It’s an atypically sunny spring day in Beaverton, Oregon, and four of US Women’s Soccer’s brightest stars are wondering what it will look like when they win. This is not an unusual train of thought for Sophia Smith, Alyssa Thompson, Naomi Girma, and Taylor Kornieck, who between them represent a new generation of standout scorers, defenders, and in this World Cup year, possible household names. But at this moment, under Vogue’s lens, they are more preoccupied with the granular realities of celebration than usual. Will they attempt an ironic gesture, à la Alex Morgan, miming drinking tea after America’s victory over England in the last World Cup? Will they whip off their shirts and fall to their knees like Brandi Chastain did in 1999? Will they collapse, or cheer, or cry? They arrange themselves in an open semicircle, arms loosely linked over one another’s shoulders. “Okay, you’ve just scored the winning goal,” photographer Brian Finke prompts them from behind his camera. “Who scored?” Thompson asks. “Me!” Smith shouts, backing up to gleefully launch herself into her teammates’ huddle as the shutter clicks. And with that, one of soccer’s most exciting young talents delivers a reminder—invaluable in any sport—that timing is everything.
Until recent years, fame, fortune, and fashion portraits have not typically been the realm of US women’s soccer. The National Women’s Soccer League, or NWSL, is this country’s third attempt at a women’s professional league, after the Women’s United Soccer Association (2000–2003) and Women’s Professional Soccer (2007–2012). Players once had to go overseas to more-established clubs and footie-friendly cultures to make their careers. “When I was growing up thinking about going pro, I was thinking about playing for PSG [Paris Saint-Germain] or Barcelona or something like that,” Alyssa Thompson tells me after the photo shoot. The 18-year-old rookie phenom and number one league draft pick made headlines when she decided to forgo Stanford after she finished high school at Harvard-Westlake this year, signing with Los Angeles’s Angel City instead (media outlets call her “the LeBron James of soccer”). But why should Thompson wait? The league is growing, she says, “and it’s just supercool that I get to be a part of it.”
Much of that growth can be attributed to four World Cup wins (including the last two, in 2015 and 2019) and the US team’s fierce advocacy for equal pay (which, after a six-year legal battle between USWNT players and the US Soccer Federation, resulted in a settlement out of court last year) and LGBTQ+ rights. It’s a team that’s easy to root for, one that’s “about so much more than just standing on top of podiums,” two-time World Cup champion, Olympic gold medalist, and ESPN commentator Julie Foudy tells me. “Of course we want to win and bring in titles and trophies, but this group has been about bigger things and bigger ideas. We care deeply about leaving the world, not just the game, in a better place.”
It’s also a team that’s easy to root for because they win. As the World Cup kicks off this July in Australia and New Zealand, the US is the team to beat, with a chance to earn a third consecutive trophy, unprecedented across FIFA. As four of its most buzzed-about Gen Z players, Smith, Thompson, Girma, and Kornieck are all hoping to make the 23-player roster and then make history. (Editor’s note: After this story went to press, the World Cup roster was announced in late June, and three of the four players profiled here—Smith, Thompson, and Girma—made the squad.)
Soccer is about speed, agility, strength, and strategic thinking. It requires thousands of near-instantaneous decisions, as well as the ability to run for over 90 minutes straight, at hamstring-wrenching speeds. At a packed Portland Thorns home game against Angel City in late April, Thompson, who’s been alternating pro training with shopping for her prom dress, tears circles around the pitch. She’s performing for her team, and for the stadium full of screaming fans, but also for an audience of one: USWNT coach Vlatko Andonovski, who has said that every match in these precious months leading up to the World Cup will affect who makes the roster. In other words? The pressure is on. “I think it’s a good thing, pressure. I invite pressure,” Sophia Smith tells me the next day, after delivering a late second-half assist that tied up that match 3-3. “If there wasn’t pressure, I feel like, what’s the point?”
For professional players the quadrennial World Cup is the big show; a coronation and sometimes a career culmination. “It means everything” to play for the national team, Taylor Kornieck tells me on a breezy day in April, fresh from a mobility session with her trainers on the San Diego Wave. The 24-year-old’s first outing (or “cap”) for the USWNT was in June 2022, and she made it memorable, scoring against Colombia with a header much in the spirit and style of her childhood idol, Abby Wambach. (Wambach, at five feet eleven, has always felt like a good proxy for Kornieck, who at six foot one is the tallest field player in league history.) “My generation, we didn’t really have a professional team to look up to besides overseas,” says Kornieck. When she was growing up in Michigan and Las Vegas, it was the national team that fans cared about, and the national team only.
As last year’s league MVP (the youngest ever) and Portland’s star scorer, the 22-year-old Smith—whose bright smile and game-time bubble braid make her an easy poster girl for the sport—takes a relatively sanguine view of greatness. “I want to be the best in the world,” she tells me. “I feel like I can be the best in the world. That’s what motivates me. There’s no end point. There is no ‘satisfied.’ There’s always: I want more.”
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Players who love soccer and are exceptionally good at it typically find that out young. Thompson figured it out at four, kicking balls around the backyard with her younger sister, Gisele (still in high school, but also signed with Nike). Smith was six or so, an all-around athletic kid for whom soccer provided exactly the right amount of improvisation: “I felt like I could be myself on a soccer field,” she says. Young Kornieck tried her hand at volleyball and basketball, the sports everyone pushes you to when you’re tall, but nothing suited her like soccer did. Naomi Girma spent every Saturday of her youth playing with the Maleda Soccer Club, which her father founded for fellow Ethiopian immigrant families in their hometown of San Jose. (Maleda means “dawn” in Amharic.) What comes next? Local club teams, invitation-only camps and youth leagues, an Olympic Development Program if you’re really good, maybe a Youth National Team, and a D1 school like Stanford, where Girma and Smith went.
“With my family, school was very important,” Girma tells me over a plate of grilled chicken and vegetables after a day of training with the Wave. The deal was “school, then soccer.” After graduating in 2022 with a degree in symbolic systems (a Stanford-specific program blending computer science, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and statistics), she’s now balancing pursuing a master’s in management science and engineering with setting a record as winner of both Rookie of the Year and Defender of the Year in her first year in the NWSL. It’s been a meteoric rise, and it’s made her into what Megan Rapinoe called a “no-brainer” starter for the national team. “She can play any kind of ball. She’s a great leader,” Rapinoe said of Girma at February’s SheBelieves cup. “She’s just fucking good…. She’s going to be the future of the team for a long time.”
That future looks increasingly bright: American players are going pro younger and younger. “I keep getting emails from Harvard-Westlake like, Alyssa hasn’t said where she’s going to college yet!” her mom, Karen Thompson, tells me. “I’m like…and?” As in, go turn on ESPN. “We believe the 2020s will be the decade of women’s sport!” Nike’s VP of global women’s sports marketing Tanya Hvizdak tells me on a Zoom call from her office in Portland, a pointillist portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the wall behind her. It’s in Nike’s best interest to believe it. “You can continue to get inflationary growth on men’s, and it will still be a massive business,” Hvizdak says, “but if you want to get to where you need to get to, women’s is just going to have to continue to explode for us.” This summer Nike released the Phantom Luna Boot, a soccer cleat designed at the behest of Nike athletes specifically to protect women’s ACLs on the field, and fetching World Cup–themed collaborations with fashion designers like Martine Rose and Yoon Ahn. But for a real explosion, they need stars.
So what makes a player into a star? How can you tell who will be the next Mia Hamm or Abby Wambach or Megan Rapinoe? “The difference between good and great is something I talk about a lot,” Foudy tells me. “There’s a lot of really good players. The great ones, I think, have a mentality that’s just different. They’re fighters, they’re competitive, they’re curious, they’re hungry. You can have tons of talent and tons of raw athletic ability. But if you don’t have the mentality to want to constantly grow and get better and push and fight through things and deal with adversity, then you’re not going to get to the great part of that equation.”
That said, all play and no life can be a grind. “You need to be able to sustain yourself and do other things that make you happy,” says Girma, who brings her Kindle to read on the beach in Del Mar, California, most recently Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. Kornieck uses her time off to play Fortnite, or to take a hot yoga class at HotWorx, one of the infrared fitness studios she co-owns with her mother. Smith likes reality TV, hanging out with her Stanford football player boyfriend, Michael Wilson—who just signed to the Arizona Cardinals—and intentionally keeping her apartment a soccer-free “sanctuary.” Thompson likes spending time with her friends and her family, and reveling in her high school senior spring for as long as she can. They all like Ted Lasso.
Most importantly, they’re a team. Even if they occasionally try to destroy one another on the pitch, they have each other. (A love of competition—what Foudy calls “wholesome discontent”—is key to the enterprise, after all.) If they don’t make the roster, they’re still going to be rooting for the USA. “I think we all realize that at the end of the day it is just a game,” Smith tells me back in Beaverton. “The relationships you build, that’s what you’ll have. That’s what’s important. A game is never more important than that.” But then she’s off, racing to her car to get to practice. There’s a World Cup to win, after all.
In this story: grooming, Beth Level.