The USWNT will play reigning World Cup champion Spain at Subaru Park in October
The reigning Olympic champions will face reigning World Cup champions Spain at Subaru Park on Oct. 13, marking the USWNT's 16th all-time visit to the region.
The U.S. women’s soccer team will return to town in October for a game that will be about as big as a friendly gets.
The reigning Olympic champions will face reigning World Cup champion Spain at Subaru Park on Oct. 13, three days after the teams open a two-game set in Washington.
It will be the U.S. women’s team’s 16th all-time visit to the region, dating back to 1991, and its 10th game at the Union’s home. Its last game at Lincoln Financial Field was soon after the team’s 2019 World Cup title, when it set an attendance record for a standalone friendly that the venue still holds.
When the Americans visited last October to play Portugal, the prospect of a school-night drive down the Blue Route might have affected a crowd that was short of a sellout. Then, as now, the game was announced in July. But this time, the marquee touts the top two teams in FIFA’s global rankings.
Various rounds of ticket presales start Tuesday, and sales to the general public start Thursday.
If Spain brings all of its stars, the roster would include three-time reigning world player of the year Aitana Bonmatí, two-time winner Alexia Putellas, a further all-world playmaker in Mariona Caldentey, one of the planet’s top young players in Salma Paralluelo, and Gotham FC’s Esther González.
They’re all well-known to women’s soccer fans here, with Putellas’ star power the biggest of the lot. That was confirmed this month when the longtime Barcelona star picked England’s London City Lionesses over the Boston Legacy as her new club home, and made the announcement in New York alongside club owner Michele Kang — who also owns the Washington Spirit.
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Putellas told The Athletic that she sees England’s Women’s Super League as “the most competitive league.” Whether or not she meant it as a shot at the NWSL, it certainly made noise on both sides of the Atlantic. The NWSL has long trumpeted holding that title, and with plenty of evidence. But the top teams in England’s circuit spend more on salaries, and don’t have the same roster limits.
(Kang, who in January signed Trinity Rodman to a new contract in D.C. that was a world record at the time, promptly told The Athletic that “there are clearly some sensitivities, but I’m not here to promote one league over the other. I want everyone to move up.”)
Fans will be happy to settle this on the field, and they had already waited a while for a U.S.-Spain matchup. The teams haven’t played each other since October of 2022, 10 months before La Roja confirmed its arrival as a power with the World Cup title.
On top of that, just one of the teams’ four meetings so far has come on U.S. soil, a tight 1-0 U.S. win at the 2020 SheBelieves Cup. Two have been in Spain, including that 2022 game — a 2-0 Spain win where the hosts were without many stars amid a long-running labor dispute with their federation.
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The teams met twice in 2019, with the U.S. winning a January friendly 1-0 and a World Cup round-of-16 game 2-1 five months later. The latter contest helped send the Americans on their way to the title, but also helped Spain announce its potential. The U.S. was pushed very hard, and only scored from two penalty kicks.
There was hope that the teams would meet at the 2024 Olympics, as the draw set the teams on a path to meeting in the gold medal game. But Brazil beat Spain in the semifinals, and the Americans took the final to win their first major title since 2019.
As next year’s World Cup starts to come on to the horizon, the U.S. finally has an opportunity to play a European team for the first time since facing Italy last December. The continent’s schedule is usually filled by continental competitions: World Cup qualifiers, European championship qualifiers, and the UEFA Nations League.
“We’ve desperately wanted to get Spain on our schedule, but the difficulties of scheduling the top teams during the women’s international calendar are well-known,” U.S. manager Emma Hayes said in a statement. “So to be able to get these two games on the East Coast will be the perfect tests before we head into World Cup qualifying at the end of the year.”
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Europe has some World Cup qualifiers in October, too. But Spain is free because the top four teams in the group phase of qualifying earned direct tickets to next year’s tournament in Brazil.
Thirty-two teams below them went into the playoffs, including heavyweights England, Italy, the Netherlands, and Norway. They will sort themselves out in the October and November FIFA windows.
The latter of those is when the U.S. will play its World Cup qualifier — and yes, that’s qualifier, singular. It needs only to beat El Salvador in the quarterfinals of Concacaf’s women’s championship to do the job.
The tournament, which will be held in Houston and suburban Dallas, is an eight-team bracket. The quarterfinal winners will clinch berths in the first 48-team women’s World Cup, and the losers will play off for two tickets to FIFA’s inter-confederation playoffs.
The top three finishers in the bracket also qualify for the 2028 Olympics. Since the U.S. is the host team in Los Angeles, it’s already in. So if the Americans win the Concacaf title, all the semifinalists will also go to the Games.
