Now that Holiday and Rapinoe were eligible to return to the lineup, Jill Ellis would have to find a way to keep a good thing going. Germany, who waited in the semifinal, had dominated the tournament thus far, scoring a whopping 20 goals and allowing only three through five games.
Could Ellis get Lloyd, Holiday, and Brian on the field together? She could, but only by abandoning the 4–4–2 formation she had clung to up to that point. She switched to a 4–2–3–1 formation, which subtracted one striker and replaced her with a central midfielder. That allowed Lloyd to tuck in behind go-to striker Alex Morgan, sit in front of Brian and Holiday, where she could roam wherever she wanted, and prowl for goals.
It mostly worked. Both Morgan and Lloyd were electric in creating chances and testing the German back line. But this was Germany—the No. 1 team in the world after bumping the USA down the FIFA world rankings months earlier—and a breakthrough wasn’t coming easily for either side.
By the 59th minute, the match was still scoreless when German striker Alexandra Popp ran down a lofted ball into the box. Julie Johnston, chasing, tugged her from behind. Popp fell, and the whistle blew. Penalty kick for Germany.
This was it. This was the moment, it seemed, the Americans would lose the World Cup. It was a given, of course, that Germany would score this penalty kick. The Germans never missed in moments like this, and a goal would shift the momentum of the match.
Hope Solo did the only thing she could do: stall. As Célia Šašić stepped up to the spot to take the kick, Solo sauntered off to the sideline slowly and got her water bottle. She took a sip. Paused. Scanned the crowd. Another sip. She strolled back slowly toward goal. She still had the water bottle in her hand. She wanted to let this moment linger. She wanted Šašić to think too much about the kick and let the nerves of the moment catch up to her.
Finally, Solo took her spot. The whistle blew, and without even a nanosecond of hesitation, Šašić ran up to the ball and hit it, as if she couldn’t bear another moment of waiting. Solo guessed to the right, and Šašić’s shot was going left. But it kept going left and skipped wide.
The pro-USA crowd at Olympic Stadium in Montreal erupted into a thunderclap that made the stands shake. The American players cheered as if they had just scored a goal.
“We knew right then and there that we were going to win the World Cup,” Ali Krieger says. “That was it. That’s when we knew: This is ours.”
Johnston, meanwhile, was in tears. She had just almost cost her team the entire tournament, and she was shaking. Her teammates urged her to snap out of it—there was still another 30 minutes left in the game.
“We all went to JJ and told her, you need to get it together and you need to focus,” Krieger says. “She was crying, and we were like, Fucking get it together—let’s go!”
When a similar penalty was called just six minutes later—Annike Krahn fouled Alex Morgan in the box—the Americans had Carli Lloyd step up to the spot.
Lloyd was the exact opposite of Šašić. She didn’t break her focus from the ball, staring at the spot where she was going to hit it and ignoring everything else around her. When the whistle blew, a composed Lloyd calmly stepped up and smashed it into the back of the net.
The Americans didn’t need their second goal to punch past the Germans, but Lloyd set it up anyway in the 84th minute. She danced her way through the German defense as if they were traffic cones and then slipped the ball across goal, where Kelley O’Hara got a foot to it.
Afterward, when Johnston spoke to reporters in the mixed zone, she was crying again.
“That was probably every defender’s worst nightmare. It happened so fast,” Johnston said. “The team definitely lifted me up after that moment happened. I really can’t thank them enough and I’m sure I’ll thank them all the way to the final.”
But Lloyd? No longer burdened by a formation and a role that didn’t fit her style, she was free to go full throttle and do whatever she damn well pleased.
As she put it herself: “I was a little bit restricted in the beginning games. I wasn’t able to express myself.”
Now, Carli Lloyd was unleashed.
* * *
The national team was on the precipice of winning their first World Cup trophy since the 1999 team did it 16 years earlier. The ’99ers couldn’t help but notice how different it was.
The 2015 World Cup was setting new television viewing records even before the final match because people wanted to see the soccer. Tactics and player performances were scrutinized carefully by the media. The coach, Jill Ellis, was being criticized by fans who expected better.
“We’re talking about them as athletes, rather than some of the conversations we had in ’99: My god, who are these women? They’re kind of hot!” Julie Foudy said.
After the team won in 1999, the players turned into one-of-a-kind heroes, pioneers, and role models overnight. Many people rooted for them as a larger statement about women in sports. But by 2015, the players of the national team were athletes that America grew to love simply as athletes.
If fans were going to be jubilant about a victory in the 2015 World Cup final, it wouldn’t just be because of some deeper meaning or greater impact—it would be because fans knew these players and wanted them to win. It was evidenced by Alex Morgan’s almost 2 million followers on Twitter, Hope Solo’s autobiography becoming a New York Times bestseller, and Abby Wambach appearing in Gatorade television ads on heavy rotation.
No longer did the players need to show up at schools and youth clinics to hand out flyers, like the 1999 team did. The word about the national team was already out. In the team’s three May 2015 send-off games, they sold out every match, drawing capacity crowds at Avaya Stadium, the StubHub Center, and Red Bull Arena.
Consider what Foudy told reporters in 1999 after the World Cup win: “It transcends soccer. There’s a bigger message out there: When people tell you no, you just smile and tell them, Yes, I can.” By 2015? Players like Carli Lloyd were talking about world domination. It was all about the soccer—and that, in and of itself, was something special and powerful.
There was just one more game of soccer left. It was set for a familiar foe: Japan.
The storyline was almost too perfect: It was a do-over—a rematch of the 2011 World Cup. Finally, after four years, the Americans could make it right and shake away the ghosts of 2011 by securing victory over Japan. Vindication was on the line.
In truth, though, the American players didn’t feel that way at all. The Americans didn’t dwell on the past, and they had a lot of respect for Japan. Going against Japan, if anything, added some comfort to the final. The Americans had been here before—they had played Japan many times and knew their style well.
The Japanese could tiki-taka opponents to death—they were known for quick, short, one-touch passes and an endless supply of patience. If the Americans liked to bulldoze their way up the field with direct long balls and use brute force to score goals like a battering ram, then Japan played the opposite game.
One of the things the Americans knew was that the Japanese weren’t strong on set pieces. They didn’t have a lot of height or muscle for those kinds of chaotic scrambles in the box. But Tony Gustavsson, an assistant coach to Jill Ellis, saw something else.
For the Nigeria game, Gustavsson had designed some short corners—plays where instead of launching a ball in the air, a short pass is played—that hadn’t worked at all, but he had a different idea for the World Cup final versus Japan. He thought the U.S. could spread the Japan defense with an unusual play. The team practiced his new set-piece play just once before the final.
* * *
When game day arrived and the players walked to their team bus, fans had already crowded the outside of the Sheraton in downtown Vancouver and had to part to form a path for the players to walk through. The players held their hands out to give high fives as the fans chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
Meanwhile, fans in USA colors were marching down nearby Robson Street singing the popu
lar American chant, “I believe that we will win!” They held up scarves, waved flags, and danced. Block by block, more fans joined until they all couldn’t fit in the middle of the street anymore and took over the curbs and sidewalks, too. By the time the moving mass of red, white, and blue arrived at BC Place, it became apparent that most of the 53,341 fans in the stadium were Americans. Even though the game was in Canada, it felt like a home match.
The team huddled up like it normally does, and Abby Wambach, who was participating in her last World Cup, offered some final motivational words, as usual. But she didn’t need to say much. As Becky Sauerbrunn puts it: “We all knew what was on the line.”
In only the third minute, Tobin Heath won the U.S. their first corner kick. It was time to try that unusual set-piece play they’d practiced once the day before. Lloyd stood just a few steps off of the center circle—well outside the box, seemingly uninvolved in the play—and as Megan Rapinoe got set to strike the ball, Lloyd started sprinting toward the goal. Instead of the usual ball lofted through the air, Rapinoe sent a low skipping ball into the box. It was about to be cleared by Azusa Iwashimizu at the near post, but Lloyd darted in front of her at the last moment and flicked the ball toward the far post with the outside of her foot. Goal, USA!
Lloyd ran over to the American Outlaws, the singing superfans of the U.S. national team, and fist-pumped as her teammates jumped on top of her. Jill Ellis patted Tony Gustavsson and smirked.
Two minutes later, the Americans got a free kick from a wide position—another set piece—and Japan hadn’t learned their lesson. Again, Lloyd was left unmarked outside the box. This time, Lauren Holiday lined up to take the kick, but again, it was a low, driving strike instead of the usual air service. Lloyd, looking for a seam to run through unnoticed, ran for the back post this time. Julie Johnston got to Holiday’s ball first but flicked it past her with a nifty back heel tap. It fell for Lloyd again, who smashed it. Goal, USA again!
Lloyd ran from the goal to the American bench on the other end of the field and brought all the substitutes in for a group hug.
The players shouted at one another to stay calm. One of the most popular clichés in soccer is that 2–0 is the most dangerous lead. It’s easy to assume you have a match won already and take the foot off the pedal. That’s how leads are blown—by complacency. The Americans weren’t going to let that happen in a World Cup final.
The clock hadn’t even hit the five-minute mark, and the Americans were already up by two goals. Fans who were still taking their seats after getting through the bottlenecked lines for admission probably did a double take at the score. The Japanese team huddled together, trying to regroup.
President Barack Obama would later joke that the match was over as soon as he sat down to watch it at the White House: “I had gotten my popcorn, I was all settling in. I’m thinking I’ve got a couple hours of tension and excitement and—poof! It was over.”
BC Place was rocking. Chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” rung around the stadium. Then the fans started chanting, “We want three! We want three!” Whether they wanted three goals or a third World Cup win, it wasn’t clear, but they would get both.
It took a mere eight minutes more for the Americans to score again. On a poor clearance from Azusa Iwashimizu, the ball popped into the air and Lauren Holiday tracked it until it fell. She later said the ball looked huge at that moment, and she smashed it for a gorgeous volley. Goal, USA! The score was 3–0, and the clock had not yet hit 14 minutes.
It was right about at this moment that the match took on a surreal feeling. Everything was falling the Americans’ way. A Japan team good enough to land in the final looked stunned and unsure of what to do. But the game hadn’t reached its peak of absurdity. That would take about another 30 seconds.
Lloyd got the ball in the USA’s half. She turned and flicked it past a Japanese defender and then ran around the player to receive the ball, almost as if Lloyd passed it to herself. When she got the ball back at her feet, she picked her head up and noticed goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori was way out of goal.
In a moment of pure audacity, Lloyd took a full swing at it from the center line and kicked the ball nearly 50 yards. Kaihori desperately tried to scramble back in place but could barely get a hand on the ball. Goal, USA! It was the sort of goal that was so brazen it would happen once in a while in a random high school game—no one would ever try such a thing in a World Cup.
But Lloyd did. She had a hat trick . . . in 15 minutes . . . in a World Cup final. That sort of performance on the world’s biggest stage was simply unheard of. It looked like the USA had been playing a video game on easy mode.
Hope Solo, who had precious few touches by that point, ran from her goal to hug Lloyd, something the goalkeeper rarely did. She looked at Lloyd and said: “Are you even human?!”
“I’ve dreamed of scoring a shot like that,” Lloyd later said. “I did it once when I was younger on the national team in a training environment. Very rarely do you just wind up and hit it. When you’re feeling good mentally and physically, those plays are just instincts and it just happens.”
Now, Ali Krieger jokes that the most exhausting part of the final was celebrating Lloyd’s goals: “We had to chase Carli after she scored all her goals. I was like, Can she not run around the entire field?”
There was still another 75 minutes left to play. It didn’t matter. Those 75 minutes would end up as a footnote on Carli Lloyd’s stunning performance—one of the most dominant displays in a championship game anywhere, ever. The Americans won the World Cup, 5–2, but it was the performance of a lifetime for Lloyd.
When the whistle blew, Lloyd dropped to her knees and cried. Heather O’Reilly ran from the bench straight to Lloyd and slid into her. Soon all the players found their way to one another for a frantic mishmash of hugs.
Afterward, in the post-match press conference, Japanese coach Norio Sasaki told reporters: “Ms. Lloyd always does this to us. In London she scored twice. Today she scored three times. So we’re embarrassed, but she’s excellent.”
Lloyd, for her part, almost downplayed the performance. She believed she could’ve scored one more goal.
“I visualized playing in the World Cup final and visualized scoring four goals,” Lloyd said. “It sounds pretty funny, but that’s what it’s all about. At the end of the day, you can be physically strong, you can have all the tools out there, but if your mental state isn’t good enough, you can’t bring yourself to bigger and better things.”
* * *
This time, when the players stepped into the locker room, no one had to remove all the protective plastic wrap. Goggles were handed out to players so they didn’t get champagne in their eyes.
They danced, shouted, and doused themselves in booze, just like the world champions they were. They took turns passing around the World Cup trophy and posed for photos.
Tobin Heath, with tears in her eyes, told reporters after stepping out of the mayhem for interviews: “It’s wild in there.”
The players didn’t know it quite yet, but their win was historic—not just because they were the new world champions but because of the match’s impact.
The USA-Japan final was watched on television by a whopping 25.4 million Americans, smashing the TV record for the most-viewed soccer game by an American audience. Even more stunning, 43.2 million Americans watched at least part of the final.
It beat every game of the NBA finals, happening around the same time, and beat the primetime average of the Sochi Olympics the year before. With 39 percent higher ratings, it destroyed a record set by the U.S. men’s team when it faced Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal during the 2014 World Cup group stage. The 1999 World Cup final, which had held the record for 15 years before that, had been watched by 17.8 million Americans.
On social media, the moment was just as big. According to Face-book, 9 million people posted 20 million interactions to the platform about the final during the game. Tweets about the tournament had been seen 9 bill
ion times across all of Twitter, with the final match earning the most engagements. Carli Lloyd’s half-field goal was the most-tweeted-about moment of the match.
The national team’s victory touched millions of people—and that probably included plenty of little girls who had no clue who “the ’99ers” were and never saw Brandi Chastain twirl her shirt in the air. For the first time, millions of young girls saw the women of the national team as heroes.
Just like that, a new generation of female soccer players was created. Statistical analysis has shown that events like a Women’s World Cup encourage young girls to sign up for sports. U.S. Soccer’s own analysis showed that after the 1999 Women’s World Cup, registration numbers among girls boomed, especially in the cities that had hosted World Cup games. In all likelihood, the future stars of the national team were watching the 2015 World Cup final.
“I think every little girl who watched last night believes that they can do this and inspire a nation,” coach Jill Ellis said the next day. “That’s what they’ve done. Remarkable.”
Before the team flew back to the United States with the trophy, they first had to take a phone call from President Barack Obama.
“Carli, what have you been eating?” he said. “I want to do what you’re doing.”
When the team landed in Los Angeles, it was off to a huge victory rally that filled downtown LA.
“They only had 24 hours to tell people about it. I thought, Hopefully we’ll get a couple thousand and some of my family will come,” Alex Morgan said. “But they were cramming in there like sardines. There were so many people.”
New York City wanted to honor the players, too. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city would hold a ticker-tape parade for the players, making them the first women’s team ever to be given the historic celebration.
Within two days, there the players were at Battery Park on their respective floats, waiting for the parade to start. They couldn’t see up Broadway and had no idea just how many people were waiting to catch a glimpse of them.
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