It’s USWNT captain Lindsey Horan’s last morning in the United States before flying back to France to join her club team Lyon. She is spending it in a hotel lobby, hidden at the table, talking Atletico for an hour about his time leading a team in the spotlight, how he sees his role in this transition period and one thing above all:
“Can we think about football?”
Horan spoke almost exactly five months since he was named by then-USWNT coach Vlatko Andonovski as captain of the national team alongside Alex Morgan (Horan received the armband when both are on the field at the same time). The role is the achievement of a life goal, but it also seems like a natural outcome, given the frequency and intensity with which he thinks about the game.
His first five months in that leadership role were filled with noteworthy exits: his team’s exit from the World Cup, Andonovski’s exit, and the retirements of Megan Rapinoe and Julie Ertz. It ended with a big addition: US Soccer’s announced hiring of Emma Hayes as head coach.
Horan, now 29 with 139 senior caps under his belt, is in an in-between field: too experienced to be a newcomer and too new to be on the way out. It’s his generation – which also includes Rose Lavelle, Emily Sonnett and others – who must keep the team’s signature fire, that USWNT DNA, burning, even as the team undergoes a serious rethink after its worst World Cup finish .

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“We have to keep going like this,” she says of herself and other intermediaries. “You have to be a part of this team for a while to know what the f… it takes… it’s one of the most competitive national teams to be a part of.”
Nobody on the team is talking about starting from scratch. It’s just that they need more ways to win. More than mentality or fitness levels, more of a “never say die” approach. That’s what Horan said his first conversations with Hayes were about. And that’s why he wants to talk about soccer and how the USWNT can bounce back, not just by playing better, but by thinking more.
“We’ve been so successful for so long in a certain way that we play, that offense and transition,” Horan says. “We had individual brilliance. We had football players on the field and real players who want to play and it all blended together either it was always going to work, or our DNA was going to get us to this point where we’re winners because our mentality was so damn good.”
The game is changing and Horan recognizes it. He praises Portugal’s level of play at the World Cup, the investment in soccer in Spain and other European countries, and the high level of emerging U.S. talent (citing in particular 19-year-old San Diego Wave forward Jaedyn Shaw). If there was a theme for Horan and the rest of the USWNT in that final camp of the year, it was a repetitive one: Nobody really knows the ceiling of this team.

Horan cited Shaw as an exciting young player for the United States (Brad Smith/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)
“Even in these latest games you see little glimpses of that, but it’s the end product, continuing to do that throughout the game, getting everyone on the same page, not just four or five players,” he says. “If you can develop it more, and it’s inherent in every single player on the team, are you trying to play with combinations, all these things? I have no idea what this team can do.
“Then there’s also the mentality aspect, where if football isn’t going well, we know we damn well can go. We’ve got players on the field who are faster, stronger, capable at the back and we’re going to gut it out, right? “The world will be very scared.”
These words could cause a stir. In 2019, Ali Krieger suggested that the USWNT replacements could have faced and beaten many other teams at the World Cup, and it was a huge point of contention for a team that has received much more criticism from across American culture even though it has been celebrated for its third time. consecutive title.
“We have to be one of the most talked about teams,” Horan says. “We are always under a magnifying glass on every single thing we do or anything we say.”
Individual players can bear the weight of that magnifying glass just as much as the team. There is a clear, albeit understandable, streak of frustration on Horan’s part about how his performances are interpreted, even by the USWNT fan base. To illustrate his point, Horan points out that many viewers will take a television commentator’s analysis at face value.
“American soccer fans, most of them are not intelligent,” he says. “They don’t know the game. They do not understand. (But) it’s getting better and better.
He pauses briefly, feeling that even those words will cause a stir.
“I’m going to piss some people off,” he continues, “but the game is growing in the United States. People are more and more informed, but most of the time they take what the commentators say, right? “My mom makes it!” She bursts out laughing. “My mother says, ‘Julie Foudy said you played so well!’ And here I am, just saying, ‘I fucked up today.'”
When playing Lyon in France, Horan says, things are different.
“From what I hear, people understand my game a little more, the meaning of my football and the way I play,” he says. “It’s French culture. Everyone watches football. “People know football.”
None of this, however, compares to Horan’s experience at the 2023 World Cup. The external comments, including that of his former teammate Carli Lloyd, the entrances into stadiums in their personalized tracksuits; the tone used in interviews; body language. Everything was carefully examined. This time, however, the speech was accompanied by bad performances and bad results.

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Horan says she wasn’t bothered by the outside criticism, but noted that no one other than the players could understand what it meant to be part of that team. Ultimately, she says it felt “perfect” for people to find something to talk about.
“If you don’t support it on the ground, people will come and talk about what you’re doing, what your priorities are,” he says. “Like, ‘Are you getting ready for the game? Do you worry more about this s—?’”

Horan leaned on Lavelle (left) to lead a team in transition (Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Horan, once again, returns to a small, seemingly innocuous detail: the traditional pre-match starting XI photo. In the NWSL, more and more teams began to use the opportunity for various hijinks; something Horan’s European teammates hold up as an example of how Americans don’t take their own business seriously. It’s clear she gets under her skin too.
“I want professionalism,” he admits. “Those little things really touched me. I don’t think I could do it, and maybe I’m wrong to say that, I don’t know. It just annoys me. “We put so much into this game, and sometimes it’s just like a joke.”
She is quick to point out that she won’t be the one to turn it off if it works for others. That’s not what she’s trying to say. It’s just that, in the end, for her it’s about football.
“We have to get back to football. “Football is the most important thing,” says Horan. “So maybe we should cut some shit out for now. “We have to focus on the game, we have to focus on being the best we can be.”
As captain, Horan can help put that into action. It’s a role she’s clearly grown into, even if she struggled to figure it out in the months between Andonovski’s departure and Hayes’ hiring.
Hayes has not yet officially started and will not coach matches until his job as Chelsea’s head coach ends along with the European season in May. But Hayes’ December visit with Horan and the rest of the team helped clarify the process, Horan says. He also gave Horan a chance to open the lines of communication, to admit that sometimes he didn’t feel like he was in full control, that she hadn’t been handed the reins.
“I always felt like I was someone who could really touch every single player and bring out the best in them and try to make them the best they could be,” Horan says. “I won’t do like the rah-rah talk, all that nonsense. Becky (Sauerbrunn) and I are probably a little similar in that. I’m probably a little crazier on the pitch. I want to make sure I’m the leader I want to be, and no one is trying to make me anything else.
Before Andonovski gave her the armband – a move made in part because longtime captain Sauerbrunn missed the World Cup with a lingering foot injury – Horan told him that getting the armband wouldn’t change her, or how the players could have talked to her. What would change, he told him, is the tone he would set. He wanted to be a role model.
“I won’t be the captain of a coach, I will be the captain of the players,” he told Andonovski. So if he wasn’t what he wanted, he shouldn’t have made her captain.
Horan has kept her word since interim coach Twila Kilgore stepped in, leaning on Morgan, Lavelle and Sonnett to make them part of the transition process. He also empowered the team’s relative newcomers. The normally reserved Naomi Girma, a 23-year-old center back, told Horan that she “just encouraged me to find my voice.”
“Many of these new young players will have important roles, including in these Olympics,” Horan says. “How on earth do we get the best out of them to get us on the podium? “It’s been a crazy place, but this is a really exciting role for me because I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do.”
The team has four months until Hayes takes over and six until the Olympics. The sprint is well underway for this massive group project to re-establish the team at the top, before looking ahead to 2027 and a World Cup that could be hosted on home soil. Every voice matters to Horan, from Horan to Lavelle to Morgan to Girma to Shaw and beyond.
“We have to do everything we can to get better, to make each other better, upholding standards,” Horan says. “We have to change every aspect of the culture we had before the last World Cup and going to these Olympics because we have to win. And this starts now.
(Photo: James Gilbert/Getty Images)