The year was 2015. Carli Lloyd entered the FIFA Women’s World Cup hungry for redemption. Silver in 2011? Not good enough. The USWNT hadn’t won gold in sixteen years. The weight of that drought pressed down on the team like a physical object.
Lloyd thought she was ready. She was captain. Peak physical condition. Mental armor polished. But out in Canada, winning didn’t feel right.
“The weight of wanting it so badly… paralyzed us all,” she tells Women’s Health. The outside noise was loud but the internal silence was worse. She was stuck in her head. No confidence. Just a loop of negative thoughts. A deep, dark place.
Then the universe intervened. Yellow cards. Lauren Cheney and Megan Rapinoe suspended for the quarterfinal. Lloyd had to move forward. Closer to the goal. It fit her. It reset everything. She scored in every remaining game. Ended with a legendary hat trick against Japan. She didn’t just win. She survived the pressure by learning to drop it.
“There are moments, there’s pressure… you’ve got to weather it all.”
Fast forward five years. No more soccer. No more pressure cooker. Now there’s Harper, her twenty-month-old daughter. And another baby on the way. September due date. Lloyd is now a studio analyst for FOX, covering the men’s World Cup. The game has changed but the lessons remain.
The Robot Unmasked
For seventeen years, Carli Lloyd was a ghost in plain sight. Two-time Player of the Year. Hall of Fame bound. But the person fans saw? That wasn’t her. Not really. She kept the game doing the talking. Kept herself out.
“I was very robotic,” she admits. She played with her face locked in. Always in the office mentality. Grinding. Always trying to be the best. Did she have a choice? She doubts it. Survival required that armor.
Her former teammates get it. They all built shells to survive the intensity. Carli just built a thicker one. She felt misunderstood. Isolated in her own success.
It took retirement. It took infertility. Multiple IVF cycles with her husband Brian. A battle with no guaranteed win. Only when she held the promise of a child in her arms did the shell crack. She wrote it all down. Shared the journey of unexplained infertility in a Women’s Health essay. Announced the pregnancy to the world.
She could have kept quiet. Privacy was her brand. But life is too short to hide your biggest wins. And besides.
“The weight of the world is off me.”
She knows she’d be a different mother if she’d started earlier. Back in 2015? Impossible. Watching teammates bring kids to the bus? She saw the exhaustion. The time zones. The lack of sleep. Now she respects moms. Truly respects them.
“Your whole self-being goes out the wheel, and it’s not about you.”
Chaos Is Normal
Life at FOX Sports isn’t quiet either. She was pumping milk on set during the 2023 Women’s Euro while Harper waited off-camera. A huge shout-out to moms balancing jobs. It’s a job that never ends. But it’s also the best job there is.
The main shift? She doesn’t take herself quite as seriously. There is freedom in that. No need to guard every angle. No need to prove her worth on air every thirty seconds.
Mess up on camera? Whatever. They are talking about soccer. It’s not brain surgery. This is a far cry from the woman who treated every pass like her life depended on it.
Great athletes adapt. They flip the script when the momentum shifts. Lloyd is well into her second pregnancy during this broadcast cycle. Back hurts. Wardrobe adjustments. Long days. Things change on the fly. You roll with it. Or you don’t survive.
It comes natural now. Because TV is chaotic. Mom life is chaotic. You don’t solve the baby crying by asking why it isn’t sleeping. You just react. Intuition. Trial and error.
Covering the World Cup again brings the ghosts back. But now she meets them as someone who has moved on. She is in the moment now. Much more than she was while climbing to the top of sports. It is refreshing.
Freeing, really. The end isn’t a full stop. Just a change in speed. And maybe that’s okay. 🎒⚽
