Add one more title to Carli Lloyd’s long list.
Lloyd, a two-time World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist, is now a Hall of Famer. She’s one of the five people chosen for this year’s National Soccer Hall of Fame class, which will be inducted May 3 in Frisco, Texas.
Lloyd was elected her first year of eligibility. She retired in 2021 after making 316 appearances for the U.S. women’s national team, second only to Kristine Lilly. She is fifth on the international scoring list, her 134 career goals behind only Christine Sinclair, Abby Wambach, Mia Hamm and Cristiano Ronaldo.
It’s not her stats that define Lloyd’s career, however. It’s the impact she made when she was on the field. Of the nine titles the U.S. women have won at the Olympics and World Cup, Lloyd is directly responsible for three of them.
She scored the game-winner in the gold-medal match at both the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the 2012 Games in London. She single-handedly outscored Japan — in the first 16 minutes, no less — in the 2015 World Cup final.
Lloyd also scored twice in the bronze-medal match at the Tokyo Olympics, where the U.S. women beat Australia 4-3.
“She obviously is a big-game player,” Becky Sauerbrunn, then the USWNT’s captain, said ahead of Lloyd’s final match with the Americans. “A large reason this team has been so successful is because of Carli Lloyd.”
Lloyd was as relentless in her preparation as she was on the field. The New Jersey native was known for never taking days off, finding time to run and work out even when she was on vacation. That single-minded focus came with a price elsewhere in her life, Lloyd acknowledged, but it was what she needed to do to become, and remain, one of the world’s top players.
Lloyd was twice a FIFA player of the year, joining Hamm as the only American to win the award multiple times. She also won the Golden Ball award as the best player at the 2015 World Cup.
Lloyd also was one of the main drivers in the USWNT’s push for equal pay. She joined Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe and Sauerbrunn in filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2016, alleging U.S. Soccer paid the USWNT less than it did the U.S. men. That complaint became the basis for the USWNT’s gender discrimination lawsuit against U.S. Soccer in 2019, with Lloyd, Morgan, Rapinoe and Sauerbrunn as the lead plaintiffs.
“I think,” Lloyd said in 2016, “that we’ve proven our worth over the years.”
Lloyd’s exacting standards carried over to her teammates, and she sharply criticized some of them during the Tokyo Olympics. She was even more caustic as an analyst for Fox Sports during the 2023 World Cup, when the U.S. women made their earliest exit ever at a major tournament.
She called the team “lackluster,” and said players were taking the USWNT’s success for granted. She also questioned the commitment of the players, criticizing them for dancing and taking selfies after a draw with Portugal.
Captain Lindsey Horan, who inherited the No. 10 after Lloyd retired, pushed back on Lloyd’s criticisms, saying she had “no idea what’s going on behind the scenes.”
Indeed, many of the players on that World Cup team made up the core of the USWNT squad for this summer’s Paris Olympics, where the U.S. women won their fifth gold medal. The Americans allowed just two goals in their six games, while the “Triple Espresso” front line of Mallory Swanson, Sophia Smith and Trinity Rodman scored 10 of the team’s 12 goals.