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When Nobody Was Watching: My Hard-Fought Journey to the Top of the Soccer World
From the celebrated star of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team, an inspiring, uplifting, and candid memoir of how she got there.
“If a player trains when nobody is watching, she might be able to do superhuman things when the entire world is watching. Like scoring a hat trick in the first sixteen minutes of a World Cup final, an eventual 5–2 victory over Japan. Or topping off that hat trick with an astonishing fifty-yard strike from midfield, the greatest goal in U.S. soccer history, a shot so audacious that it's surprising to learn that Lloyd had actually practiced it for years with [James] Galanis on an empty field in New Jersey, far from any crowds.” – Grant Wahl, Sports Illustrated
In 2015, the U.S .Women’s National Soccer Team won its first FIFA championship in sixteen years, culminating in an epic final game that electrified soccer fans around the world. It featured a gutsy, brilliant performance by team captain and midfielder Carli Lloyd, who made history that day, scoring a hat trick—three goals in one game—during the first sixteen minutes.
But there was a time when Carli almost quit the sport. In 2003 she was struggling, her soccer career at a crossroads. Then she found a trusted trainer, James Galanis, who saw in Carli a player with raw talent, skill, and a great dedication to the game. What Carli lacked were fitness, mental toughness, and character. Together they set to work, training day and night, fighting, grinding it out. No one worked harder than Carli. And no one believed in her more than James. Despite all the naysayers, the times she was benched, moments when her self-confidence took a nosedive, she succeeded in becoming one of the best players in the world.
This candid reflection on a remarkable turnaround will take readers inside the women's national team and inside the head of an athlete who willed herself to perform at the highest levels of competition.
“If a player trains when nobody is watching, she might be able to do superhuman things when the entire world is watching. Like scoring a hat trick in the first sixteen minutes of a World Cup final, an eventual 5–2 victory over Japan. Or topping off that hat trick with an astonishing fifty-yard strike from midfield, the greatest goal in U.S. soccer history, a shot so audacious that it's surprising to learn that Lloyd had actually practiced it for years with [James] Galanis on an empty field in New Jersey, far from any crowds.” – Grant Wahl, Sports Illustrated
In 2015, the U.S .Women’s National Soccer Team won its first FIFA championship in sixteen years, culminating in an epic final game that electrified soccer fans around the world. It featured a gutsy, brilliant performance by team captain and midfielder Carli Lloyd, who made history that day, scoring a hat trick—three goals in one game—during the first sixteen minutes.
But there was a time when Carli almost quit the sport. In 2003 she was struggling, her soccer career at a crossroads. Then she found a trusted trainer, James Galanis, who saw in Carli a player with raw talent, skill, and a great dedication to the game. What Carli lacked were fitness, mental toughness, and character. Together they set to work, training day and night, fighting, grinding it out. No one worked harder than Carli. And no one believed in her more than James. Despite all the naysayers, the times she was benched, moments when her self-confidence took a nosedive, she succeeded in becoming one of the best players in the world.
This candid reflection on a remarkable turnaround will take readers inside the women's national team and inside the head of an athlete who willed herself to perform at the highest levels of competition.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published September 26, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 249 reviews
October 28, 2016
A memoir. Written by a woman. About soccer. I’m surprised my local book store didn’t just automatically set it aside for me. This shit is my jam.
If you aren’t a fan of women’s soccer (and if you enjoy sports, you should check it out), you probably hadn’t heard of Carli Lloyd before last summer. She’s been playing for the US Women’s National Team since the early 2000s, but she stepped hard into the spotlight during the World Cup in Canada last year, when she scored three times in the final win over Japan, including a shot basically from mid-field.
Of the memoirs I’ve read recently that involve a co-writer, this one reads the smoothest. I don’t know Ms. Lloyd, and I haven’t seen her interviewed much, but the voice, while a bit stiff, feels genuine. The book follows her journey from player in her New Jersey hometown, through college, and into her professional career. It has much more soccer in it than Abbi Wambach’s memoir from earlier this year, and I loved that. Ms. Lloyd also discusses some of the same incidents that Ms. Wambach did, with a different perspective, which is fascinating for someone like me.
Ms. Lloyd is dedicated as hell, a hard worker, and talented. She says repeatedly she doesn’t like drama, but also says she tells it like it is, and in my experience drama and a lack of desire to choose one’s words carefully almost always go hand in hand. At the same time, I do think Ms. Lloyd is self-aware; she is open about her flaws and how they have impacted her life, especially her relationship with her immediate family (spoiler alert: it’s not a good one).
If you like sports and a bit of an underdog story, I think you’ll like this. But if you don’t enjoy sports, I think there might just be too much technical discussion for this to be a good read.
If you aren’t a fan of women’s soccer (and if you enjoy sports, you should check it out), you probably hadn’t heard of Carli Lloyd before last summer. She’s been playing for the US Women’s National Team since the early 2000s, but she stepped hard into the spotlight during the World Cup in Canada last year, when she scored three times in the final win over Japan, including a shot basically from mid-field.
Of the memoirs I’ve read recently that involve a co-writer, this one reads the smoothest. I don’t know Ms. Lloyd, and I haven’t seen her interviewed much, but the voice, while a bit stiff, feels genuine. The book follows her journey from player in her New Jersey hometown, through college, and into her professional career. It has much more soccer in it than Abbi Wambach’s memoir from earlier this year, and I loved that. Ms. Lloyd also discusses some of the same incidents that Ms. Wambach did, with a different perspective, which is fascinating for someone like me.
Ms. Lloyd is dedicated as hell, a hard worker, and talented. She says repeatedly she doesn’t like drama, but also says she tells it like it is, and in my experience drama and a lack of desire to choose one’s words carefully almost always go hand in hand. At the same time, I do think Ms. Lloyd is self-aware; she is open about her flaws and how they have impacted her life, especially her relationship with her immediate family (spoiler alert: it’s not a good one).
If you like sports and a bit of an underdog story, I think you’ll like this. But if you don’t enjoy sports, I think there might just be too much technical discussion for this to be a good read.
August 1, 2017
It kind of bothered me that this was written in present tense, but I love Carli Lloyd, so it's all good.
"Blank out everything and be the hardest worker, the quickest thinker, the most efficient, most creative and most dangerous player on the field."
"Carli has achieved so much, and she trains as if she's achieved nothing. That is a very rare quality."
"If you keep working at 80 percent, you won't get anywhere... you need to start treating every training session, every game, as if it were a World Cup final. You need to be the hardest-working person out there, every time, no exceptions... You complain about the coach not giving you enough time? You need to give the coach no choice but to give you time."
"When you work toward a goal for this long, you can't even fathom how you might feel once you achieve it. I still cannot fathom it now, and in some ways I am not sure I even want to, because I do not want to stop here. I want to keep getting better and better. I don't want to be satisfied, ever. That may sound grim, but it isn't at all. It is joyful, because the pursuit of progress is joyful. Playing the game I love is joyful. So I keep pushing, keep working."
"Blank out everything and be the hardest worker, the quickest thinker, the most efficient, most creative and most dangerous player on the field."
"Carli has achieved so much, and she trains as if she's achieved nothing. That is a very rare quality."
"If you keep working at 80 percent, you won't get anywhere... you need to start treating every training session, every game, as if it were a World Cup final. You need to be the hardest-working person out there, every time, no exceptions... You complain about the coach not giving you enough time? You need to give the coach no choice but to give you time."
"When you work toward a goal for this long, you can't even fathom how you might feel once you achieve it. I still cannot fathom it now, and in some ways I am not sure I even want to, because I do not want to stop here. I want to keep getting better and better. I don't want to be satisfied, ever. That may sound grim, but it isn't at all. It is joyful, because the pursuit of progress is joyful. Playing the game I love is joyful. So I keep pushing, keep working."
October 2, 2016
I loved this book!! Carli Lloyd is a real as they come. It was so cool to see the inner workings of the USWNT from her perspective. Her single-minded focus on her goals is beyond anything I've ever read about other athletes. It's also interesting to see how her focus initially led to a negative reputation of sorts, when Carly talks about times when she was perceived as being a player who isolated herself from team bonding. I giggled during the parts when she called out a few of the people who have talked trash about her over the years or tried to hurt her. She's a Jersey girl for sure and keeps it real. She also discusses her family issues with humility and tact. Carly makes herself extremely vulnerable in this book in talking about her personal and professional difficulties. I truly admire the courage it took her to write this book and disagree with other reviewers. I thought the writing was quite good. Well done Carli Lloyd!! You are an inspiration!
June 8, 2017
No thank you. Struggled though this as Carli explains only superficially her life in soccer and beyond. Poorly ghostly written, Carli comes off snobby and not a team player. 2 stars because it is about women's athletics and the USA national team, but there are other books that aren't quite as self-centered.
October 25, 2016
Ever since the World Cup last summer, Carli Lloyd has been the face of Women's soccer. I closely follow the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team, so I thought reading this book would be of great interest to me. Carli Lloyd tells her personal story about her family problems and set backs in soccer. I loved reading this autobiography because I can definitely relate to parts of her life. It is pretty cool to know that a huge celebrity had a similar childhood to me. I even found that Carli and I both go to Raystown Lake, Pennsylvania for weekend getaways. She goes boating and swimming there, and my family does the same thing! In short, Carli Lloyd has an amazing story, and I really enjoyed getting to read about it.
November 29, 2020
Great Book.
There’s an outstanding book about a truly outstanding Lady and the US’s top women’s soccer player.
It takes you through her time is a young girl up to her are winning the Olympics for the USA and then on to the World Cup for the USA. It is not an overly sweet book, she tells it like it is which includes some of the toughest situations with teammates, friends, and even her family.
I’m a soccer fan of both men, women and professional so this book really was enjoyable for me.
And I recommend it to everyone.
There’s an outstanding book about a truly outstanding Lady and the US’s top women’s soccer player.
It takes you through her time is a young girl up to her are winning the Olympics for the USA and then on to the World Cup for the USA. It is not an overly sweet book, she tells it like it is which includes some of the toughest situations with teammates, friends, and even her family.
I’m a soccer fan of both men, women and professional so this book really was enjoyable for me.
And I recommend it to everyone.
October 7, 2018
Carli Lloyd is a class act. She is so inspirational and a wonderful role model for young women. She is straight forward when telling her story, it's not sugar coated. I highly recommend this to any fan and yes it can be read to the young fans as well, mine ate it up. I hope her parents do come around and make peace with Carli, life is too short!
February 5, 2017
If only James Galanis had taught Carli how to write...
October 17, 2016
Poorly written and difficult to read, this does nothing to make Lloyd more likable. Given her worship of Galanis, its a good thing she found soccer otherwise she'd be in a cult. The only thing in her life seems to be soccer since there's an apparent lack of any insight into her actual personal life.
June 7, 2017
This was a fine read, but I could have done without a lot of the snark towards other USWNT players. Lloyd comes off as fairly unlikeable, angry at everyone, and a bit immature. You can definitely write an honest book without it being negative, but this book did not do that.
December 16, 2016
Buy this memoir, read it, be inspired by it, and either
a) pass it on to your favorite teenage jock or jockette who can actually read books, or
b) donate it to a local high school library.
Since 1999, I have loved the US Women's National Team, warts & all. These athletes have inspired millions of American girls to grow into strong women, and our nation needs more strong women. They have served as role models, mostly positive, both on and off the pitch. They come from a variety of backgrounds, not all privileged suburban kids with indulgent parents. Beyond our borders, the USWNT's success has inspired other nations to create women's programs that can compete at the highest levels, whereas women's sports had been a mere afterthought.
Thus I am taking the time to devote hundreds of words to reviewing Carli Lloyd's life story, as if it were an important book. Lloyd is not a perfect player, not always the smoothest on the ball, but when she lets loose one of her trademark shots from 30+ yards out, you can feel the impact in the upper deck of the stadium. The same when she makes crunching midfield tackle. She isn't just powerful; she is power personified. Just as importantly, Lloyd has a huge heart, and she feels deeply just how much she and the team mean to all those soccer girls.
Let's get a couple of minor disappointments out of the way before moving on to why this book is a worthy read.
First, as a supporter of the Houston Dash and Dynamo, I find the lack of any mention of the Dash distressing. Well, the jacket flap notes that Carli Lloyd currently plays for the Dash, but she and co-author Wayne Coffey didn't see fit to mention it. Even though it rankles me, I understand why the Dash organization did not rate a shout-out, and the word "Houston" appears just once (as the setting of some qualifying or friendly match, I forget which).
Lloyd transferred to Houston from the Western New York Flash just before the beginning of the 2015 season, when most of her focus was on the Women's World Cup, and if you learn just one thing about Lloyd from her book, it's that she is focused af. Training for the WWC kept Lloyd, Morgan Brian, and Meghan Klingenberg away from the Dash for half the season. Despite her achievements with the club in the other half, Lloyd likely viewed club soccer as a distraction from her real job. Also, while she was winning a world championship, why should she bother to waste any ink on a club that finished 5th out of 9 and didn't make the playoffs?
The second disappointment is that Lloyd's life is not very interesting—at least, as related by Lloyd herself. She doesn't make a good talk-show guest. Unlike Hope Solo, Megan Rapinoe, Ali Krieger, or Alex Morgan, she won't do ESPN The Magazine's Body Issue. She grew up in a working-class town in southern New Jersey, but she did not suffer much privation (because even as recently as the 1980s a family could live comfortably on a working-class income). This year she married the guy with whom she has been almost continuously since high school, golfer Brian Hollins. If it weren't for the as-yet-unresolved rift with her family, apart from the on-field recollections there would be no drama at all. That's perfectly fine for Lloyd, who tells us that she hates drama and has constructed her life to minimize it.
I got the sense multiple times that there were details left out, mostly in the service of keeping the book PG. Compare this to Solo's memoir Solo—nah, you can't. Hope Solo's life has been nothing but drama, and Solo did not skimp on f-bombs. In life outside the lines, Solo has overcome a lot more than Lloyd; sometimes the overcoming hasn't been pretty, and sometimes there were obstacles of her own making.
Thirdly, Lloyd certainly could have devoted more than just a throwaway half-paragraph to her role in pursuing equal compensation for the women's and men's teams. Even though the suit was quickly dismissed and forgotten, it was an important statement. Yes, it's a fact that the revenue of the men's team dwarfs that of the women, because our sporting and media infrastructures have a centuries-old bias toward men's sports; but, as we say in Texas, that don't make it right. The women work just as hard, the USWNT plays more competitive and friendly matches per year, and I believe that paying them equally would go a long way toward increasing ticket sales for the USWNT and the National Women's Soccer League.
So what's to like in this slim memoir? Yeah, as jock memoirs go, it's pretty damn jock-centric, with detailed re-livings of important matches. But those scenes are remarkably well written. Lloyd is smart enough that not all the clever phrasings can be attributed to co-author Coffey. I imagine that they watched a ton of video together from various Olympic, World Cup, Algarve Cup, and international friendly matches in the process of producing the book, with Lloyd reconstructing exactly what happened on the field and combining that with what was going through her incredibly agile mind.
I'll freely admit that I was on the verge of tears in the chapter about the 2015 World Cup final against Japan. It brought back in living color how incredibly the US team had progressed from three underwhelming performances in the group stage to improving by quantum jumps in each elimination match, and finally turning in its most dominating performance ever while the Japanese side had its only bad match of the tournament.
We also meet the towering figure of James Galanis, who has served as Lloyd's personal trainer for 14 years. He is her Mr. Miyagi. He insisted from the beginning that he would take her on only if she was 100% committed to improving her fitness and her game, willing and able to drop everything to train. Also, he hasn't asked for a single dime for his trouble: Just being part of the creation of Carli the Awesome has been reward enough.
Lloyd's obsession with training and self-improvement, even when she could be enjoying life on top of the soccer world, results from some early disappointments of her own. She discovered the hard way that just having the skills was never enough, and that while some of her teammates in youth, college, and U21 soccer could give their all and be effective for 90 or 120 minutes without such intense training, she could not. So, as she acknowledges, she has had to work her ass off.
The fact that she has maintained this superhuman determination for so many years is an inspiration, but also a bit intimidating. That teenage jock or jockette to whom you give a copy of When Nobody Was Watching needs to know what it takes, not just to be the best but to become the best and remain the best. If they aspire to be a professional athlete—regardless of their preferred sport or their skill—ask them if they have the same level of commitment as Ms. Lloyd.
a) pass it on to your favorite teenage jock or jockette who can actually read books, or
b) donate it to a local high school library.
Since 1999, I have loved the US Women's National Team, warts & all. These athletes have inspired millions of American girls to grow into strong women, and our nation needs more strong women. They have served as role models, mostly positive, both on and off the pitch. They come from a variety of backgrounds, not all privileged suburban kids with indulgent parents. Beyond our borders, the USWNT's success has inspired other nations to create women's programs that can compete at the highest levels, whereas women's sports had been a mere afterthought.
Thus I am taking the time to devote hundreds of words to reviewing Carli Lloyd's life story, as if it were an important book. Lloyd is not a perfect player, not always the smoothest on the ball, but when she lets loose one of her trademark shots from 30+ yards out, you can feel the impact in the upper deck of the stadium. The same when she makes crunching midfield tackle. She isn't just powerful; she is power personified. Just as importantly, Lloyd has a huge heart, and she feels deeply just how much she and the team mean to all those soccer girls.
Let's get a couple of minor disappointments out of the way before moving on to why this book is a worthy read.
First, as a supporter of the Houston Dash and Dynamo, I find the lack of any mention of the Dash distressing. Well, the jacket flap notes that Carli Lloyd currently plays for the Dash, but she and co-author Wayne Coffey didn't see fit to mention it. Even though it rankles me, I understand why the Dash organization did not rate a shout-out, and the word "Houston" appears just once (as the setting of some qualifying or friendly match, I forget which).
Lloyd transferred to Houston from the Western New York Flash just before the beginning of the 2015 season, when most of her focus was on the Women's World Cup, and if you learn just one thing about Lloyd from her book, it's that she is focused af. Training for the WWC kept Lloyd, Morgan Brian, and Meghan Klingenberg away from the Dash for half the season. Despite her achievements with the club in the other half, Lloyd likely viewed club soccer as a distraction from her real job. Also, while she was winning a world championship, why should she bother to waste any ink on a club that finished 5th out of 9 and didn't make the playoffs?
The second disappointment is that Lloyd's life is not very interesting—at least, as related by Lloyd herself. She doesn't make a good talk-show guest. Unlike Hope Solo, Megan Rapinoe, Ali Krieger, or Alex Morgan, she won't do ESPN The Magazine's Body Issue. She grew up in a working-class town in southern New Jersey, but she did not suffer much privation (because even as recently as the 1980s a family could live comfortably on a working-class income). This year she married the guy with whom she has been almost continuously since high school, golfer Brian Hollins. If it weren't for the as-yet-unresolved rift with her family, apart from the on-field recollections there would be no drama at all. That's perfectly fine for Lloyd, who tells us that she hates drama and has constructed her life to minimize it.
I got the sense multiple times that there were details left out, mostly in the service of keeping the book PG. Compare this to Solo's memoir Solo—nah, you can't. Hope Solo's life has been nothing but drama, and Solo did not skimp on f-bombs. In life outside the lines, Solo has overcome a lot more than Lloyd; sometimes the overcoming hasn't been pretty, and sometimes there were obstacles of her own making.
Thirdly, Lloyd certainly could have devoted more than just a throwaway half-paragraph to her role in pursuing equal compensation for the women's and men's teams. Even though the suit was quickly dismissed and forgotten, it was an important statement. Yes, it's a fact that the revenue of the men's team dwarfs that of the women, because our sporting and media infrastructures have a centuries-old bias toward men's sports; but, as we say in Texas, that don't make it right. The women work just as hard, the USWNT plays more competitive and friendly matches per year, and I believe that paying them equally would go a long way toward increasing ticket sales for the USWNT and the National Women's Soccer League.
So what's to like in this slim memoir? Yeah, as jock memoirs go, it's pretty damn jock-centric, with detailed re-livings of important matches. But those scenes are remarkably well written. Lloyd is smart enough that not all the clever phrasings can be attributed to co-author Coffey. I imagine that they watched a ton of video together from various Olympic, World Cup, Algarve Cup, and international friendly matches in the process of producing the book, with Lloyd reconstructing exactly what happened on the field and combining that with what was going through her incredibly agile mind.
I'll freely admit that I was on the verge of tears in the chapter about the 2015 World Cup final against Japan. It brought back in living color how incredibly the US team had progressed from three underwhelming performances in the group stage to improving by quantum jumps in each elimination match, and finally turning in its most dominating performance ever while the Japanese side had its only bad match of the tournament.
We also meet the towering figure of James Galanis, who has served as Lloyd's personal trainer for 14 years. He is her Mr. Miyagi. He insisted from the beginning that he would take her on only if she was 100% committed to improving her fitness and her game, willing and able to drop everything to train. Also, he hasn't asked for a single dime for his trouble: Just being part of the creation of Carli the Awesome has been reward enough.
Lloyd's obsession with training and self-improvement, even when she could be enjoying life on top of the soccer world, results from some early disappointments of her own. She discovered the hard way that just having the skills was never enough, and that while some of her teammates in youth, college, and U21 soccer could give their all and be effective for 90 or 120 minutes without such intense training, she could not. So, as she acknowledges, she has had to work her ass off.
The fact that she has maintained this superhuman determination for so many years is an inspiration, but also a bit intimidating. That teenage jock or jockette to whom you give a copy of When Nobody Was Watching needs to know what it takes, not just to be the best but to become the best and remain the best. If they aspire to be a professional athlete—regardless of their preferred sport or their skill—ask them if they have the same level of commitment as Ms. Lloyd.
December 1, 2020
Conflicted about this book. Having recently read Megan Rapinoe’s memoir, I wanted this one to be as vibrant and lively. But Carli is different. Where Rapinoe is easy going and an extrovert, Carli keeps to herself, and is single-minded.
She is extremely focused on soccer to the point where the only input I get from her life is her loving partner who takes the backstage in her life, and the struggle and falling out between her and her parents.
I get it. She’s a national player; she’s worked hard and narrated the path of her fails and successes. The conflicts on the field, with teammates and coaches, and the inner struggle within herself. It was interesting, and I respect Lloyd so much as a player, but I guess I expected something else from her book.
She is extremely focused on soccer to the point where the only input I get from her life is her loving partner who takes the backstage in her life, and the struggle and falling out between her and her parents.
I get it. She’s a national player; she’s worked hard and narrated the path of her fails and successes. The conflicts on the field, with teammates and coaches, and the inner struggle within herself. It was interesting, and I respect Lloyd so much as a player, but I guess I expected something else from her book.
December 26, 2017
I hope people looking to decide if they want to read this book don't see my two star rating and think I didn't enjoy it (according to the Goodreads descriptions, two stars means "it was ok" not "this was a bad book"!), but I fear this book has many noncritical followers (as evidenced from some of the reviews I saw). Overall, this was a great (and real!) story of triumph, dedication, and authenticity that ought to encourage and uplift anyone (male or female, involved in sports or not). It is always interesting to see the inner workings of a major social entitity (in this case the US Women's National Team), and who doesn't want to hear about the drama that will inevitably plague any group of people (espcially, as Lloyd points out, females who are ultra-competitive) who eat, sleep, train, travel, and work together? On the one hand, no one should be surprised that the USWNT is influenced (and I use this term vaguely) by political shenannigans and that the veterans often offer icy shoulders to any newcomers who (in addition to trying to earn a spot on the team) are ultimately attempting to make the team better and more competitive on an international scale. These women are, at the end of the day, simply women (albeit highly trained competitors) who want to be successful and often will "do anything" (Lloyd's words) to "make it happen." I only wish she had gone into more detail about what some of those "things" were!
Things that were lacking for me:
-VOICE! I get that Carli was being herself, and that's totally cool, but maybe her editor/coauthor should have taken up the slack and been a bit more involved to make the writing more interesting! I believe that Lloyd was as true to the real events as she could remember/reconstruct, but I often felt like I was just reading her soccer journal (that she mentions she kept multiple times) instead of a book intended for mass publication.
-Although I liked the soccer lingo and the descriptions of major parts of important games that Lloyd felt like defined turning points in her career, I feel like the soccer colloquialisms (and sometimes ensuing definitions) were a little offputting for anyone who does not have a high soccer IQ. Her book could have been more marketable to and easier to follow for non-soccer specific fans if she had been able to simply describe her journey and her emotional investment in the game with broader strokes. As a soccer referee, I was quite distracted when she used the wrong terminology to describe a referee's decision to issue a yellow card instead of a red card! I don't mind that she explained the situation, but I would have preferred she stick to describing her side of the game if she doesn't know the proper phrasing for the officiating crew.
-Lloyd explicitly states that she hates to be involved in drama, but I think she missed an opportunity to fill a niche in the women's sports world by giving more details about the inner workings of US Soccer in general (not just the USWNT). Maybe she gave us what she knew, though. She does state that she was often oblivious to what was happening outside of her immediate circle of influence (which usually consisteted of just her and her trainer). She alludes to a scandal with Hope Solo, but gives no details. She mentions (several times) about "rumblings" from the team about certain coaching decisions, but she never says what the rumblings are about or who is doing the rumbling! Tell me more, Carli!
Finally, I really just can't understand what was going on with her parents and siblings! Here are the facts: the family was uber-supportive and was willing to sacrifice money, time, and their own dreams to give Lloyd the time to train and compete at the highest levels possible throughout her formative years. At some point in time Lloyd hired and immediately reversed her decision to hire a relative in the family to be her agent (even though he knew nothing of the sports world). Ever since that decision (according to Lloyd) the family became more and more withdrawn, refusing to come to her games, telling her she had "changed her style" as a player and was no longer "playing her game" (possibly because she was on a team... and the team wanted to play a different style...and she was adapting like a coachable player. Come on, dad...really?!?), and ultimately kicking her out of the house! When Lloyd finally wins the world cup, her parents to not call or visit to congratualate her. They send a card several weeks later. By the time the book was written she had not seen them in years. Lloyd never really explores this dynamic much except to say that she is grateful for everything her parents have done for her, that she could never be where she was without them, that she knows she had some "role to play" in the tension that exists in the family, and that she is more than willing to set their differences aside to come together as a family again. She does explain the one time she almost had a real conversation with them about what had happened. Both sides apologized and it seemed things would move forward more cordially, but they never do! Also, how did Brian (the future husband, and only boyfriend she ever had) cope with her being gone all the time? How did he feel? What was his perspective?
Things that were lacking for me:
-VOICE! I get that Carli was being herself, and that's totally cool, but maybe her editor/coauthor should have taken up the slack and been a bit more involved to make the writing more interesting! I believe that Lloyd was as true to the real events as she could remember/reconstruct, but I often felt like I was just reading her soccer journal (that she mentions she kept multiple times) instead of a book intended for mass publication.
-Although I liked the soccer lingo and the descriptions of major parts of important games that Lloyd felt like defined turning points in her career, I feel like the soccer colloquialisms (and sometimes ensuing definitions) were a little offputting for anyone who does not have a high soccer IQ. Her book could have been more marketable to and easier to follow for non-soccer specific fans if she had been able to simply describe her journey and her emotional investment in the game with broader strokes. As a soccer referee, I was quite distracted when she used the wrong terminology to describe a referee's decision to issue a yellow card instead of a red card! I don't mind that she explained the situation, but I would have preferred she stick to describing her side of the game if she doesn't know the proper phrasing for the officiating crew.
-Lloyd explicitly states that she hates to be involved in drama, but I think she missed an opportunity to fill a niche in the women's sports world by giving more details about the inner workings of US Soccer in general (not just the USWNT). Maybe she gave us what she knew, though. She does state that she was often oblivious to what was happening outside of her immediate circle of influence (which usually consisteted of just her and her trainer). She alludes to a scandal with Hope Solo, but gives no details. She mentions (several times) about "rumblings" from the team about certain coaching decisions, but she never says what the rumblings are about or who is doing the rumbling! Tell me more, Carli!
Finally, I really just can't understand what was going on with her parents and siblings! Here are the facts: the family was uber-supportive and was willing to sacrifice money, time, and their own dreams to give Lloyd the time to train and compete at the highest levels possible throughout her formative years. At some point in time Lloyd hired and immediately reversed her decision to hire a relative in the family to be her agent (even though he knew nothing of the sports world). Ever since that decision (according to Lloyd) the family became more and more withdrawn, refusing to come to her games, telling her she had "changed her style" as a player and was no longer "playing her game" (possibly because she was on a team... and the team wanted to play a different style...and she was adapting like a coachable player. Come on, dad...really?!?), and ultimately kicking her out of the house! When Lloyd finally wins the world cup, her parents to not call or visit to congratualate her. They send a card several weeks later. By the time the book was written she had not seen them in years. Lloyd never really explores this dynamic much except to say that she is grateful for everything her parents have done for her, that she could never be where she was without them, that she knows she had some "role to play" in the tension that exists in the family, and that she is more than willing to set their differences aside to come together as a family again. She does explain the one time she almost had a real conversation with them about what had happened. Both sides apologized and it seemed things would move forward more cordially, but they never do! Also, how did Brian (the future husband, and only boyfriend she ever had) cope with her being gone all the time? How did he feel? What was his perspective?
February 2, 2021
Great book to read during pandemic times and the importance of staying MENTALLY TOUGH and staying relentless in pursuit of goals. Carli Lloyd is a person of few words who let her work ethic do the talking. She didn’t bad mouth other players or enter into “the drama”. I have tremendous respect for her as a woman and as an athlete.
May 12, 2021
I love women’s soccer and it was great to hear more about Carli Lloyd’s life. I think she is a great role model. There were a lot of details about soccer matches which was fine for me, but may be more challenging for a non-soccer player.
June 12, 2020
you don't have to like soccer to like this book, it was very inspirational and pushed me to work harder
November 12, 2017
When author and professional soccer player, Carli Lloyd when nobody is watching, she can change the world when everyone is watching. For instance, scoring a hat-trick in the World Cup final or writing a world class memoir, When Nobody is Watching. The memoir follows the career of a two-time Olympic gold medalist and a World Cup champion. This inspiring and uplifting story shares the battle Lloyd faces to get to the top.
As a member of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, she assisted the team in bringing home the World Cup title in 2015; the first in 16 years. In the same match, Carli Lloyd made history scoring three goals in the first sixteen minutes of the championship game. From over 50 yards away, Carli made scoring a goal in the World Cup final look simple. Little do people know the struggle she faced to get to this point and earn the title. From the results of the match, it may seem like everything comes easily for Lloyd, but the rest of her soccer career would say differently. In 2003 Carli Lloyd planned on hanging up her cleats and to never touch a soccer ball again. Carli was cut from the U-21 national team because according to the coach she was not a “national team player.” Following the news she called her parents sobbing and said, “I don’t know if I want to keep doing this national team thing. It’s not going anywhere... The coach just finished telling me I’m not at that level” (pp. 36). Lloyd had no clue whether her career would continue until she met James Galanis, her trusted trainer to this day. James saw talent in Carli that no one else did and was willing to shape Carli into a tough, hardworking and dedicated player. If Carli was willing to make sacrifices so was James; their schedule included training at night, in the snow or even on holidays when everyone else was resting. Carli was asked to rejoin the national team, and due to James training she was a different player. This was just the beginning of how James influenced her career throughout the book.
The book ends on a positive note as Carli is ready to tackle the final years in her career. Lloyd does not only share the teams she has made and the awards won. When Nobody is Watching shows the insight of what it takes to become a professional athlete and the hardships that go along with it. The reader is able to connect to Carli’s problems and is encouraged to face theirs. I was able to look past the flaws of a first time author because I was inspired on and off the field due to this memoir.
Following the 2015 World Cup Carli Lloyd gained a large fandom, but I have a feeling she is going to secure even more fans following the release of When Nobody is Watching. I encourage young athletes to read this novel immediately for inspiration and insight on how to be the best.
As a member of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, she assisted the team in bringing home the World Cup title in 2015; the first in 16 years. In the same match, Carli Lloyd made history scoring three goals in the first sixteen minutes of the championship game. From over 50 yards away, Carli made scoring a goal in the World Cup final look simple. Little do people know the struggle she faced to get to this point and earn the title. From the results of the match, it may seem like everything comes easily for Lloyd, but the rest of her soccer career would say differently. In 2003 Carli Lloyd planned on hanging up her cleats and to never touch a soccer ball again. Carli was cut from the U-21 national team because according to the coach she was not a “national team player.” Following the news she called her parents sobbing and said, “I don’t know if I want to keep doing this national team thing. It’s not going anywhere... The coach just finished telling me I’m not at that level” (pp. 36). Lloyd had no clue whether her career would continue until she met James Galanis, her trusted trainer to this day. James saw talent in Carli that no one else did and was willing to shape Carli into a tough, hardworking and dedicated player. If Carli was willing to make sacrifices so was James; their schedule included training at night, in the snow or even on holidays when everyone else was resting. Carli was asked to rejoin the national team, and due to James training she was a different player. This was just the beginning of how James influenced her career throughout the book.
The book ends on a positive note as Carli is ready to tackle the final years in her career. Lloyd does not only share the teams she has made and the awards won. When Nobody is Watching shows the insight of what it takes to become a professional athlete and the hardships that go along with it. The reader is able to connect to Carli’s problems and is encouraged to face theirs. I was able to look past the flaws of a first time author because I was inspired on and off the field due to this memoir.
Following the 2015 World Cup Carli Lloyd gained a large fandom, but I have a feeling she is going to secure even more fans following the release of When Nobody is Watching. I encourage young athletes to read this novel immediately for inspiration and insight on how to be the best.
April 6, 2017
Book club choice for this month. I like soccer. I really do. While I spend very little time watching sports of any sort on television, I have been known to watch a major soccer match-up. And little kids' soccer has been a staple of many Saturdays for years now. Carli Lloyd is a STAR, unquestionably, but the real star of this autobiography is her coach/trainer James Galanis. If every aspiring athlete had someone alongside them like Galanis...well, there would be more interest in lifelong sports and an explosion of superstars. I am not discounting Carli's talents and drive, but Galanis really "got" her, both as she was and as she could be. For an autobiography, I found this book pretty honest and it did let this reader get to know Carli Lloyd, foibles and all. It also pointed out that I need to learn the soccer jargon; many terms were unfamiliar to me and there wasn't any handy glossary (most readers probably aren't as ignorant as I am). My primary gripe about the book was that too often I felt I could see the outline that a chapter was built on. Oh, and now watching the 7-year-olds practice, I wish they were teaching them more skills and making them drill. It's still kids chasing a ball around for an hour.
Read
March 30, 2017The autobiography When Nobody Was Watching, is about how determination and hard work will pay off in the end. The author, Carli Lloyd, writes about her hard fought journey to make her way to the top of the soccer world. Carli starts her soccer career as a young girl playing pickup in New Jersey and only being coached by her dad. On her way to making women's national team she encounters numerous problems with coaches who doubted her, and her family who she no longer speaks to. I enjoyed this book because I also play soccer. I realized even the best players doubt themselves and do not always have it as easy as we all think. She was told she would never have a chance at making the women's national team, but fast forward to 2016, and she is the FIFA player of the year. She taught me that if you set your mind to a goal, you can achieve it if you work hard enough. She is a perfect role model for not only me, but all the women’s soccer players all around the world, and she will forever leave a mark on the game of women’s soccer.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 15, 2017
This book was Really good. I loved it to the point where I couldn’t put it down. I gave it 5 stars because it’s a great book for people whether they like soccer or not. Sometimes when people write biographies about sports they only appeal to people who like the Sport. Carli Lloyd did a great Job making it interesting for people who don’t play soccer. She also did a great job explaining positions and what they mean so that these people can understand what she is saying. When Carli Lloyd was cut from the U21 team, I was also upset with her. That’s how well written it was. I would definitely recommend this book to someone who likes Soccer and older readers. (this is the adult version. She also adapted it to a kids version called “All Heads”.)
December 19, 2018
I'm really enjoying this book. I read Carli Lloyd's other book, All Heart, which is very similar. You learn the rocky journey it is to be a professional athlete. You learn that everyone goes through adversity and life can be hard for everyone, even famous people. I highly recommend this book to people who enjoy autobiographies and learning about the journey to being a professional athlete. :)
August 17, 2023
While Carli Lloyd was vague in terms of her personal life, the extreme detail that she wrote of her rise to an all star was well worth it. The hardships she faced made the ending all the more rewarding as she was finally able to showcase her talent. Overall the book is well written with great details that round out the character of the soccer star
March 20, 2019
I followed the USMNT pretty closely -- but I tend to only hear about the drama with the USWMNT it was nice to listen to this story that cut through the drama and its honest so that's always refreshing.
October 5, 2016
I love reading about female athletes that I follow, especially on the US Women's National Team. So much fun.
December 20, 2016
a well written biography that Lloyd is very open about her soccer and life. It definitely should be a read for anyone starting out in a career (soccer, sports, business, life) about working hard.
November 5, 2019
This book is very interesting. I’ve been one of her fans for a long time. It was interesting to read about her life and the work it took to get to where she is now.
January 2, 2021
I wrapped up 2020 reading this one. I’ve been on a memoir/autobiography kick lately and received this one as a Christmas gift. I’ve always loved soccer, from playing growing up, to refereeing the game, to watching the US Women’s National Team compete in the Olympics and World Cup every few years. I was especially interested in reading Carli Lloyd’s story, as she grew up on New Jersey and worked her ass off to be a professional soccer player. Being a Jersey girl myself, I recognized many places and names of people she spoke about.
What I respected most was her vulnerability and willingness to open up about her family drama. She had a falling out with her family, when she chose to select a sports lawyer and not a family member to represent her and her endorsements. This caused a riff in the family, as she began taking ownership of her own professional career. Carli also opens up about the dynamics of the national team, and how each coach and player influenced her game. I also respected her dedication, and how time and time again Carli chose her profession over everything. I really enjoyed this one!
What I respected most was her vulnerability and willingness to open up about her family drama. She had a falling out with her family, when she chose to select a sports lawyer and not a family member to represent her and her endorsements. This caused a riff in the family, as she began taking ownership of her own professional career. Carli also opens up about the dynamics of the national team, and how each coach and player influenced her game. I also respected her dedication, and how time and time again Carli chose her profession over everything. I really enjoyed this one!
August 17, 2020
She's a perfectionist and a hustler. I love the women's soccer team and 2014/2018 world cup teams. Carli is just a hard working, kick ass hustler. She will out run, out write, out practice, out speak, whatever it is she's going to put her mind to it and be the best.
April 14, 2020
Cuando alguien te diga que no puedes o no eres lo suficiente bueno para realizar tus sueños, es momento de leer esta historia de vida, de una de las mejores mediocampistas que ha tenido la selección de estados unidos.
Tu misión en la vida es "Empty The Tank" y callar bocas.
My Favorit Soccer Player!
Tu misión en la vida es "Empty The Tank" y callar bocas.
My Favorit Soccer Player!
November 19, 2023
The Outlier
INTRODUCTION
Carli Lloyd's 2017 Memoir, When Nobody was Watching: Hard-Fought Journey to the Top of the Soccer World is a self-deprecating account of how the United States Women's National Team's (USWNT) superstar reached the height of her career in the 2015 World Cup when she won the Gold Medal for herself and country. Carli is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, twice FIFA Women's World Cup champion, twice FIFA Player of the Year, and a four-time Olympian. These and other accomplishments indicate that she is peerless among American soccer players. Yet, why is it that while objective measures show that Lloyd is supreme among women football players, she does not receive her due acclaim, or if she does, only grudgingly?" Lloyd answered that question this way:
[When] I came into the U.S. Soccer scene, I wasn't somebody that was necessarily being groomed to be the star of the team nor do I think U.S. Soccer really wanted me to be the star . . . I just think U.S. Soccer, they like people that maybe just conform to the way that they want someone to represent them [Carli's Complaint] .
By "U.S. Soccer," Lloyd refers to the American Soccer Federation, her coaches, their staff, her teammates, the media, corporate sponsors, and the path girls and women follow to become professional soccer players. This review argues that one instrument in producing a particular type of professional footballer is a filtering process called "Pay-to-Play." This early process of developing American girls into professional footballers tended to select privileged WASP and Catholic girls as future products and deselect those who did not fit that mold. So far, the resultant product has been immensely successful with "America's Team" winning four women's World Cups. That is until the American National Team began losing circa 2020.
PAY-TO-PLAY
Pay-to-Play is the practice of parents funding their children to participate in football. The cost of joining a top-tier under-13 team with a soccer organization in 2023 is $3000- $4000/year. This cost does not include hotels for out-of-state tournaments, gas driving to and from practices, and games at least four times a week. Furthermore, this pay-to-play element resulted in upper-middle-class parents with high cultural capital sending their daughters to elite white colleges regarded as top-tier soccer schools. It was not by chance that the starters of the 2019 World Cup Team consisted of nine out of eleven who went to UCLA, North Carolina, Stanford, and the University of Santa Clara.
Pedigreed players like them are archetypes (or clichés) of the American female professional footballer that the Pay-to-Play system produced. [America's Team] .
However, for outliers like Carli Lloyd and others, Pay-to-Play was a formidable barrier to their realizing their professional football ambitions.
THAT JERSEY GIRL
Carli Anne Lloyd was born and raised in the New Jersey town of Delran, which ran along the Delaware River, a "small blue-collar community . . . that stretches along U.S. Route 130, a busy run of a road with an abundance of diners, car lots and chain restaurants, long on neon and short on charm" (p 11). Carli overcame the obstacle of the Pay-to-Play system to advance in soccer through her father, who offset her training expenses by helping establish a local soccer team, the Delran Dynamites, of which Her father was the assistant coach. The young football daughter was the star on the team when the coach of a more prestigious local club, the Medford Strikers, recruited her. With the Strikers, she excelled as a midfielder, attracting state soccer Powers-to-Be's attention, and earned from her teammates the nickname of PITA, an acronym for "pain in the ass."
At fourteen, Carli made the New Jersey Olympic Development program. She gained the attention of Rutgers, New Jersey's flagship blue-collar University, which she attended through a Title IX scholarship. While playing for Rutgers, Lloyd joined a national Under-21 football camp, another which "was loaded with big-time players as Aly Wagner [North Carolina], Nandi Price [UCLA], and Cat Whitehill [Santa Clara]" (p 33).
As could be predicted, Carli was not part of the U-21 team's preppie clique. Her few friends throughout her career included Hope Solo, raised by a single mother and mentored by her Vietnam war veteran father, who the police once arrested for child kidnapping; mixed-race Sharon Boxx, with a black father and a single white mother; and an anomaly, Heather Mitts, a Catholic preppie from Cincinnati, Ohio. Carli first met Heather when the two were classmates at James Galanis' Univeral Soccer Academy (USA).
THE ZEN MASTER
While playing for Rutgers, Carli's ambitious father met James Galanis in a Delran parking lot on a grey rainy day. He asked the Pay-to-Play training center owner if he would consider coaching his daughter, hoping to defray expenses with a footballer service exchange. Galanis said Carli should give him a call. While her father was keen on Galanis, Carli was ambivalent. She thought, Why should I work with a trainer who is not working anywhere near the national level, no matter how good he is? (p 40).
However, Carli decides to call the mysterious trainer while on vacation from Rutgers. They have a brief interview, and Galanis says he will train her at no cost if she wants because he believes in her as a future football great. Carli accepts Galanis' offer. The Zen Master Galanis will teach the acolyte Carli the art of being a killer and ruthless assassin in the pitch. However, she must sacrifice everything: friends, father, and family, to achieve this aim. Carli agrees to these terms.
James Galanis is a second-generation Greek American with a heavy Aussie accent whose classmates bullied him in the Jersey public schools. His teachers thought that he was a slow learner. Hateful of school, James dropped out and found refuge by reading library books on soccer and playing street football alone in an alley near his house.
At sixteen, James dropped out of school and joined a karate club, where he quickly earned a black belt, and played for an adult local soccer club, where he got paid per game. James honed his soccer skills further when he visited his parents' Greek birthplace, the Island of Poros, where he met a college student touring Greece—the two married. Afterward, the couple split their time between New Jersey and Australia, where James played professional football, taught karate, and acquired his thick Aussie accent. In 2000, he and his wife, Coleen, decided to settle full-time in America and open a soccer school, the Universal Soccer Academy (USA).
Carli's training program focused on three aspects of the USA's Five Pillar Program: 1) physicality, mental toughness, and character. Under James' training, Carli soon became a deadly assassin on the pitch. Her coaches put up with her because they knew she was good, more than good, the ultimate "badass," as her teammates begrudgingly acknowledged behind her back. The coach who made the best of Carli when the Jersey girl served two masters, James, and her coach, was the legendary Jill Ellis.
A brilliant Brit, Jill Ellis won back-to-back World Cups in 2019 and 2015, the year Lloyd sorely tested Ellis' people skills. Jill also had to contend with another equally strong but different personality, Mega Rapinoe, who had been fomenting a Woke uprising for LBGTQ rights and social justice. Nevertheless, Ellis' handling of Carli Lloyd was Machiavellian. In 2015, she appeased Lloyd's disruptive individualism and manipulated her to lead the National Team to Gold. In 2019, she cooly benched her star and reconstructed the pliable player to fit her coaching needs and won the World Cup back-to-back. In the context of Pay-to-Play, the 2019 World Cup team represents the ultimate triumph of the American upper-crust women and girls who were the system's products. Carli Lloyd was the exception that proved the rule.
However, an unexpected American loss in the 2021 women's Olympics raised the question of whether the American National team was on the decline or merely experiencing temporary setbacks. More defeats and disappointing performances put U.S. Soccer and others, like football's heavy investors, in panic mode. Carli Lloyd blamed the National Team's defeats and disappointments on "toxicity," an attribute she never precisely defined.
In 2021, Carli Anne Lloyd resigned from the National Team because, she said, of this toxicity. She also abruptly left her guru trainer, Galanis, reconciled with her father and family, and launched a new career as a media personality with CBS. When Lloyd separated from her guru trainer, Galanis, she said it was the happiest day of her life.
JERSEY GIRL ON CBS
As above, CBS asked Carli to be part of a new football venue, "Kickin' It."
Carli Lloyd sits on a couch on a CBS studio set. She is wearing a minimalist light green pantsuit. Cosmetologists have expertly done her up to look like she was not wearing makeup. Carli appears tense in her new incarnation as a sports commentator.
Among the many soccer topics discussed on the show, Carli claimed to have predicted that the 2023 National soccer team would lose the World Cup that year. Post hoc, the Netherlands had defeated the Americans in the group stages, and the much-touted American team limped into the Sweet Sixteen elimination stage only to be beaten by the Swedes. In that game, fabled veteran Megan Rapinoe, rising suburban star Sophia Smith, and fellow erstwhile Stanford veteran Kelly O'Hara missed their penalty kicks after a zero-zero draw, giving the match to the Swedes. No American World Cup team had been knocked out of the tournament that early. Lloyd blamed the poor showing again on toxicity, adding that the young players should realize that their BMWs, Rolex watches, and Gucci shoes come from winning, not vice versa.
Carli Lloyd, former PITA, and later GOAT, says she always tries to speak the truth and was true to herself when she took U.S. Soccer by storm, even though her coaches and teammates doubted, resented, disparaged, patronized, or feared her. The ugly duckling turned into a soaring eagle. Will she still have that sense of self in her new incarnation as a media personality? Only time will tell.
In her 2017 memoir, Lloyd concluded this about her mentor/guru, James Galanis:
He saved my career, believed me when no one else did . . . It took me thirteen years . . . [with him] . . . to realize that I could become the best player in the World. . . I can try to thank you for all you've done for me as a player and a person, but words could never be enough. I guess they'll have to do, though, won't they mate? (p 232)
Carli made that glowing testimonial before she had implied that Galanis was a messianic cult figure who had brainwashed her the thirteen years when Galanis was her private trainer.
Online Alert: Goodreads is telling me that this review is too long, so I will conclude by asking a pressing question: Who will win the Women's Football Olympics in Paris in 2024? FIFA, the international football federation, ranked the top four teams in 2020 1) U.S.A. 2) Germany, 3) France, 4) Sweden. As of August 2023, after Spain's transcendental World Cup win, they are 1) Sweden 2) Spain, 3) U.S.A., 4) England. Since suspiciously racist England is falling as fast as are the goody-two-shoes Germans and the Taylor Swift Americans, I predict the French, a truly multi-ethnic squad, will win the Gold. The elegant Spaniards, who seem to thrive under another kind of toxicity, will win the Silver, and the queer Swedes, with their corny country team spirit, the Bronze.
Assuming that CBS has not fired Carli Lloyd, she can give her outlier perspective on why the Americans were losers again. This time, Carli can pontificate from an establishment's neo-liberal platform. All bets are off, however, if America's Black Princesses, the subject of my next football review, come through and stand up as U.S. Soccer's real Americans and Make America Great Again (MAGA).
Michael Tang is working on his second novel, Samsara in Mongolia: The Fabulous Adventures of two ex-Peace Corps Girls in Buddha-Land.
INTRODUCTION
Carli Lloyd's 2017 Memoir, When Nobody was Watching: Hard-Fought Journey to the Top of the Soccer World is a self-deprecating account of how the United States Women's National Team's (USWNT) superstar reached the height of her career in the 2015 World Cup when she won the Gold Medal for herself and country. Carli is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, twice FIFA Women's World Cup champion, twice FIFA Player of the Year, and a four-time Olympian. These and other accomplishments indicate that she is peerless among American soccer players. Yet, why is it that while objective measures show that Lloyd is supreme among women football players, she does not receive her due acclaim, or if she does, only grudgingly?" Lloyd answered that question this way:
[When] I came into the U.S. Soccer scene, I wasn't somebody that was necessarily being groomed to be the star of the team nor do I think U.S. Soccer really wanted me to be the star . . . I just think U.S. Soccer, they like people that maybe just conform to the way that they want someone to represent them [Carli's Complaint] .
By "U.S. Soccer," Lloyd refers to the American Soccer Federation, her coaches, their staff, her teammates, the media, corporate sponsors, and the path girls and women follow to become professional soccer players. This review argues that one instrument in producing a particular type of professional footballer is a filtering process called "Pay-to-Play." This early process of developing American girls into professional footballers tended to select privileged WASP and Catholic girls as future products and deselect those who did not fit that mold. So far, the resultant product has been immensely successful with "America's Team" winning four women's World Cups. That is until the American National Team began losing circa 2020.
PAY-TO-PLAY
Pay-to-Play is the practice of parents funding their children to participate in football. The cost of joining a top-tier under-13 team with a soccer organization in 2023 is $3000- $4000/year. This cost does not include hotels for out-of-state tournaments, gas driving to and from practices, and games at least four times a week. Furthermore, this pay-to-play element resulted in upper-middle-class parents with high cultural capital sending their daughters to elite white colleges regarded as top-tier soccer schools. It was not by chance that the starters of the 2019 World Cup Team consisted of nine out of eleven who went to UCLA, North Carolina, Stanford, and the University of Santa Clara.
Pedigreed players like them are archetypes (or clichés) of the American female professional footballer that the Pay-to-Play system produced. [America's Team] .
However, for outliers like Carli Lloyd and others, Pay-to-Play was a formidable barrier to their realizing their professional football ambitions.
THAT JERSEY GIRL
Carli Anne Lloyd was born and raised in the New Jersey town of Delran, which ran along the Delaware River, a "small blue-collar community . . . that stretches along U.S. Route 130, a busy run of a road with an abundance of diners, car lots and chain restaurants, long on neon and short on charm" (p 11). Carli overcame the obstacle of the Pay-to-Play system to advance in soccer through her father, who offset her training expenses by helping establish a local soccer team, the Delran Dynamites, of which Her father was the assistant coach. The young football daughter was the star on the team when the coach of a more prestigious local club, the Medford Strikers, recruited her. With the Strikers, she excelled as a midfielder, attracting state soccer Powers-to-Be's attention, and earned from her teammates the nickname of PITA, an acronym for "pain in the ass."
At fourteen, Carli made the New Jersey Olympic Development program. She gained the attention of Rutgers, New Jersey's flagship blue-collar University, which she attended through a Title IX scholarship. While playing for Rutgers, Lloyd joined a national Under-21 football camp, another which "was loaded with big-time players as Aly Wagner [North Carolina], Nandi Price [UCLA], and Cat Whitehill [Santa Clara]" (p 33).
As could be predicted, Carli was not part of the U-21 team's preppie clique. Her few friends throughout her career included Hope Solo, raised by a single mother and mentored by her Vietnam war veteran father, who the police once arrested for child kidnapping; mixed-race Sharon Boxx, with a black father and a single white mother; and an anomaly, Heather Mitts, a Catholic preppie from Cincinnati, Ohio. Carli first met Heather when the two were classmates at James Galanis' Univeral Soccer Academy (USA).
THE ZEN MASTER
While playing for Rutgers, Carli's ambitious father met James Galanis in a Delran parking lot on a grey rainy day. He asked the Pay-to-Play training center owner if he would consider coaching his daughter, hoping to defray expenses with a footballer service exchange. Galanis said Carli should give him a call. While her father was keen on Galanis, Carli was ambivalent. She thought, Why should I work with a trainer who is not working anywhere near the national level, no matter how good he is? (p 40).
However, Carli decides to call the mysterious trainer while on vacation from Rutgers. They have a brief interview, and Galanis says he will train her at no cost if she wants because he believes in her as a future football great. Carli accepts Galanis' offer. The Zen Master Galanis will teach the acolyte Carli the art of being a killer and ruthless assassin in the pitch. However, she must sacrifice everything: friends, father, and family, to achieve this aim. Carli agrees to these terms.
James Galanis is a second-generation Greek American with a heavy Aussie accent whose classmates bullied him in the Jersey public schools. His teachers thought that he was a slow learner. Hateful of school, James dropped out and found refuge by reading library books on soccer and playing street football alone in an alley near his house.
At sixteen, James dropped out of school and joined a karate club, where he quickly earned a black belt, and played for an adult local soccer club, where he got paid per game. James honed his soccer skills further when he visited his parents' Greek birthplace, the Island of Poros, where he met a college student touring Greece—the two married. Afterward, the couple split their time between New Jersey and Australia, where James played professional football, taught karate, and acquired his thick Aussie accent. In 2000, he and his wife, Coleen, decided to settle full-time in America and open a soccer school, the Universal Soccer Academy (USA).
Carli's training program focused on three aspects of the USA's Five Pillar Program: 1) physicality, mental toughness, and character. Under James' training, Carli soon became a deadly assassin on the pitch. Her coaches put up with her because they knew she was good, more than good, the ultimate "badass," as her teammates begrudgingly acknowledged behind her back. The coach who made the best of Carli when the Jersey girl served two masters, James, and her coach, was the legendary Jill Ellis.
A brilliant Brit, Jill Ellis won back-to-back World Cups in 2019 and 2015, the year Lloyd sorely tested Ellis' people skills. Jill also had to contend with another equally strong but different personality, Mega Rapinoe, who had been fomenting a Woke uprising for LBGTQ rights and social justice. Nevertheless, Ellis' handling of Carli Lloyd was Machiavellian. In 2015, she appeased Lloyd's disruptive individualism and manipulated her to lead the National Team to Gold. In 2019, she cooly benched her star and reconstructed the pliable player to fit her coaching needs and won the World Cup back-to-back. In the context of Pay-to-Play, the 2019 World Cup team represents the ultimate triumph of the American upper-crust women and girls who were the system's products. Carli Lloyd was the exception that proved the rule.
However, an unexpected American loss in the 2021 women's Olympics raised the question of whether the American National team was on the decline or merely experiencing temporary setbacks. More defeats and disappointing performances put U.S. Soccer and others, like football's heavy investors, in panic mode. Carli Lloyd blamed the National Team's defeats and disappointments on "toxicity," an attribute she never precisely defined.
In 2021, Carli Anne Lloyd resigned from the National Team because, she said, of this toxicity. She also abruptly left her guru trainer, Galanis, reconciled with her father and family, and launched a new career as a media personality with CBS. When Lloyd separated from her guru trainer, Galanis, she said it was the happiest day of her life.
JERSEY GIRL ON CBS
As above, CBS asked Carli to be part of a new football venue, "Kickin' It."
Carli Lloyd sits on a couch on a CBS studio set. She is wearing a minimalist light green pantsuit. Cosmetologists have expertly done her up to look like she was not wearing makeup. Carli appears tense in her new incarnation as a sports commentator.
Among the many soccer topics discussed on the show, Carli claimed to have predicted that the 2023 National soccer team would lose the World Cup that year. Post hoc, the Netherlands had defeated the Americans in the group stages, and the much-touted American team limped into the Sweet Sixteen elimination stage only to be beaten by the Swedes. In that game, fabled veteran Megan Rapinoe, rising suburban star Sophia Smith, and fellow erstwhile Stanford veteran Kelly O'Hara missed their penalty kicks after a zero-zero draw, giving the match to the Swedes. No American World Cup team had been knocked out of the tournament that early. Lloyd blamed the poor showing again on toxicity, adding that the young players should realize that their BMWs, Rolex watches, and Gucci shoes come from winning, not vice versa.
Carli Lloyd, former PITA, and later GOAT, says she always tries to speak the truth and was true to herself when she took U.S. Soccer by storm, even though her coaches and teammates doubted, resented, disparaged, patronized, or feared her. The ugly duckling turned into a soaring eagle. Will she still have that sense of self in her new incarnation as a media personality? Only time will tell.
In her 2017 memoir, Lloyd concluded this about her mentor/guru, James Galanis:
He saved my career, believed me when no one else did . . . It took me thirteen years . . . [with him] . . . to realize that I could become the best player in the World. . . I can try to thank you for all you've done for me as a player and a person, but words could never be enough. I guess they'll have to do, though, won't they mate? (p 232)
Carli made that glowing testimonial before she had implied that Galanis was a messianic cult figure who had brainwashed her the thirteen years when Galanis was her private trainer.
Online Alert: Goodreads is telling me that this review is too long, so I will conclude by asking a pressing question: Who will win the Women's Football Olympics in Paris in 2024? FIFA, the international football federation, ranked the top four teams in 2020 1) U.S.A. 2) Germany, 3) France, 4) Sweden. As of August 2023, after Spain's transcendental World Cup win, they are 1) Sweden 2) Spain, 3) U.S.A., 4) England. Since suspiciously racist England is falling as fast as are the goody-two-shoes Germans and the Taylor Swift Americans, I predict the French, a truly multi-ethnic squad, will win the Gold. The elegant Spaniards, who seem to thrive under another kind of toxicity, will win the Silver, and the queer Swedes, with their corny country team spirit, the Bronze.
Assuming that CBS has not fired Carli Lloyd, she can give her outlier perspective on why the Americans were losers again. This time, Carli can pontificate from an establishment's neo-liberal platform. All bets are off, however, if America's Black Princesses, the subject of my next football review, come through and stand up as U.S. Soccer's real Americans and Make America Great Again (MAGA).
Michael Tang is working on his second novel, Samsara in Mongolia: The Fabulous Adventures of two ex-Peace Corps Girls in Buddha-Land.
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