Alex Morgan is retiring, and the top line of every press release or story covering the news will rightly hail her as one of the greatest women’s soccer players ever.
They will celebrate her 200-plus career goals, including 123 for the U.S. women’s national team.
They will call her an Olympic gold medalist and a two-time World Cup champion, because she is.
They will tell the tale of how Morgan evolved from “Baby Horse,” a lethal forward with blazing speed, to a more traditional target striker who was no less effective.
They will tabulate her accomplishments, and the list will stretch on and on, seemingly endlessly: National Women’s Soccer League and UEFA Champions League titles, player of the year awards, golden boots and golden balls, ESPYs.
None of that, though, will be her primary legacy.
The goals and championships built a platform; Morgan’s legacy will be how she used it. Throughout her 15-year career, she also became a change-maker and fighter — first, and most prominently, for gender equity.
She was one of the driving forces, publicly and privately, behind the USWNT’s years-long fight for equal pay, which yielded a landmark agreement with U.S. Soccer and the men’s national team in 2022.
But she didn’t stop there. She became one of the loudest voices in her sport, a consistent advocate for better working conditions, whether or not the conditions were hers.
When, for example, Spanish players went to battle with their soccer federation, decrying poor treatment, Morgan supported them.
Months later, on a trip to Paris for an awards ceremony, amid all sorts of appearances and responsibilities, she met with players from around the world who were locked in similar fights of their own, and spent an hour or more strategizing and brainstorming with them.
Morgan didn’t have to do any of this. Ever since she broke out at the 2011 World Cup and the 2012 Olympics, she has been one of the faces of women’s soccer. She was a marketable star who earned millions of Instagram followers. She surely made millions of dollars (and counting) in endorsements.
But her legacy is that she didn’t settle for the millions. She used her status to lift up others, and better society, and change her sport.
As a straight, cisgender woman, she became a vocal ally to the LGBTQ+ community.
As an icon with influence, she advocated on behalf of athlete-moms who didn’t enjoy the same maternity provisions she did.
And when two lesser-known former NWSL players, Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly, decided to publicly accuse a prominent coach of abuse, sexual coercion and harassment, Morgan put her name in the story. She confirmed details on the record, and lent credibility to the accusations. She went on TV with Shim. She played a secondary-but-crucial role in sparking the reckoning that reshaped the NWSL for the better.
She did so in private, leading hundreds of NWSL players in a push for a league-wide anti-harassment policy.
She did so in public, calling out the league and then-commissioner Lisa Baird, and persistently asking for accountability.
“She deserves a ton more credit than she gets in this regard,” Becca Roux, the executive director of the USWNT Players Association, told USA Today last year. “A lot of people talk. She does a lot of work that people never see.”
And so, her impact has been and will be gargantuan. It already touches NWSL and USWNT players directly. Indirectly, it has spread to multiple sports, because Morgan’s drive — on the field and off it — inspired athletes of all kinds to push like she did.
“Legend,” Caitlin Clark wrote on Instagram.
“Thank you for inspiring so many (including me),” skier Mikaela Shiffrin said.
In response to her retirement, prominent soccer players from Mexico, England, Sweden and just about everywhere thanked her. But it was a future soccer player closer to home who struck Morgan’s heart and opened her eyes to the impact she’s had.
Her daughter, Charlie, recently came to her and “said that when she grows up, she wants to be a soccer player,” Morgan recalled in Thursday’s announcement.
And then she got emotional. “It just made me immensely proud, not because I wish for her to become a soccer player when she grows up,” Morgan said. “But because a pathway exists, that even a 4-year-old can see now. We’re changing lives. And the impact we have on the next generation is irreversible. And I’m proud of the hand I had in making that happen.”