And what does one gain from tearing it down? Former USWNT teammates Carli Lloyd and Hope Solo chatted on a recent podcast, deriding the team culture as “toxic” despite opposite reports from others in the team.
USWNT veteran Hope Solo launched a new podcast this month, which stirred up her old rift with her former team and prompted a fresh round of criticism from weary football fans. The former goalkeeper invited recently retired forward Carli Lloyd onto the first episode to discuss their time on the US Women’s National Team, picking apart the recent equal pay settlement (which Lloyd, but not Solo, will benefit from) before Lloyd left fans bristling with an attack on the team’s ‘toxic culture’ since its 2015 World Cup win.
During the time Lloyd described, the team was amping up its pursuit of equal pay in line with the USMNT. Solo was effectively fired from the team in the wake of their disastrous 2016 Olympics campaign after she called the Swedish silver medallists who defeated them “a bunch of cowards”. The team stormed toward a second consecutive World Cup win in 2019, a tournament that Carli Lloyd would later describe as “the worst time of my life,” with Jill Ellis bringing her off the bench to score her three goals during the tournament and playing her in every match. Off the field, the Black Lives Matter movement concentrated growing public fury about the killings of Black people by police hands and weapons, Megan Rapinoe knelt in support of Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality (which Lloyd called a distraction) and, by 2020, as protests swept across the US and other countries, it had become a central topic in football discourse. Black players shared their perspectives, NWSL teams began to kneel, US Soccer’s hastily assembled 2016 kneeling ban was rescinded, and racism and abuse across sport became a topic that could no longer be hushed up.
“What we had in the last several years was not a good culture, and the mentality changed, and it became toxic.”
– Carli Lloyd