The French Connection: Why Lindsey Horan’s Past Represents the USWNT’s Future

By Andrew HelmsJune 7, 2019, 4:00 am UTC • 22 min

Lindsey Horan was waiting. She had a good feeling she’d be going to her first Women’s World Cup this summer, but she didn’t know. Not yet. The official coronation—and the official freedom to celebrate a childhood dream at long last achieved—would come only when national team coach Jill Ellis called to confirm her spot on the roster.

So Horan did the thing you do when you know without knowing. She kept busy. She filled the idle hours between training and gym sessions with friends, reruns of The Office, and phone calls with family. And then, finally, Ellis called. Horan was in the middle of an interview when it came, but she excused herself to answer.

After a few agonizing minutes of small talk, Ellis shared the good news: Horan would be going to France this summer to help the United States try to repeat as World Cup champions. But in that moment, as the 25-year-old midfielder celebrated the career-defining accomplishment, she flashed back to a less pleasant memory. It was the summer of 2012, and she was sobbing on the front lawn of a mansion outside Paris.

At the time, Horan was only 18 and had just signed for superclub Paris Saint-Germain, a decision that was as remarkable as it was controversial. In the men’s game, talented young American soccer players frequently sign for European clubs, but Horan was the first women’s player to forgo college to make the same move. Some friends and coaches questioned her choice to give up the safety of a scholarship to play abroad. Horan also had to give up her spot on the U.S. team for that year’s under-20 Women’s World Cup. If she struggled in Paris, there was no guarantee she’d ever make her way back to a national team roster. “I took a lot of heat. I know my parents took a lot of heat for it,” Horan says. “And that’s ultimately what helped me make my decision, because it was like, no, this is what I want to do, and I don’t want to listen to any of these people.”

When she got to Paris, it seemed as if she’d landed in a European fairy tale. In addition to a six-figure salary, PSG provided the Colorado native with living accommodations with a wealthy family in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a tony town 13 miles outside Paris. Every afternoon, Horan watched the main square fill up with couture-wearing Parisians sipping aperitifs in sidewalk cafés. Above town towered the castle where Louis XIV had been born almost 400 years before. “When a cab driver dropped me off there the first time,” recalls Horan’s mother, Linda Horan, “he’s like, ‘What does your daughter do to be able to live in this town?’”

But the day-to-day challenges of living abroad troubled Horan. She didn’t speak French and the studied coldness of store clerks and waiters made her anxious. Even routine trips to the doctor turned into logistical nightmares as she scrambled to use Google Translate to complete medical paperwork. When she went to open a bank account, Horan overheard the tellers describe her as an enfant, or a child, in French. The meaning lost in translation, Horan replied defiantly: “I’m not an infant.”

Then, just as she was getting comfortable in the mansion in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, PSG officials informed her that she was being relocated to an apartment in the city. At the same time, Linda, who had accompanied her to France to get settled, was returning to the United States. “I was ready to live there, and my mom was leaving, and I just started bawling,” she says. “I was leaving that night to go to this apartment in the city, and I was so scared.”

As the taxi pulled up to the house, Linda said goodbye to her distraught daughter. “And I was just driving away, and I could hardly contain myself,” she says. “I could just envision her standing out on their lawn crying, and I was thinking, ‘I can’t stay there forever.’”

Seven years later, that was the moment that flashed into Horan’s mind when she learned that she would be returning to France this summer as a member of the U.S. women’s national team. In the years since, she has matured from a raw teenage talent into the country’s most complete player, a box-to-box midfielder with the vision to unlock defenses, the ability to smash headers into the net, and the grit to grind out games. After four standout seasons with PSG, she returned to the United States in 2016 to play for the Portland Thorns in the National Women’s Soccer League. She led the Thorns to the NWSL title in 2017, and last year she was named the league’s most valuable player. “There’s no player that can impact a game as much as Lindsey can. The skills and the tools that she has—the physical attributes, the tactical, the technical, the leadership,” says her Portland Thorns coach, Mark Parsons. “What she did last year, she was hitting the statistics of three central midfielders.”

Though veteran players like Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe have greater name recognition, Horan will be the national team’s anchor in France, the midfielder who makes the supercharged American attack flow. Many analysts have called her the team’s most important player, which is a roundabout way of stating that she just may be the team’s best player. And at 25, she’s still getting better.

But what makes her so good isn’t just her technical skill, tactical savvy, or strength. It’s the mind-set that she’s acquired on her journey from Denver to Paris and back again. Over those seven years, she’s come to believe that her success is a process and not an outcome, the byproduct of the choices she has made and—just as crucially—the choices she did not make. And more broadly, Horan’s unique path to the World Cup may foretell significant changes for the future of women’s professional soccer. “I actually said this to her, that ‘You sacrificed a lot to get to this point, and I’m delighted to inform you that it is paying off, and that you’re here,’” says Ellis of her congratulatory call with Horan. “‘But we still have more to do.’”

“As soon as Jill said that to me, I flashed back to that moment because it was the most dramatic that I’ve ever been,” says Horan. “It kind of showed me that all of that emotional stress and sacrifice that I’ve made, and the torture for my mom of leaving her little kid in a foreign country—all of that was worth it.”

Horan’s path to the U.S. women’s national team started not in Paris, but with a phone call to Comcast. One day in middle school, she called up the cable company to figure out how to get more soccer channels at her family’s home in Golden, Colorado, a Denver suburb. She got “a really good deal,” as she later explained to her mother. For a small monthly fee, the entire family would get more sports channels, and Horan would get what she wanted most: a slate of soccer channels that would allow her to watch all the European soccer she could handle.

Her mom agreed. “And then I got the bill, and I was like, ‘Oh my god!’” Linda says. Despite the added cost, the family kept the sports package, and Horan binged as much televised soccer as she could. “That was the best decision I’ve ever made even though it pissed off my parents,” she says. “That’s where I really started loving watching the game.” On weekend mornings, she’d watch Premier League games and follow them up with La Liga matches in the afternoon. On weekdays after school, she’d hurry home to catch the Champions League.

Horan’s early exposure to European soccer nurtured a dream that made her unique among top players across the country. Though most of her peers idolized Mia Hamm, the legendary national team forward who transcended the sport to become a cultural icon, Horan was only 5 in 1999, too young to experience the earth-shattering moment when Brandi Chastain’s penalty kick sailed into the net and catapulted American women’s soccer into the mainstream.

Instead, Horan’s formative experience in soccer came when a teenage Lionel Messi broke into Barcelona’s first team in 2004. She quickly grew enchanted with the Argentine attacker, and her bedroom filled up with Messi jerseys and Barcelona posters. When she was tasked with sculpting a person who inspired her in a middle school art class, she made a miniature Messi. “The only memories I have watching [the ’99 team] were on YouTube,” she says. “Messi was the player that I was obsessed with rather than the U.S. national team.”

All the hours watching soccer off the field combined with a rigorous training schedule (she’d train as many as four times a day) turned Horan into powerhouse player. Shy and quiet off the pitch, Horan played with a restless fury, a forward constantly demanding the ball. By the end of high school, she was one of the most highly regarded youth players in the country and had committed to play for the University of North Carolina, the legendary program that launched the careers of national team stars like Hamm, Heather O’Reilly, and Tobin Heath.

But her Messi obsession had stoked a different kind of dream. At the end of a family trip to Spain in the summer of 2011, before her senior year of high school, her youth club coach, Tim Schultz, called the family to convey an intriguing offer: French powerhouse Olympique Lyonnais wanted Horan to try out for the team. The rest of her family returned to the United States, but she traveled to train with Lyon. She didn’t make any official appearances for the club in order to preserve her NCAA eligibility, but Horan impressed the coaching staff. Lyon wanted her to sign right away. That would mean moving to France, finishing high school there, and becoming a professional footballer before she was old enough to vote.

“That was a huge decision,” recalls Linda. “And she came back and stewed on it, and she wasn’t quite ready to leave her friends and family. The more she talked about it, you could tell how nervous she was. And so it was, ‘Why don’t you finish out high school here and then you can relook at it?’”

The Horans spent the next year weighing the merits of European club soccer versus a college scholarship, and they quarreled often. Linda wanted to make sure that her daughter understood the risks. The coaching staff wouldn’t speak English, and the other players on the team would see her as a threat to their roster spot. At the time, no top American women’s player had ever skipped college to play abroad. If she failed at PSG and then returned to the United States, she would have forfeited her NCAA eligibility and there was no professional women’s league to play in at the time (Women’s Professional Soccer had folded earlier in 2012). There were no role models to follow, no safety net, and no second chance to get this decision right.

There’s no player that can impact a game as much as Lindsey can.
Portland Thorns coach Mark Parsons

The constant arguments took a toll on Horan’s relationship with her mother. “It was tough. And we really had some bad moments,” Linda says. “I just wanted to make sure she’s happy. That was my biggest goal. I felt in my mind, always, the decision is hers, but I also had this fear she was going to go over to France, not speak the language, not make the cut of the team and just be sitting on the bench and be miserable.”

Horan ended up signing with PSG. (Lyon didn’t have any international roster slots available at the time and PSG made a strong offer.) Overnight, she became a media sensation: the first female player to ever sign for a European team straight out of high school. “She took a very different path, which was very brave,” says national team coach Ellis. “She’s paved a way that no one had previously trodden.”

Despite the praise in the press, other parents and friends criticized the choice. “She did take a lot of harassment from a lot of people on that. And still does,” Linda says. “You know people tease her about not going to college. ‘Are you smart enough to figure that out?’ I can tell you it still bugs her.”

After arriving in Paris, Horan had to battle homesickness as she contended with almost constant criticism from PSG’s coaching staff. At one meeting, a coach told the team that Horan wouldn’t start again until she lost weight. Horan called her mom that night and said she wanted to quit. “It’s a culture that’s very critical in general,” says Tobin Heath, one of Horan’s USWNT teammates. Heath joined PSG a few months after Horan. “In the U.S., people always say, ‘Good shot. Good try,’ stuff like that. And in France, it’s like nothing is good enough. There’s not that margin. Everything is criticized.”

Most of all, the PSG coaches attacked Horan’s freewheeling playing style. With her Colorado club team, she had been able to roam all over the field to affect games. But the PSG coaching staff wanted her to play as a classic target forward, a true number nine. The coach “would always call me this little kid who always wants the ball,” Horan says. “There was a point where he was like, ‘You’re literally pissing me off because you’re not in the box when we need you, so you’re going to stay within the width of the 18, and you’re not going to go outside of it.’”

Over time, Horan acclimated to her PSG coaches’ abrasive style, learning to accept their advice without letting their tone upset her. She worked hard after practice to meet their rigid fitness expectations, and adjusted her game to fit in with tactics-heavy European soccer. She developed a more sophisticated understanding of spacing on the field, realizing that sometimes moving two steps into an open passing lane was better than sprinting across the field to pick up the ball. That work paid off; in her first 20 appearances with PSG, she scored 17 times. “We all just think Lindsey turns up or is in the right place at the right time,” says Thorns coach Parsons. “It’s not true. She has the ability to create space for herself. She times her movement and smells the opportunity.”

Halfway through her first season, life in Paris improved when Heath joined the club. Heath, six years older, was already a regular for the U.S. national team; her presence helped Horan grow more comfortable in Paris. They shared meals after practice and binged shows like The Vampire Diaries. “I can only imagine in that culture how that must’ve felt for her because she’s a bit quieter and more reserved, especially when she was that age,” says Heath. “For both of us, it was a comfort having somebody that knew what was going on, knew what you were saying, that didn’t make you feel as isolated when you were there alone.”

The presence of two American stars in Paris also symbolized a larger shift in women’s soccer: the rising power of European clubs. Historically, Europe has lagged behind the United States in women’s soccer due to an even stronger current of sexism in its sports culture. For much of the 20th century, women were formally banned from playing soccer. England banned the women’s game in 1921, arguing that the sport was “quite unsuitable for females.” France did the same in 1932, and Germany followed suit in 1955. Many of these restrictions were lifted in the 1970s, but European governing bodies failed to match the United States’ investment in women’s soccer when Title IX forced American universities to offer women scholarships in 1972. By 1981, there were just under 100 women’s collegiate soccer programs, and soon the national team reaped the rewards, winning the 1991 and 1999 Women’s World Cups.

In the U.S., people always say, ‘Good shot. Good try,’ stuff like that. And in France, it’s like nothing is good enough. There’s not that margin. Everything is criticized.
Tobin Heath

But Europe’s deep-pocketed clubs are catching up. Increasingly, top clubs and soccer brands view supporting the women’s game as a way to be seen as progressive and inclusive, and they’re starting to use the massive profits from the men’s game to subsidize the growth of women’s soccer. England’s FA Women’s Super League fully professionalized last year and recently signed a title sponsorship deal with Barclays, an eight-figure deal (estimated to be worth more than £10 million over the next three seasons) that amounts to the largest corporate investment in the women’s game in English history. Next year, Manchester United and Tottenham will field first-division women’s teams for the first time, joining their rivals Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Manchester City in the FA WSL.

The growth in England is mirrored on the continent. A match between the women’s sides of Barcelona and Atlético Madrid drew more than 60,000 fans in March. Mastercard recently signed sponsorship deals with both Lyon and Arsenal, and Visa has vowed to make its sponsorship commitment to the 2019 Women’s World Cup equal to its sponsorship of the 2018 men’s World Cup in Russia. On May 18, the Women’s Champions League final drew a crowd of just under 20,000 to watch Lyon defeat Barcelona 4-1, the club’s fourth straight CL victory.

All this growth is posing a major challenge to women’s pro soccer in the United States. The first two American women’s soccer leagues failed because of a lack of institutional support, short-sighted investors, and low revenues. The current league, the NWSL, is in the middle of its seventh season, making it the longest-surviving women’s professional soccer league in American history. Unlike the first two leagues, the NWSL receives direct financial and management support from the U.S. Soccer Federation. Though the nine-team league thrives in markets like Portland and Salt Lake City, it has struggled to gain a national audience and lost its main television partner, A&E, earlier this year.

“I think the United States internationally and domestically have been a world leader, and we’ve all been working really hard to catch up,” says Kelly Simmons, the director of women’s professional football for England’s FA. “When Europe breaks down those barriers and the football bodies get behind it, it’ll be really interesting to see how quickly it can catch up, because we have that football culture, we’ve got those clubs, we’ve got the academy system. And we’re starting to see how quickly and if we can close the gap.”

At youth levels, European teams have already closed it. While top young American players compete for college programs that have a four-month season, European players are competing year-round for major clubs. “All I hear from national youth team coaches when they go and play in youth tournaments is, ‘We’re going and playing against professional players,’” says Thorns coach Parsons. “We go to the U-20 World Cup, we’re playing against Bundesliga professional players from Bayern Munich. We’re playing against professional players from Arsenal.”

All of Europe’s investment in the women’s game will be on display this summer in France. Though Horan and the U.S. women’s national team will enter the tournament as slight favorites, they will need to defeat the toughest playing field in the competition’s existence in order to lift the country’s record fourth Women’s World Cup trophy.

“We’re all going to be surprised at how much growth there has been from these countries in just four years,” says Parsons. “It’s going to be the biggest shock to our system that we’ve seen. I know this always happens every four years. ‘Wow! People are catching up, people are catching up.’ But this will be the biggest shock without a doubt. And it’s only going to speed up.”

As agonizing as Horan’s decision to go to Europe was, her decision to return to the United States was just as difficult. By 2014, her dominant play for Paris Saint-Germain had put her on the national team’s radar for the 2015 Women’s World Cup. Fans clamored for her to be called up, but in a New York Times profile, Ellis contended that playing abroad actually limited Horan’s chances to feature for the U.S. women’s national team since the European club soccer calendar would make it harder for her to participate in several training camps.

In early 2015, all that speculation was rendered moot. Horan got injured in practice and underwent exploratory surgery. That operation revealed that she had a microfracture in her knee and would not be able to play for seven months. “I remember the look on her face when she found out,” says Linda. “She just lost it.”

The recovery process was difficult for Horan and those around her. She lived at home, rehabilitated her knee, and was unable to play soccer regularly for the first time since she was a young child. “I was trying to do my best, but she was just so frustrated and so down during that time,” says Linda. “We had some horrendous fights then, too. She needed somebody to get that emotion out on, and I think I was the only around.”

That summer, Horan traveled to Canada to watch the United States compete in a World Cup group stage match against Sweden. “I have never been so depressed and pissed off in my life,” she says. “It was so hard for me, and I was just like, I will never let this happen again where I’m up in the stands watching the U.S. national team.”

She returned to Paris after the World Cup and earned her spot back in the PSG starting lineup. But as the 2016 Olympics approached, Ellis let Horan know that if she wanted to play in that tournament, she needed to be playing professionally in the United States. U.S. Soccer pays the salaries of national team members who play in the National Women’s Soccer League (between $62,500 to $67,500 a season in 2017), in hopes of boosting the fledgling league using the USWNT’s star power. In addition, the league’s season is structured to accommodate the national team’s training schedule.

Horan fretted over the decision, forced to choose between her club team and her dream of playing for the national team. After the rocky start to life in Paris, she’d grown close with the PSG coaching staff and her teammates. If she left midseason, she’d abandon them in the middle of their Champions League run. “She felt like she was deserting them,” says Linda. “And it’s something we always felt really strongly about. You don’t break contracts.”

Horan is not the only player who has had to choose between staying in Europe or earning a spot on the national team. Christen Press returned from Sweden to play in the NWSL ahead of the 2015 Women’s World Cup. Alex Morgan and Carli Lloyd played briefly for European clubs in 2017 (Morgan reportedly earned an estimated $30,000 a month playing for Lyon), but their loans were short and they remained under contract with their NWSL teams. Last year, Crystal Dunn returned to the NWSL after one season abroad with Chelsea. “I had to make a really tough decision of either enjoy my life in London or come back, you know, and be seen by the coaching staff,” Dunn says. “So I decided to do what I thought was best for me to have a key role on this national team.”

It’s not lost on the women’s national team players that no men’s player has ever had to choose between a club career in Europe and a spot on the national team. “Let’s not go down that lane,” jokes Dunn when asked whether it was fair that men’s star Christian Pulisic was able to play in Germany for Borussia Dortmund then sign for Chelsea and still remain a fixture of the men’s national team. “The men operate in a different way than the women’s side, so maybe they don’t have those restrictions,” says Dunn.

Those restrictions, however, are partially the result of the contract the women signed with U.S. Soccer. While men’s players draw the bulk of their income from their club teams and receive only appearance and bonus payments from U.S. Soccer, the women’s team has sought out guaranteed salaries from the federation given the historic lack of stability in the women’s club game. (The details of the U.S. women’s national team 2017 collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer were first reported by journalist Caitlin Murray in her book The National Team.) In addition to their NWSL salaries, U.S. Soccer pays a minimum of 18 women from the entire non-amateur player pool a $100,000 salary plus benefits. Players who aren’t salaried receive appearance and bonus fees, but those fees are lower than what the men are paid. For instance, the men’s base appearance fee is $5,000 while the women’s base appearance fee is $3,500.

In return for this financial support, U.S. Soccer runs the national team on an almost full-time basis, making it difficult for players to play for European clubs even though they are technically free to do so. U.S. Soccer operates training camps outside of FIFA-approved dates, like the annual January camp, when European clubs won’t release players. The NWSL, on the other hand, accommodates the national team’s schedule. This year, NWSL teams released national team players to attend a pre–World Cup training camp in early May even though the FIFA-mandated date for clubs to release their players didn’t start for another two weeks.

She’s paved a way that no one had previously trodden.
USWNT coach Jill Ellis

But the growth of women’s professional soccer in Europe is posing a challenge to U.S. Soccer and the NWSL. As women’s salaries in Europe rise, it’s certain that some national team players will follow the money. In turn, they will be less reliant on U.S. Soccer for a guaranteed income and will be more willing to enter into a contract with the federation that mirrors how the men are compensated, with lower base pay and higher bonus and appearance fees. Right now, as detailed in the lawsuit the women filed against U.S. Soccer in March, if a woman were to play in and win 20 national team games in a year she would earn 38 percent of what a comparable men’s player would earn in bonuses ($99,000 to $263,320).

“New tensions are arising with the evolution and growth in the women’s game,” says Becca Roux, the executive director of the U.S. Women’s National Team Players Association. “Historically, players have received financial security from their national teams. But with the growth of club soccer, especially in Europe, that’s going to change and U.S. Soccer and the NWSL must keep up and hopefully see an opportunity to lead the way.”

The federation denies that those disparities constitute unfair inequities in pay and treatment, arguing that the differences are the result of each team having entered into separate collective bargaining agreements with U.S. Soccer. “USWNT and USMNT are physically and functionally separate organizations that perform services for U.S. Soccer in physically separate spaces and compete in different competitions, venues, and countries at different times,” wrote U.S. Soccer in its response to the women’s lawsuit, an explicit rejection of the federation’s own “One Nation, One Team” marketing campaign. The lawsuit will be resolved after the World Cup.

In January 2016, PSG allowed Horan to sever her contract in order to return to the United States and join the national team. “It seemed like an exception to the rule,” says Linda. “If she wanted to be on the Olympic team, and as long as PSG was OK with it … but it still went against her integrity.” Horan broke down frequently telling her coaches and teammates that she would be leaving midseason. “That was the hardest thing for me. I felt like I was letting down my teammates,” says Horan. “I don’t like breaking my contract. That’s not who I am. I would’ve 100 percent stuck with them, but it’s a dream of mine to play in the Olympics and be on the national team.”

Back in the United States, Horan was announced as the newest signing for the Portland Thorns, the NWSL’s top franchise, with a rabid fan base of almost 17,000 per match. (That summer, Horan played at the 2016 Olympics in Rio, a tournament most remembered for goalkeeper Hope Solo’s postmatch comments that the United States’ quarterfinal opponent, Sweden, played like “a bunch of cowards.”) But Horan wasn’t content with just dominating club soccer anymore; she was coming home to make a World Cup team. “She has told me all along if she didn’t eventually make a World Cup team, we would think [signing for PSG was] a mistake,” says Linda. “It was a good move for her. But it was equally as tough coming back as it was going over to France.”

After settling into Portland, Horan had to make one more change to break into the national team. Following Lauren Holiday’s retirement, national team coach Ellis needed a new box-to-box midfielder, and she turned to Horan. While PSG had used Horan as a target forward (she’s the no. 4 all-time leading scorer in club history), Ellis wanted to use Horan’s tactical savvy in the midfield. She tried Horan there during a 2015 friendly against Trinidad. Horan scored and had two assists, and hasn’t played forward since. “I fricking love midfield,” she says. “I get the ball more and I have a little bit more freedom than I have as a number nine.”

The current version of the U.S. women’s national team features a trio of all-star attackers—Rapinoe, Morgan, and Heath—but a heavy burden will fall on Horan to maintain possession and create chances for them to finish. “I feel like I’m the type of player that can really feel out the game and know absolutely what it needs me to be,” she says. “Whether that’s getting in the box, trying to help score a goal, or making that final pass to try and assist someone, or starting the build-up play, being a crazy person defending—like, that might be what the game needs of me. And it might be different every time because we’re playing so many different teams.”

As she returns to France this summer, Horan faces the odd reality of being a seven-year veteran of the professional game at the same time she is making her first appearance at a Women’s World Cup. But she’s also aware of how much she has changed since she first showed up in Paris, having matured as both a footballer and as a daughter.

In 2017, Horan called her mom after watching the Greta Gerwig film Lady Bird. In the movie, a rebellious teenage daughter clashes with her mother before coming to recognize that their fights were symbols of love. “She called me from Portland and said, ‘Mom I just saw this movie,’” remembers Linda. “And she started crying and she’s like, ‘I thought of you. All I can say is, “I’m sorry.”’” All those years of fighting have brought Linda and her daughter closer together. “We got to this point where she’s now my best friend,” says Horan. “She stuck around and she didn’t hate me for being a little shit, which is incredible.”

To Linda, the symbolism of her daughter playing in her first World Cup in the country where her professional career began feels providential. “Like this was supposed to be, like this was the path she was supposed to be on,” she says.

But this time around, Horan doesn’t intend to shed any tears. “I just want to go out there and have fun because it’s the love of my life playing this game,” she says. “And I’m playing in a fucking World Cup. Sorry for my language, but that’s how I would put it.”

Andrew Helms is a writer and documentary producer in New York. He produced Back Pass, a podcast on the rise and fall of the first U.S. women’s professional soccer league.

Andrew Helms

The French Connection: Why Lindsey Horan’s Past Represents the USWNT’s Future

The French Connection: Why Lindsey Horan’s Past Represents the USWNT’s Future

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