Last year, U.S. women’s soccer legend Carli Lloyd stirred the pot from the Fox studio desk following a scoreless draw with Portugal in the Women’s World Cup.
“I have never witnessed something like that,” Lloyd said, referencing the cheery-looking team. “You’re lucky to not be going home right now.” Two weeks later, she doubled down in an interview with The Athletic: “I think there’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and I just saw this team go in a direction where the values that were built and instilled in this team is not what was displayed out at this World Cup.”
A year later, Lloyd has tripled down on those sentiments on Thursday’s episode of Front Office Sports Today. “My criticism was correct,” Lloyd says. “The truth of the matter was that [with] this team, the more success that you have, the harder it becomes to stay hungry, to stay humble, to stay focused.”
The USWNT’s success in the mid-2010s, specifically winning the 2015 and 2019 World Cups, brought more off-the-field opportunities for the players. With that winning, “some people’s heads may have become a bit bigger than the collective team,” Lloyd says. She called the 2021 Olympics, in which the team got bronze, a “complete disaster,” and criticized former head coach Vlatko Andonovski for not refocusing the team on the product on the field before a “disastrous finish” at the 2023 World Cup.
Lloyd said she thinks new head coach Emma Hayes has righted the ship, and the program is “going in the right direction” after being “humbled.”
“She’s gotten the team focused again on what really matters, and that’s winning,” the former player says of Hayes.
Lloyd had much more to say in an expansive interview with FOS Today, which you can listen to here. The U.S. women go for gold Sunday morning against Brazil.
