let pressure – In the summer of 2015, Carli Lloyd went into her third FIFA Women’s World Cup seeking redemption—but pressure during group play left her and the U.S. Women’s National Team “paralyzed.” A tactical shift after yellow-card suspensions in the round of 16 helped pu
It was the summer of 2015, and Carli Lloyd walked into her third FIFA Women’s World Cup with a kind of hunger that didn’t feel like inspiration—it felt like a weight.
Four years earlier, the U.S. had finished with a silver medal. It wasn’t enough. And with it having been 16 years since the U.S. last won it all, the pressure didn’t hover in the background. It pressed in from every angle.
Lloyd, the captain, believed she was ready—physically and mentally, seasoned enough for the expectations that came with the badge. But when the U.S. started group play in Canada—even while winning—something didn’t feel right.
“The weight of wanting it so badly in the beginning really kind of paralyzed us all,” Lloyd said.
From her perspective, the team struggled to live in the moment, to play with freedom. The criticism from outside was loud. The standard from within was louder.
“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,” she said.
Then came the first real jolt of consequence.
After yellow-card accumulations during the round of 16, starters Lauren Cheney (now Holiday) and Megan Rapinoe were suspended for the quarterfinal. Lloyd moved higher up on the field—closer to the goal, a position she said she felt comfortable in. For Lloyd, it became the reset she didn’t know she needed.
She scored in every game for the remainder of the World Cup, culminating in what became a defining moment: a hat trick in the final against Japan.
But even with the trophies and the headlines, Lloyd frames the lesson differently than you might expect.
“The tournament taught her to let go and embrace the process rather than agonize over potential outcomes,” the account says.
Lloyd described the feeling of turnaround from a personal low point to the biggest stage.
“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 said. “That’s what World Cups do. There are moments, there’s pressure, there’s momentum, and you’ve got to weather it all.”
Now, the two-time World Cup champion is five years removed from the pressure cooker of professional soccer. Her life has changed in ways she says reshaped what “pressure” even means—through a fertility journey that included multiple rounds of IVF treatments. and a new family built with time. uncertainty. and persistence.
She is now mom to her daughter Harper, 20 months old, and pregnant with baby number two, due in September.
On top of motherhood, she’s also stepped into a different kind of spotlight. She’s a studio analyst for FOX Sports, covering this year’s men’s World Cup—and the same lesson that turned her into a tournament icon is what she says is guiding her into this next era.
For much of her 17 years as a professional athlete—two-time FIFA Player of the Year, three-time Olympic medalist, and a National Soccer Hall of Fame inductee—the version of Lloyd the public saw was, in her words, “very robotic.”
“I didn’t like to let people in; I preferred to let my game do all the talking,” she said.
“I was very robotic,” she said. “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 U.S. Women’s National Team—and agree they did what they needed to succeed. For Lloyd, that meant keeping her life private for years.
“I’ve been just a bit misunderstood,” she said. “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—after she and her husband, Brian, fought through unexplained infertility and multiple rounds of IVF treatments—that she felt a crack in the armor. Eventually, she told her story in an essay for Women’s Health, and also announced her first pregnancy.
“It wasn’t something that I was necessarily thinking I was going to open up about,” she said. “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,” she said.
Lloyd believes she would be “a totally different mom” if she had had kids 10 years ago, around the time of that pivotal World Cup. She watched teammates bring children on the road while she was playing.
Adjusting to different time zones, prioritizing recovery, and getting enough sleep can be difficult enough when you’re young and childfree, she said—“let alone with minimal childcare support.”
“Now, being a mom, I have such a newfound respect for moms,” she said. “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.”
Her new world has demanded her own kind of multitasking. In 2025 UEFA Women’s EURO coverage for FOX, she said she was still breastfeeding during the tournament—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,” Lloyd said. “It certainly is a job that really never stops, but it’s the best job in the world.”
Even with multiple roles pulling for her attention, she isn’t taking herself so 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 said.
On television, she’s also learned to loosen her grip on perfection. She still strives to improve her TV skills with each tournament she works, but gives herself permission to be human.
“If I mess up on air, I mess up on air,” she said. “I mean, it’s not the worst thing in the world. We’re literally talking about soccer.”
That shift is stark compared with the player who once treated every match like life or death. But Lloyd says the through-line remains: embrace the challenging moments, don’t linger, and adapt quickly.
“Great players are able to somehow figure it out and quickly adapt and adjust,” she said. “The players that show up in big moments are able to flip the script and flip the mindset.”
Now she’s well into her second trimester during this World Cup. She said she’s 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 said. “Being an athlete for so long, that has just kind of come natural for me.”
That go-with-the-flow approach shows up again in her “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 said. “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 brings her right back—but this time she can watch from a place of growth.
“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 said. “It’s just been really freeing and refreshing, this life after soccer that I’ve had.”
Carli Lloyd USWNT 2015 Women’s World Cup Canada 2015 Lauren Cheney Holiday Megan Rapinoe quarterfinal suspension hat trick vs Japan FOX Sports 2025 UEFA Women’s EURO fertility IVF Harper second child pregnancy due September