Boot winner (21 goals) and Player of the Season in the English WSL.

Forward: Caroline Graham Hansen (Barcelona/Norway, No. 2): Last and certainly not least – the most inexplicable omission from the Fifpro lists after leading the Spanish League F in goals (21) and assists (19).

And that’s us still leaving out some fearsome scorers, including the USA’s top scorer at the Olympics (Mallory SwansonChicago, No. 9 in The Guardian’s poll) and the first player to score 20 goals in an NWSL season (Temwa ChawingaKansas City/Malawi, No. 19).

Fifpro emphasizes that its prizes are special because players vote for them. But players are just as sensitive to media hype as anyone else. Within a competition, in which every team plays against every other team, players can judge everyone who is eligible for a prize. That is not possible in a voting pool with 7,000 players.

In the past, the spotlight has shone perhaps too exclusively on the United States, which won the first Women’s World Cup (1991) and the first Olympic Games (1996) before the sport burst into the public consciousness with the U.S. World Cup victory on home soil in 1999. But the spotlight doesn’t seem to be broadening. It simply crossed the Atlantic Ocean.