6 min readIt was the summer of 2015, and Carli Lloyd headed into her third FIFA Women’s World Cup focused on redemption. A silver medal four years prior wasn’t good enough for the U.S. Women’s National Team—it had now been 16 years since the U.S. last won it all, and they were hungry.
As captain of the USWNT, Carli believed she was in peak physical and mental shape, with enough experience behind her to handle the outsized expectations. But when they began group play in Canada, even as they were winning games, something didn’t feel quite right.
“The weight of wanting it so badly in the beginning really kind of paralyzed us all,” Carli tells Women’s Health. From her perspective, the team struggled to live in the moment and play with freedom. The outside criticism was loud, but no one held Carli to a higher standard than Carli. “The amount of pressure that I felt, it was heavy, and I was kind of in a deep, dark place—not really feeling confident about myself, and all of these thoughts and things running through my mind.”
After yellow-card accumulations during the round of 16, starters Lauren Cheney (now Holiday) and Megan Rapinoe were suspended for the quarterfinal, placing Carli higher up on the field, closer to the goal. It was a position she felt comfortable in and the reset she needed. She scored in every game for the remainder of the World Cup, culminating in a legendary hat trick in the final against Japan. But most importantly, the tournament taught her to let go and embrace the process rather than agonize over potential outcomes.
“It’s an unbelievable feeling, knowing how down and out I was, to then end on the world’s biggest stage in that fashion—it’s just crazy,” she says. “That’s what World Cups do. There are moments, there’s pressure, there’s momentum, and you’ve got to weather it all.”
These days, the two-time World Cup champion is five years removed from the pressure cooker of professional soccer and settling in to a much different mindset. After a rollercoaster fertility journey, she’s now mom to daughter Harper, 20 months, and pregnant with baby number two, due in September. She’s also a studio analyst for FOX Sports, covering this year’s men’s World Cup. And the same lessons that turned her into a tournament icon are what’s guiding her into a new era.
Letting the World In
For much of her 17 years as a professional athlete—two-time FIFA Player of the Year, three-time Olympic medalist, National Soccer Hall of Fame inductee—the version of Carli Lloyd that the public knew wasn’t really Carli at all. She didn’t like to let people in; she preferred to let her game do all the talking.
“I was very robotic,” she says. “I look back on my career and I’ve thought to myself, Could I have been any different? And I think everything kind of worked out the way that it was supposed to work out. I don’t know that I could have survived that type of environment if I had been any different.”
When she gets together with former teammates, they reflect on the intensity of playing for the USWNT, and ultimately agree that they all did what they needed to do to succeed. For Carli, that meant keeping much of her life private.
“I’ve been just a bit misunderstood,” she says. “For my entire career, I had my game face on. I was in the office. I was trying to grind away and be the best that I possibly could be.”
It wasn’t until retirement, when she and her husband, Brian, fought through unexplained infertility and multiple rounds of IVF treatments, that she felt a crack in the armor. She decided to tell her story—and announce her first pregnancy—in an essay for Women’s Health.
“It wasn’t something that I was necessarily thinking I was going to open up about,” she says. But she realized that life was too short to not celebrate her personal milestones and use her platform to help others on a similar path to parenthood. “The weight of the world is off of me from the whole soccer perspective, so I think that obviously changes a lot.”
Carli believes she would be “a totally different mom” if she had had kids 10 years ago, around the time of that pivotal World Cup. “I watched a lot of my teammates have kids on the road and bring them along on our trips while I was playing,” she says. Adjusting to different time zones, prioritizing recovery, and getting enough sleep can be difficult enough when you’re young and childfree, let alone with minimal childcare support.
“Now, being a mom, I have such a newfound respect for moms,” she says. “You obviously don’t know until you become a mom how your whole self-being goes out the window, and it’s not about you—which is okay.”
Adapting Off the Field
Carli has done her fair share of juggling while on the job at FOX. She was still breastfeeding during the 2025 UEFA Women’s EURO, pumping on set to feed Harper while her husband and parents held down the fort. “I just give a huge shout-out to all the moms that have to do it all and have to balance,” Carli says. “It certainly is a job that really never stops, but it’s the best job in the world.”
Even though she has multiple roles that demand her focus, post-retirement Carli is not taking herself too seriously anymore. “There’s a freeing feeling of not feeling like you have to have your guard up all the time or have to prove yourself,” she says.
She still strives to improve her TV skills with each tournament she works, but she’s also giving herself permission to not be perfect. “If I mess up on air, I mess up on air,” she says. “I mean, it’s not the worst thing in the world. We’re literally talking about soccer.”
Carli on the desk for FOX Sports at the World Cup alongside Rob Stone, Clint Dempsey, and Stu Holden.
It’s a far cry from the player who once treated every match like life or death. But if she’s learned anything from her international playing career, it’s that the best athletes embrace the challenging moments and don’t linger on them. “Great players are able to somehow figure it out and quickly adapt and adjust,” she says. “The players that show up in big moments are able to flip the script and flip the mindset.”
Carli is well into her second trimester during this World Cup, and is grateful for a supportive work environment to help her navigate everything from wardrobe to her energy levels. “It’s not easy. My back hurts, and there’s long days sometimes, and there’s things that pop up that change on the fly, and you just got to roll with the punches,” she says. “Being an athlete for so long, that has just kind of come natural for me.”
The go-with-the-flow nature of TV also resonates with Carli when she shifts into mom mode. “The biggest lesson for me is just reacting in the moment and not trying to figure out, ‘Well, why aren’t they sleeping?’” she says. “Just the trial and error of your intuition—just tackling the day and what’s to come and reacting to that.”
Covering a World Cup on TV will always bring back memories for Carli, but she’s able to view them from a place of growth, living those life lessons in real time. “I’m definitely in the moment more than I ever was in my career. I think it’s entirely hard to be in the moment while you’re navigating climbing to the top of the soccer world,” she says. “It’s just been really freeing and refreshing, this life after soccer that I’ve had.”
Amanda Lucci is the director of special projects at Women’s Health, where she works on multi-platform brand initiatives and social media strategy. She also leads the sports and athletes vertical, traveling to cover the Paris Olympics, Women’s World Cup, WNBA Finals, and NCAA Final Four for WH. She has nearly 15 years of experience writing, editing, and managing social media for national and international publications and is also a NASM-certified personal trainer. A proud native of Pittsburgh, PA, she is a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. Follow her on Instagram @alucci.
