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For so long, on so many occasions, it felt like Marta’s time. On Saturday, it finally was.
The Orlando Pride, captained by the 38-year-old Brazilian playmaker and spearheaded by incandescent striker Barbra Banda, completed one of the most dominant seasons in NWSL history on Saturday with a 1-0 win over the Washington Spirit in the league’s championship game. The title is the team’s first ever, and Marta’s first win in a final at club level since the 2011 WPS championship with the Western New York Flash.
Marta was 25 then, already a star thanks to her dominant performance against the United States in the 2007 World Cup semi-final. Most of her teammates from that Flash team have since retired – though two of them, Alex Morgan and Christine Sinclair, only finally did so this year. (That’s right: Marta, Sinclair and Morgan were all on the same club team once, all in their prime.) That game was the last played in WPS before the league folded, and Marta spent the next five club seasons in Sweden before returning to the US, with Orlando in 2017.
Marta’s addition was supposed to turn the Pride into a consistent title contender. Instead, it took nearly a decade’s worth of mostly bad seasons for Marta to finally make her way to NWSL’s marquee occasion.
“Of course it means so much,” she said in front of a national television audience after Saturday’s win, before sending the audio crew dashing for the bleep button. “I fucking waited eight years!”
Saturday’s match had just about every ingredient one could want in a final. The setting at Kansas City’s CPKC Stadium, a boisterous crowd, the primetime kickoff and place on US network airwaves all felt appropriate and befitting a major-league championship match. On the field, too, the team’s contrasting approaches made for an intense tactical battle that was a pleasure to watch.
The Spirit, true to the Barcelona roots of head coach Jonatan Giráldez, owned the majority of possession and sought opportunities through smart ball movement and an intelligent if not all-encompassing press. The Pride, renowned throughout the year for their NWSL-best defense, were happy to play the Spirit straight up. The back four absorbed pressure, threw themselves at shots and into passing lanes, and looked to play direct to Banda at every opportunity once possession finally fell to them.
In the 33rd minute, that exact clash of styles resulted in a Banda breakaway, during which she attracted the attention of all four trailing Spirit defenders. Marta, amazingly, was left completely unchallenged. Her tame effort on goal after Banda’s pass was both a missed opportunity and a warning shot.
Four minutes later, Banda was at it again. In another display of rangy movement and exquisite skill, the Zambian latched on to a well-placed ball over the top by midfielder Angelina, put Spirit defender Esme Morgan in a blender, and finished with a confident strike to the near post to put the Pride up 1-0.
It was an incredible goal, with a no-call in the buildup. Angelina had been able to play that pass in part because of a full-on, two-handed shove of Leicy Santos – a foul for many, but not in the eyes of center referee Alyssa Nichols. VAR had a look but determined it was a judgement call.
Washington continued to press. Trinity Rodman, playing through a back injury picked up this summer at the Olympics, found space in interesting areas but the Pride defense, led by Emily Sams, repeatedly stepped up to contain the threat. The Spirit finished with an eye-popping 26 attempts on goal, but only five that were on target, with a total xG of 1.76.
The Pride were happy to absorb the pressure.
“What Emily has done this season has been tremendous,” said Orlando’s English head coach, Seb Hines, of Sams, while also praising her center back partner Kylie Strom. “In the last 15, we have been the most consistent team when it comes to defending and we showed it tonight.”
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It’s old hat yet ultimately true that defense wins championships, and it’s also accepted that investment usually leads to results. The 2024 NWSL Championship – and indeed the entire playoffs – proved to be emblematic of both concepts. The regular season’s four elite teams – the two finalists plus Kansas City and Gotham FC – separated themselves from the pack: there was a five-point gap between Kansas City in fourth and Orlando in first, but a 16-point gap between Kansas City and fifth-placed North Carolina. The top four also made up the semi-final field.
It is surely not a coincidence that each of those four got to that point after increased investment and/or new, deep-pocketed ownership. In the Pride’s case, the 2021 takeover by the Wilf family begat the retention of Hines and the hiring of Haley Carter as sporting director, giving the team a direction and level of team-building nous that simply had not existed before. Then, the investment came. Under Carter, and with the Wilfs’ backing, Orlando paid the league’s second-highest transfer fee ever for Banda, who scored the winning goal, and Angelina, who assisted it. They surrounded these difference-makers with a special mix of hard-working, dependable pros.
And at the center of it all, they had an all-time great who had seen it all before; who had played in the US in the dark ages of club soccer, who knew how special this moment was, and whose mom was in the US for the first time to watch her daughter play before a sold-out, purpose-built women’s soccer stadium on a chilly night in the midwest.
“I told everybody today, hey, we need to take this. We did an incredible season. It’s only one more game, please,” Marta told CBS afterward. “I have my moments like: ‘Oh my God, what am I doing’. But I have incredible players by my side that push me …they make me feel young. Not so young, but a little bit young.”
Marta’s individual honors are legion – six Fifa World Player of the Year awards, several player of the season honors on top of that. But there was that lingering failure in club finals, the runners-up finishes at Olympics and World Cups for Brazil, and the fact that she incredibly had not won a senior title at club level since 2015.
Now, with the 2024 NWSL Shield and Saturday’s Championship, she has two.
