With more than 200 caps and two World Cups won, one of the greatest players in history will retire internationally this weekend, after a real fiasco.
A superstar of women’s football will hang up her boots for the national team this weekend. Without doubt one of the best players on the planet and of all time. She has two World Cups, a gold medal at the Olympic Games, a Ballon d’Or and two French championships, one of the best in women’s football, to her credit. Despite these numerous successes, history will undoubtedly remember a final tragic and humiliating sequence this summer.
Megan Rapinoe announced her international retirement following the FIFA World Cup in Australia and New Zealand this summer. At the age of 38, she will play her last match for the national team this Sunday, September 24 against South Africa. Captain and emblematic player of the United States, Megan Rapinoe will also have marked all of American society and beyond for her commitment in favor of LGBT rights, the right to abortion, equal pay and even against the politics of Donald Trump. This weekend she will celebrate her 203rd cap with her national team, for which she has scored 63 goals.
The United States selection has long dominated world women’s football, notably thanks to Megan Rapinoe. But this hegemony came to an end in the round of 16 of the 2023 World Cup, with an elimination that was as surprising as it was humiliating for her and her team. Favorites against Sweden, the Americans were unable to make a difference on the field (0-0) and ended up coming out pitifully on penalties (3 tab to 2).
We will especially remember the missed penalty of Megan Rapinoe herself, abruptly ending her success story with a “disaster” in her own words and provoking an outburst from conservatives and Trump supporters across the Atlantic, who found in this “failure” a way to get revenge. “It’s the failure of woke thinking”, Donald Trump will even rejoice on social networks, openly mocking the star: “nice shot Megan”.
It is in this context that Megan Rapinoe says goodbye to the United States jersey. She will even retire from sports at the end of the 2023 season. She also plays her last matches in the jersey of OL Reign (formerly Seattle Reign FC), a franchise with which she twice reached the final of the American championship without never win it. Megan Rapinoe also played a year at Olympique Lyonnais, winning two French championship titles along the way, and playing in a Champions League final.
Megan Rapinoe looked back on her memories with the national team: “I remember the chants (in the public) for equal pay after the final (of the 2019 World Cup, in Lyon). Of course, there are had the World Cups played, the championships won… But knowing that we used our talent to do something that changed the world forever, that’s what matters most to me.”
In particular, she obtained, with her teammates in the selection, equal pay between women and men in the United States national football team. Since 2021, the American Soccer Federation has paid an identical salary but also equal competition bonuses to the players of the selection. Commercial revenue is also shared equally between the two teams.
