Friday Newsletter: NWSL Championship, Emma Hayes, Maccabi Haifa play amid war and more
We have a jam-packed Friday newsletter to get you ready for the soccer weekend and analyze the news and results of the past week.
What’s on the menu for this week’s Friday newsletter? We got…
Busy week for NWSL with its championship this weekend and a lucrative TV deal. I got you covered on what to know about the two teams competing and the future of watching the NWSL.
Emma Hayes named USWNT manager. I’ll discuss how it happened and how she will fit.
USMNT releases it roster for the Nations League. What does no Tim Weah and Christian Pulisic mean?
New UCL format, and why I think it will make the group stage more entertaining.
Amidst war at home, Maccabi Haifa persevere and play in Europa League.
NWSL Championship offers swan song for Ali Krieger and Megan Rapinoe
Where the NWSL finds itself this week is in a television zenith. That sentence has a double meaning. The NWSL Championship will be broadcast primetime on CBS on Sunday and pit two U.S. soccer legends—Rapinoe and Krieger—against each other in their final professional matches at Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego. And earlier this week, the NWSL penned a new televison with ESPN, CBS Sports, Prime Video, and Scripps Sports, the league announced Thursday.
Let’s start with the action on the pitch on Saturday.
To reach this point, both Gotham FC and OL Reign had their work cut out for them. Gotham finished sixth in the regular season, only making the playoffs due to a superior goal differential than Orlando Pride. Gotham had to go on the road to the fourth-seeded North Carolina Courage and the two-seeded Portland Thorns to reach the final. OL Reign dispatched fourth-seeded Angel City and shield-winning San Diego Wave.
“Only one of us is going to be able to win, and that’s going to be sad for whoever the person is that doesn’t win,” Rapinoe said, “but it’s really special.”
Now that we are here, the storybook ending for either Krieger or Rapinoe can come to fruition. For all the accolades for both of them on the international stage—two World Cups and two Olympic gold medals, to name a few—neither has attained silverware in the NWSL. One will get their hands on the trophy in the last game of their storied careers.
And those stories are not linear or direct. No one would have foreseen a final between these two of such magnitude and with such a large television audience when their careers started, or even when they were household names for the USWNT.
From 2003 to 2009, there was no professional women’s league in the U.S. Krieger graduated college in 2007 and signed with FFC Frankfurt in Germany. She won the Champions League there, then moved to Tyresö in Sweden, where she reached the final of the tournament. It was not until 2013 that the NWSL was founded, and Krieger returned stateside to join her hometown, Washington.
Rapinoe tested the U.S. women’s soccer setup after graduating from the University of Portland. Initially, she joined the Chicago Red Stars, and then the improperly managed and pratfall that was magicJack. She, too, headed overseas, joining Lyon. Once the NWSL began, she returned to join the Seattle Reign (now OL Reign), where she has played her club soccer ever since.
“I’m obviously cognizant that it’s my last game ever for anything, but also that this is everybody’s last game this year,” Rapinoe said. “So it takes a little bit of the focus off me, which is welcomed.”
The two became close over their shared journeys, trying to make it as women’s soccer players and represent their country during the Dark Ages of women’s soccer in the U.S.
Krieger’s first impression of Rapinoe was, “Who is this skinny little... She had legs like tampon strings out there,” she said.
Rapinoe remembers wondering, “Who is this German girl?” at their first U.S. training camp 15 years ago.
But the two soon got along once they got to know each other better.
“Right away, we just hit it off,” Rapinoe said. “We’re serious about what we’re doing on the field but also like to enjoy ourselves and realize this is a really unique journey that we’re on, and we want to celebrate and maximize everything we can together.”
“She’s just a really good human, too,” added Rapinoe. “You play with a million people, but she’s one of my best friends in life and will continue to be so. For both of us, it is a really special moment to be able to celebrate. I know if I win [Saturday], she’ll be happy for me, and if she wins, I’ll be thrilled for her.”
Both players announced their intention to retire in the middle of this season, but Krieger's final season has been a difficult one. After almost four years, she filed for divorce with former USWNT goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris in September. Rapinoe was there for Krieger during this tough time in her life off the field.
“She has been rock-solid for me as a best friend,” Krieger said. “We’re always going to be there for each other, and it goes far beyond the playing field, and that’s something I really cherish and nurture forever.”
Saturday, in front of a crowd and television audience that would be unimaginable when their careers and NWSL started, an audience that Krieger and Rapinoe’s play on the USWNT garnered, will cast their eyes on the last time on two American soccer legends.
“It’s really poetic,” Krieger said.
Both have the temerity to understand the magnitude of the moment and will seek to do what they have their entire careers to make the most of it.
“Before I go home,” Krieger said, “I want to take time to myself to decompress because I’m going to be in mom mode right when I land.”
“I look at my entire career and just think, ‘This is f---ing crazy,’” Rapinoe said. “I can’t believe I’m here, getting to still play the game I love at 38 and having the success I’ve had with my teammates, not only here but with the national team. I would love to get that one last little thing.”
On the monetary side, the NWSL announced their broadcasting deal for the next three years, and it is a significant raise in price. The league will partner with CBS Sports, ESPN, Prime Video, and Scripps Sports for a three-year deal starting next season.
The deal is worth $240 million to the league over four years, according to ESPN sources, a massive increase from the three-year $4.5 million agreement that was previously in place with CBS.
Even with a historically low performance in the Women’s World Cup by the U.S., the investment in broadcasting women’s soccer is deserved. The NWSL is now more than a decade into its existence, greatly outlasting the previous flashes in a pan that were the WPS, WUSA, and W-League, and it is great to see the continued expansion and investment into the proven profitable business that is women’s soccer.
USWNT found the replacement they needed with Emma Hayes hiring.
I had repeatedly called for the USWNT to get their business done when it came to hiring their next head coach. Vlatko Andonovski was not re-signed after an unsuccessful four-year tenure. For the past two international windows, Andonovski’s assistant, Twila Kilgore, was in charge. Now, U.S. sporting director Matthew Crocker has all but hired Emma Hayes as the new coach of the USWNT (its a fait accompli, but there has been no formal announcement), and I think in the long term it is the right appointment.
However, the short term is more unclear. Hayes is still head coach of the Chelsea women’s team and intends to stay on the job until the end of the season in May. During that time, the USWNT will have multiple games in the necessary windows to prepare for the Olympics this summer in Paris. Who will coach these games? Will Hayes jet over to lead these camps? Will she delegate an assistant coach at Chelsea, possibly American Denise Reddy, to run these windows? It all gets murky with the contracts Hayes and Reddy are under at Chelsea. I have no answer to how it will look; only time will tell.
The U.S. will have the CONCACAF W Gold Cup from February 20 until March 10, 2024, a period when Chelsea has two league games on their schedule.
Hayes is a successful and highly regarded coach, even if she may be a little unknown to casual American soccer fans. She has won six Women’s Super League (WSL) titles and five FA Cups in her 11 years with Chelsea. Off the field, she has pushed for better treatment and investment in the women’s team. She treats her players with empathy and respect. She has utilized science and technology to garner the best performance from her players by optimizing training around their menstrual cycles.
Hayes does have connections in the U.S., though. She states, "I was born in England, but I was definitely made in America." She loves the will to work and training league of the U.S. and cites her exposure to coaching stateside as helping her become the coach she is today. Hayes's first coaching job was as the manager of the Long Island Lady Riders between 2001 and 2003. She was the head women's soccer coach at Iona College between 2003 and 2006. She worked in the front office of the Chicago Red Stars, and drafting Rapinoe in the WPS that would soon fold. After those jobs, she returned to England, where she has been ever since.
As a coach, Hayes is more adaptable than Andonovski in her game plan. She assesses the opponent and plots the best way to break them down before and in-game, according to Andonovski’s consistent 4-3-3 and pre-planned substitutions, which proved unsuccessful during his tenure.
Hayes likes to deploy a press that asks a lot out of her wingers and prefers a double pivot formation at Chelsea. We will see how much she sticks to what has worked abroad at a club level and how much she adapts to the international setup with the collection of players she has. She has shown she fancies some of the USWNT pieces by signing Catarina Macario and Mia Fishel—two players who were not part of the WC campaign—to Chelsea over the summer.
I think the return to Stateside is a perfect fit for Hayes to be at the pinnacle of the sport. It does speak volumes for where women’s soccer is at that the USWNT went overseas to nab their candidate. But it also demonstrates the pulling power the team still has to lure Hayes from one of the best clubs in Europe to take the job. For U.S. Soccer to make a hire that adequately responds to the humbling exit at the World Cup and creates parity in the salary of both the men’s and women’s coach checks all the boxes for me.
USMNT set for Nations League quarterfinals without Pulisic, Weah
AC Milan attacker Christian Pulisic and Juventus winger Tim Weah were left off the U.S. men’s national team's CONCACAF Nations League roster due to injuries. Pulisic sustained a recurrence of a left hamstring injury in Tuesday's 2-1 victory over Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League. Weah has been dealing with a similar injury for the past two weeks.
But for those included in the roster that will face a two-legged tie against Trinidad and Tobago, Folarin Balogun leads the line, getting more valuable time to gel with the USMNT. For the first time ever, both Brenden and Paxten Aaronson are named in the same senior squad. (Side note on the e’s in their names: their mom Janell made sure her kids—Brenden, Paxten, and Jaden—had the letter in their names after her name was lacking the letter at the end of it.
If you look into the archives, Ken and Steve Snow are the only set of brothers to appear in a USMNT game together in 1988.
The winner of the U.S.’s two-game series progresses to the CNL semifinals, as well as clinching qualification for next summer's Copa America, which the U.S. will host.
The first match against the Soca Warriors will take place on Nov. 16 at Q2 Stadium in Austin, Texas. The return leg will be contested four days later at the Hasely Crawford Stadium in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad.
The stadium the return leg will be played in is not the house of horrors, Ato Boldon Stadium in Couva, where the USMNT were shockingly ousted from World Cup contention in 2018, which may lead to a sigh of relief from Americans. Another historical fact is that the return leg happens to fall on the 34-year anniversary of Paul Caligiuri’s “Shot Heard 'Round the World”, where the defender struck the lone goal in the match at Trinidad and Tobago to send the USMNT to the World Cup in 1990, their first trip in 40 years, at the same site the CNL second leg will be played at.
The USMNT has won the first two editions of the CNL.
"The objective ahead of us is clear. We want to compete for our third Nations League title and the chance to play in Copa America, and it's going to take focus and determination to get past Trinidad and Tobago," Berhalter said.
"We have had a core group together for the last two windows in preparation for this opportunity, and we want to finish the year on a strong note and position ourselves to compete in two important competitions next year."
The new UCL format will fix group stage disinterest.
With two-thirds of the UEFA Champions League group stage over and six of the 16 spots in the round of 16 already booked, I am looking forward to the altered group stage format that the tournament will adapt next year to make the initial stage of the tournament more interesting for fans.
The new format is known as the “Swiss Model”, and I am excited for its adaptation.
Currently, we have a format with eight groups of four where everyone plays everyone home and away, and the top two advance to the knockout round.
Gab Marcotti pithily describes the Swiss Model as: “36 teams, split into four pots of nine based on seedings; think of them as champion material, outsider material, here-for-the-ride material, and cannon fodder material. Each team plays two games from each of the four pots, either home or away. You still get three points for a win and one for a draw, but everyone gets ranked in one big league table, one to thirty-six, based on points. The top eight get a bye into the round of 16, nine through 24 face off in a home-and-away playoff round for a place in the knockouts against the top eight, and the bottom 12 go home.”
Like Marcotti, one of my favorite soccer writers, I am excited for this change, even if it may be difficult to wrap your head around.
With our current system, six teams have little to nothing to play for in the final two games. This can lead to some perfunctory games where teams send out rotated squads or an A-team that lacks vim and vinegar. The result: games that do not intrigue the viewer and are a waste of time and effort for the teams that have already booked a spot in the knockout stages.
The new model addresses this con by adding a table, so teams are incentivized to win every game to get a higher seed or even qualify for the round of 16. Seeding matters here, as do points, results, and even goal difference. Your seed follows you for the entire campaign, so whoever finishes in the group stage—now the single-table stage—will be rewarded with an easier path to the trophy.
Marcotti even floats having the higher seeds pick who they want to play in the knockout stages, but admits this may be a bridge too far for UEFA. I, for one, would love to see this, especially if a lower-seeded team feels slighted as a pick by one of the high-finishing teams and dumps the heavyweight out of the tournament.
The Swiss model will allow the Champions League to operate more smoothly and satisfyingly for fans. In other words, you can say it will run like clockwork.
Maccabi Haifa’s story of perseverance by playing on while their home’s at war
In an empty stadium in Larnaca, Cyprus, 1,400 blue and white balloons swayed in the windy night. They each represented one of the lives that were taken on the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, which started an ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas fighters.
On Thursday, a game of soccer took place between Spanish side Villarreal and Israeli champions Maccabi Haifa. It was the group stage of the Europa League and the first game played by an Israeli team since the conflict broke out. Maccabi Tel Aviv also played later on Thursday, visiting Zorya Luhansk in the Conference League.
However, in Haifa, no one was thinking about soccer.
“It’s very tough to talk about football,” Haifa’s manager, Messay Dego, said at the AEK Arena on Wednesday night. Dego, an Ethiopian Jew, revealed that his grandmother had passed away in the morning. He took no questions after a brief speech. “A lot of our fans were killed,” Dego said. “But Israel is very strong, and we will get through it.”
The team has hardly trained, and even if they are safe in Cyprus, their minds fixate on their loved ones still in a war-ravaged nation.
“When my son is with the army, I don’t sleep,” fitness coach Uri Harel says of his 29-year-old son, who left his job as a lawyer to serve his country.
The ongoing atrocities and thoughts of their friends linger as they hear the latest news from the region.
Defender Rami Gershon says: “All of us know people who have gone to fight. Ordinary people like you Imagine you need to leave everything and defend your country. This is our reality.
“I know people who died. One ex-player, Leo Assoulin, was at the music festival. Football is a community. Another player, Ben Binyamin, lost his leg. He and his fiancee went inside the shelter at the musical festival. The terrorists threw a grenade into the shelter. He and his fiancee are supposed to get married next month. Each of them lost their right leg.”
The players appreciate all those who have served their country. They know their job is to bring a sense of normality back to the daily lives of Israelis by representing their country on the pitch.
“I saw news 24-7,” defender Sean Goldberg says. “But I say to myself, ‘What can I do to help?’ I cannot defend the country, but I can make people happier by visiting kids from the kibbutz. On one side, we don’t want to play. But it is our job to help people mentally. If we will do something to make people a little proud and make them forget for 90 minutes, it is good. We don’t only play for fans of Maccabi Haifa. We play for the country.”
When Haifa entered the AEK Arena field prior to the game, both teams gathered at the center circle for a minute of silence. Two Villarreal players—defender Aïssa Mandi and attacker Ilias Akhomach—stayed away due to their Maghrebin heritage.
The stadium was decorated with balloons and Israeli flags. There were few media members and no fans.
Villarreal predictably controlled the game from the start, but it was Haifa who found the net first. Off a set-piece delivery from the left flank, defender Abdoulaye Seck shed his defender and nodded home a header at the far post. Initially, the referee whistled for offside. But after a video assistant referee check, the goal was given.
Minutes later, Villarreal would have a chance to level the score. Alexander Sørloth stepped up to take a penalty kick, but Haifa’s goalkeeper, Shareef Keouf—who is Druze, highlighting the diversity of the Haifa team—denied the effort by expertly diving to his left. The referee ordered a dubious retake, judging Keouf had stepped off his line on the first attempt. Up stepped Manu Trigueros, who was denied by Keouf also.
Villarreal clawed back two goals in the second half to secure a 2-1 win. Haifa sits at the bottom of their group with one point from three matches. The result and standing do not matter. The team, for two hours, brought back a sense of normalcy to all of Israel.
This weekend, the Israel national team travels to face Kosovo in a Euro qualifying match. Israel is third in Group I, securing 11 points from six games. They have a chance to qualify for the tournament next summer in Germany, with group-leaders Romania (16 points in eight games) and Switzerland (15 points in seven games) above them. And what a sight that would be if it happened.
Games of the weekend
Man United vs. Luton (Sat. 10 a.m. ET, USA): Erik ten Hag is holding on to his job by thread; he would likely be gone already if Manchester United had their ownership stabilized. Luton are minnows, but United have been woeful all season. They are like a train wreck; you can’t look as inept as they may be.
Houston Dynamo vs. Real Salt Lake (6:00 p.m. ET, MLS Season Pass): This may be a bit of an uninspiring choice with two small-market MLS teams, but I am interested in how the first ‘Game 3’ of the MLS playoffs pans out.
OL Reign vs. NJ/NY Gotham FC (8:00 p.m. ET, CBS): I led the newsletter with this game, and it sells itself with Krieger and Rapinoe’s last time on the pitch. At the start of the business end of the season, Krieger imagined playing Rapinoe for the last time in the NWSL final. Now that is no longer her imagination—it is happening on Saturday.
That’s all for me this week. Let me know what you think, and have a stupendous weekend!