Carli Lloyd’s second World Cup act? Fox’s USWNT agitator

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Carli Lloyd never planned to stir up World Cup controversies in retirement. At least that’s how Carli Lloyd tells it, so sprinkle in grains of salt. Broadcasting, she told Yahoo Sports, was “probably the furthest thing that I was thinking about” as she grinded through an unparalleled U.S. women’s national team playing career. “It was not something on my radar at all.”

And yet here we are, amid a USWNT crisis, with Lloyd as a frenzied fan base’s agitator.

“I mean, the player of that match was that [goal]post,” Lloyd said on TV after her former U.S. teammates scraped into the knockout rounds with a 0-0 draw against Portugal. “You're lucky to not be going home right now."

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She was there, on set in Sydney, because Fox came calling soon after she retired in 2021. “I was very hesitant, very reluctant,” Lloyd said in a June phone interview. But she eventually jumped at an opportunity to narrate the 2023 Women’s World Cup to millions of Americans. And it didn’t take long to realize that the USWNT’s erstwhile hero would become its chief critic.

Lloyd promised “honesty” and “my most authentic self.” In our interview, she promised to “just kinda speak my mind.”

Because she wasn’t concerned about burning bridges. I asked her whether she felt a need to walk a tightrope between unvarnished opinions and protecting relationships with former teammates.

“Um, not really,” Lloyd said.

And thus began Lloyd’s second World Cup act.

She followed through on those promises over the past week. She ripped into players and “question[ed] their heart” at halftime of a 1-1 draw with the Netherlands last Thursday. After Tuesday’s draw with Portugal, she called them “lackluster” and “uninspiring.”

Then she saw the postgame videos, of players dancing and taking selfies with fans, and "I have never witnessed something like that," she said on air. "There's a difference between being respectful of the fans and saying hello to your family, but to be dancing, to be smiling” — she was disturbed.

Her comments, and others, were relayed to Lloyd’s former coach, U.S. boss Vlatko Andonovski, at his postgame news conference.

“I mean,” Andonovski responded, “this team wanted to win this game more than anything else. … To question the mentality of this team, to question the willingness, the willingness to win, to compete, I think it’s insane.”

But that’s exactly what Lloyd has done over the past two years. In March 2022, she told Hope Solo that she “hated” her “last several years” with the USWNT. She told fellow Fox rabble-rouser Alexi Lalas that the USWNT’s culture was “toxic.”

Lloyd’s critics clapped back, pointing out that her narrative conveniently coincided both with her descent from the starting lineup and with the team’s social activism, in which she often didn’t partake. They also pointed out that it aligned with her individualistic aura, and hinted at political divisions within the USWNT squad.

But Lloyd was undeterred.

“Like, I lived it; I saw it,” she told Yahoo Sports a year later. “I'm basically just saying what I see, because I was a part of it. And the last couple years, when I was retiring, you could just feel that love and that hunger and that humbleness just kinda dissipating a bit.”

“It was not a good environment,” she added. “You didn't see people fighting on the field, fighting for every loose ball, sprinting. And that is a reason why we didn't win the Olympics.”

On Lalas’ podcast, she alleged that players became more concerned with “what can I do to build my brand off the field, what can I do to get an endorsement deal — and less about what we have to do when we step in between those lines.” She reiterated that point in our interview — though she acknowledged that she took advantage of off-field opportunities as well.

Now she is taking that viewpoint to the world, to an already agitated audience. She promised “tactical expertise,” given that she knows “so much of the history, players, teams, coaches.” But also “mentality expertise,” she said, and that, instead, is what has made headlines.

“It's not my place to rip apart players,” she said in our interview, and to be fair, her criticism has rarely targeted individuals. But she hinted that she’d be direct, perhaps even harsh — just like she was as a player.

“Everything I would say on air, I would probably say to the person,” she said. “If I see that the group is maybe not working as hard as they could, or we need a bit more creativity, or the subs that are coming on [need to] have to have more energy — that would be stuff that I would say amongst the team.”

And not everybody would like it. They probably don’t appreciate it now. But Lloyd is unbothered.

“I remained true to who I was for my entire career, whether people liked that or didn't like that,” she said. She’d sneak out of team hotels to run even when coaches “denied” her and told her to rest. “And this,” she said of TV punditry, “is no different.”