The USWNT's “rusty” victory over Iceland shows that further development is necessary

AUSTIN, Texas – On Thursday, the U.S. women's national team picked up where it left off in August: on the podium. Two hours before kickoff of the team's first game since winning the 2024 Olympics, that team's 18 players in attendance entered the field to face Iceland at the Q2 Stadium and stood on a raised platform for a pre-game TV interview to record.

Gold was omnipresent in the arena, from the medal around Captain Lindsey Horan's neck during the interview to special “Champions Edition” aluminum water bottles and spiked seltzer cans. Thursday was primarily a celebration of the USWNT's fifth Olympic gold medal.

“Just being back together is a celebration in itself,” USWNT forward Sophia Smith said later after scoring in her team’s 3-1 win.

A few minutes after the smoke from the pregame fireworks cleared, the whistle blew to start the game and midfielder Rose Lavelle put the ball in play. With that, the tide turned to the 2027 Women's World Cup.

When Emma Hayes first met reporters in May as head coach of the USWNT, she used a common coaching refrain to describe the changing landscape of the women's game: “What got you here won't get you there.”

She discussed how the USWNT could bounce back from a weak 2023 World Cup at this year's Olympics, but that sentence was even more true Thursday when the USWNT ended a three-game losing streak with a goal from a player who wasn't. Victory Tour even started at the Olympic Games.

Nineteen-year-old striker Alyssa Thompson, making her first international appearance in nearly a year after returning to form with Angel City FC, blasted a shot off the underside of the crossbar in the 39th minute to give the Americans the lead. It was the first goal of her USWNT career.

Striker Yazmeen Ryan and midfielder Hal Hershfelt came off the bench in the second half on their international debuts. Hayes had promised to make debuts next week during this three-game winning streak, and given there are six uncapped players in camp, more are likely to arrive.

Thompson, Ryan, Hershfelt and dozens of other young players are hoping to break through in the USWNT as Hayes plots her strategy to win the 2027 World Cup. This work has already begun. Hayes plans to use this international window, which includes a return match against Iceland on Sunday and a game against Argentina on Wednesday, to test new players. But all this experimentation could lead to some “choppy” performances, the coach admitted earlier this week.

“One of the hardest things at international level is that we always want to see more players, but the more changes you make, the more fractured the game becomes,” she said. “Football, like any sport, is about building connections and relationships, and you can’t do that if relationships change from game to game.”

Hayes said the team seemed “a little rusty” Thursday, noting that most of the players were coming to the end of a long NWSL season. Ten of the USWNT's 11 starters on Thursday were from the Olympic gold medal-winning team, but the 3-1 win over Iceland would certainly be considered incomplete from the USWNT's perspective.

Key passes in the final third were missing in the first half and players were too slow to recognize when to switch play down the field, Hayes said. She also suggested that the Americans had lost the physical battle against a compact and defensively disciplined Icelandic team.

“It was a physical team,” Hayes said of Iceland, ranked 13th in the world. “Sometimes I want us to win the fight first and there are parts of it that I didn’t particularly like about us and I’ll address that.”

Iceland equalized early in the second half when the USWNT midfield was beaten in a quick sequence, and it took excellent finishes from Smith and Jaedyn Shaw off the bench in the final minutes of the game to break the stalemate.

Shaw and Smith were both part of the Olympic team – although Shaw did not play due to injury – and at 19 and 24 respectively, they will play an important role in Hayes' plan going forward. The USWNT coach said after the game that Shaw's “ability to score and score goals is unmatched in this country” and that Smith is becoming “the prolific striker that I want her to be.”

Hayes has the core of the team she will build to compete in the 2027 World Cup, but she is still studying the player pool. The gold medal game was just the 10th in which Hayes led the team after taking over in June. The players spoke this week about how they are still getting to know their new coach and how their development as a group is just beginning, with Horan claiming: “This team is going to develop tremendously.”

Ryan is one of three players in her first USWNT camp; Hershfelt, who was an alternate on the Olympic team despite his non-commitment, was never called up to youth national team camps. Striker Emma Sears, who is training with the USWNT for the first time this week, was also absent. A host of new players will train with the senior team in January while Hayes runs an identification camp. It will take time for so many new faces to adjust to what is known to be the sport's most brutal environment – and the established players will have to adapt too.

“One of them is the conversations, the communication off the field,” Horan said. “Making the players feel comfortable but also knowing that they are new and that they need to figure out the level and standard. It's different coming to this team from a club environment and it's difficult. We have all experienced this and must adapt.

“I think that's the reality: you have to make it clear to these players that this is their job, but they are all here for a reason. I am sure they will do great. We have that.” We’ve only had one training session in this camp so far. We will do everything we can to make you feel welcome.

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How the USWNT won their first game since Olympic gold

The USWNT prevailed against a brave Iceland in Austin, their first game since winning Olympic gold in Paris.

Hayes said their “biggest goal is to expand the player pool.” A larger player pool will bring competition and a greater variety of skills, which Hayes said will lead to a greater variety of opportunities to beat teams.

The margins in women's football are thinner than ever before. The USWNT won all three knockout games at the Olympics 1-0 – two of them in overtime. The team “suffered” through winning the tournament, as Hayes said at the time, by getting results and reaching the peak of an unstoppable forward line.

It was only a year since Spain won its first World Cup, and the Americans suffered a different kind of suffering with their worst finish at a major tournament in history: They were eliminated in the round of 16 after a penalty shootout against Sweden for a shot had lost the line that went into the flank by a millimeter. The 2023 World Cup exposed the USWNT as too predictable and showed how much other teams had improved.

“The reality is that it is extremely difficult to create some of the more traditional advantages, be it numerical superiority or technical advantages for example,” Hayes said this week. “You have to find another way to do that.”

What got the Americans on the podium at the Olympics won't get them there at the next World Championships. The next three years require evolution, and that process began Thursday.