Carli Lloyd blasted the recent culture of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team.
Lloyd appeared on the SiriusXM podcast “Hope Solo Speaks” with her former teammate, and spilled the tea.
“Even within our squad, the culture has changed,” Lloyd said. “It was really tough and challenging to be playing these last seven years. To be quite honest, I hated it.
“It wasn’t fun going in. It was only for love of the game, really, for me. I wanted to win and I wanted to help the team, but the culture within the team was the worst I’ve ever seen it.
“I’m hoping that the future is bright and some things change.”
Lloyd, 39, retired from soccer in 2021, playing her final games with the NWSL’s Gotham FC.
She first played for the USWNT in 2005, winning Olympic Gold medials in 2008 and 2012, and World Cups in 2015 and 2019. For both Olympic titles, she scored the game-winning goals.
Lloyd was the only member of the USWNT not to kneel for the national anthem when they played Australia last August in the Olympics.
Solo, who has been close friends with Lloyd since 2007, said that it made her “really sad” to hear but that she understood what Lloyd was going through.
“When I got fired in 2016 … every time I left for camp my husband Jerramy [Stevens] hated to see me sad,” Solo said.
“I didn’t want to go to the social aspect of camp. I wanted to train my ass off. I wanted to work my butt off. I wanted to play games. But I didn’t want to be around everybody and the culture of the team. It was really difficult. I don’t think people understand how difficult emotionally and mentally that is.
“It’s tough. I just wanted to be a professional athlete. I wanted to be cutthroat and I wanted to win. But you still have to play the political and social game sometimes. That’s hard for an introvert like myself. It was really difficult.”
In addition to the alleged culture issues within the team, the USWNT was embroiled in a bitter pay dispute for years with US Soccer.
The USWNT recently settled for $24 million, and Solo was not happy about it.
“Six years ago, we started the fight for equal pay, something I’m very proud to say I led when I pushed to bring on a new Players Association Executive Director, Rich Nichols, someone I knew would truly fight for us and give us the tools to challenge a Federation that marginalized us for decades,” Solo wrote on Instagram. “His strategy to file the EEOC complaint was the boldest action any team had ever taken. It wasn’t an easy ask of anyone, and at the time, the decision went against the wishes of other players on the team now being called the ‘leaders’ of this fight.
“Throughout the entire process, Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan were the two most agreeable with the Federation and to this day, continue to to accept terms that are nowhere near what we set out to do. They both know this is not a win. They know it’s an easy out of a fight they were never really in.”
