Alyssa Thompson, the youngest player on the 2023 United States women’s national soccer team (USWNT) to compete in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, kept a speech from team captain Alex Morgan close to her heart after the rattling tie game with Portugal that ended the team’s shaky group stage performance in the summer tournament.
The match versus Portugal, the third of the group stage, featured in the penultimate and final episodes of Rebecca Gitlitz’s Netflix docuseries, “Under Pressure: The U.S Women’s National Team,” along with retired captain Carli Lloyd’s criticism of the team’s performance in the final group stage match. The speech Thompson mentioned resonates with the overall themes of the series, which Gitlitz described as three types of pressure.
“I remember at the end of our Portugal game, Alex gave a really inspiring speech. It was just very scary, that game, and the result was obviously not what we wanted, but we got through so we were just thinking about the next game,” Thompson told TheWrap. “But Alex gave a really inspiring speech about how there’s going to be so [much], a lot of talk about our performance, our game, what we need to do ‘blah, blah, blah.’ But it’s about the 23 players in the room and we have to protect each other, and just be here together and not listen to the outside noise.” Morgan’s speech didn’t make it into the final cut of the docuseries.
Lloyd, who scored a hat-trick in the 2015 Women’s World Cup final against Japan, said the squad was lucky to not be going home after their lackluster performance against Portugal. Captain Lindsey Horan also countered the expected criticism at a press conference.
“I thought that was super important because there was so much people were saying, and knowing that your team has your back is the one thing that you need to win tournaments,” Thompson added. “It doesn’t matter what other people are saying. I felt after that we were so together. We were just ready to prove to other people, and to ourselves, [that] this is what we wanted,and these are the results that we need to get.”
Even those players — like Megan Rapinoe and Julie Etz — who retired shortly after the 2023 Women’s World Cup, left Thompson with a legacy and she traced their impact into her future as a rising player on the squad.
“It’s really cool that I got to be a part of their final goodbyes, and the end of their career because they taught me a lot about what it means to be professional and how much it takes to get to their point,” Thompson said. “I think it will help me in the future to be a better player and know what to expect, more so from playing in those games, the pressure they feel on the day-to-day, what it means to really be on the national team. I feel like I really got that from them.”
Thompson wasn’t the only player whose first World Cup was caught on camera and thoroughly documented, which she acknowledged was a conscious decision she made when she contributed press interviews to the docuseries.
“I was very excited that Sav[annah] DeMelo got called because that would be both of our first World Cups and also our first big tournaments with the team,” Thompson said. “I think we leaned on each other a lot throughout the tournament because we were experiencing similar things, and we’re bus buddies, too, so we just did everything together. It was really cool having her there as an outlet for me.”
Another partner Thompson will soon have on her professional team Angel City F.C. is her sister Gisele Thompson, who signed a deal with the Los Angeles women’s team at the end of November. The deal runs through 2025 with an option for 2026. Gisele, who plays defense for Harvard Westlake, signed just days before her eighteenth birthday.
“I’m so excited. I could not be happ[ier]. I love doing everything together. We’re going to practice every day, we’re going to games we’re going [on] away trips. I’ll have a piece of my family everywhere I go so I was so excited when she made the decision to come to Angel City My happiness cannot be explained really.”
All four episodes of “Under Pressure: The U.S. Women’s World Cup Team” are now streaming on Netflix.
