Alex Morgan retires from professional soccer and is expecting her second child

Two-time Girls’s World Cup champion Alex Morgan introduced she is pregnant together with her second baby and is retiring from skilled soccer.

Over the course of a 15-year profession with america, Morgan not solely made an impression on the sector, she additionally helped lead the crew’s struggle for equal pay and was outspoken about social justice points.

The 35-year-old Morgan will play her last match together with her membership crew, the San Diego Wave of the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League, on Sunday at Snapdragon Stadium.

Along with World Cup titles in 2015 and 2019, Morgan additionally received a gold medal with america on the 2012 London Olympics. She first joined the nationwide crew in 2009.

Over her profession with the U.S. crew, she performed in 224 matches, ninth-all time, with 123 targets (fifth all-time) and 53 assists (ninth all-time).

“I grew up on this crew, it was a lot greater than soccer,” Morgan mentioned in a press release. “It was the friendships and the unwavering respect and assist amongst one another, the relentless push for international funding in ladies’s sports activities, and the pivotal moments of success each on and off the sector. I’m so extremely honored to have borrowed the crest for greater than 15 years. I realized a lot about myself in that point and a lot of that may be a credit score to my teammates and our followers. I really feel immense pleasure in the place this crew is headed, and I’ll ceaselessly be a fan of the USWNT.”

Morgan was named the U.S. Soccer Participant of the 12 months twice.

Her last recreation with america got here on June 4, 2024, towards South Korea. She was not on the roster of gamers that received the gold medal on the Paris Olympics.

Morgan was among the many gamers who sued U.S. Soccer in 2019 for gender discrimination, citing inequitable pay and therapy in comparison with the boys’s nationwide crew. In 2022, the edges agreed to collective bargaining agreements that pay each groups equally.

Morgan has a daughter, Charlie, who was born in 2020.

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

Anne M. Peterson, The Related Press