On the last Saturday in May, a steamy one in suburban Chicago, Aly Wagner—who next week will become the first American woman ever to do commentary on a men’s World Cup match—was at Toyota Park in Bridgeview, doing what she does every Saturday of the National Women’s Soccer League season, broadcasting the Lifetime Game of the Week. A former member of the U.S. women’s national team, Wagner was an instinctive central midfielder with special vision, and it happened to be on display that afternoon.
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“Put your phone down, Zach,” she said on the broadcast, a reference to Philadelphia Eagles receiver Zach Ertz, whose wife, Julie Johnston Ertz, was playing for the hometown Red Stars. “Eyes on the field.”
Wagner is a purist when it comes to the game and someone who, in an ideal world, would prefer to see everyone’s phone out of sight, for people to be present at all times. When we met over lunch a few days later, she never, not once, looked at her own phone.
She was in New York for a Fox Sports event at the Russian Tea Room later that day. The network was introducing some of the on-air talent for the World Cup. Even though Fox is presenting Wagner’s involvement as a big deal—and it is—she has analyzed other men’s matches.
“Aly knows more than any of us—and she’s a badass,” Alexi Lalas said at the Fox event. “To me, she is a great analyst who just happens to be female.”
JP Dellacamera calls her “the Doris Burke of soccer,” referring to the NBA analyst.
She is comfortable making unpopular suggestions, as she did during the Copa America Centenario in 2016, when she said that the best place for Clint Dempsey might be on the bench (“He gives you a couple goals in a tournament, but how many opportunities is he costing you?”), and she has no trouble admitting she could be wrong. “But,” she said at lunch, flashing a fight-me look, “given the overall picture, the long-term view for the national team, was I wrong?”
That Wagner was chosen to call games was not a surprise to her, nor to many of her Fox colleagues. Her selection was “based on her body of work,” said David Neal, the executive producer, introducing her at the Fox event, “not because she is a woman.”
Fox was impressed with her during the 2015 Women’s World Cup, Neal told me later, “and things evolved from there.” She did three matches of the Confederations Cup in 2017, with Dellacamera, and displayed such “an innate sense of the game,” such an ability to explain “why, not what” that the decision made perfect sense.
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When the official announcement was made in April that she would be a match commentator and analyst paired with the renowned Scottish broadcaster Derek Rae, all she could think of is what “a big honor and a big responsibility this was. I would have been happy to do whatever they asked, but this way, I have the opportunity to break down the game and convey what is going on in my head.”
Wagner finished third in two World Cups and won two Olympic gold medals. She was a national champion at Santa Clara, scoring the game-winning goal against North Carolina, and received the Hermann Trophy her senior year as the country’s outstanding player. She retired from professional soccer in 2009, after a career marked by injury and, in her view, nagging disappointment. She worked at a Lululemon store and was the COO of Eleanor’s VF-11 Plant Food. She had children (triplets, all boys, in 2013, and a daughter in 2015). But when she watched soccer on TV, she found herself dissatisfied by the commentary, and began to analyze the matches out loud from the couch. It was a sign to her that she had unfinished business with the game.
Wagner’s college coach, Jerry Smith, knew Aly for years before she attended Santa Clara. She and her older sister, Samantha, had been coming to his soccer camps since they were kids. Smith and his wife, Brandi Chastain, are friends and neighbors with Wagner and her family in the Bay Area.
“Are you happy now?” he remembers asking her after their Santa Clara team won the national championship. He knew that her national team career had been frustrating up to this point, and he knew that she had not always been easy to coach, so he was hoping, on that December day in Dallas of 2001, she could put that aside and just experience joy. She didn’t really answer, but the look in her eyes suggested it was complicated. Jerry had been coaching elite athletes long enough to be saddened, but not surprised.
All these years later, in Jerry’s opinion, she is still seeking and searching—for validation most of all.
“Look, “ he said, using Carli Lloyd as an example. “Aly and Carli are two years apart in age, and I know that Aly envisioned having the kind of success Carli has had. But her career ended in her late 20s and Carli is still playing.”
As the World Cup approaches, Wagner’s days are even more chock-a-block than usual. She and Rae begin the first of their 10 matches, all from a studio in Los Angeles, on June 15th with Morocco vs. Iran. She has already watched hours of film and made handwritten notes on 18 teams. She has analyzed their rosters, spending somewhere between 15 and 20 hours per squad, looking for tactical and substitution patterns, hoping to unearth the little things that could set her analysis apart. She and Rae have already done three trial matches, internally, to become familiar with each other.
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Her mind is filled with thoughts of Morocco and Iran, and how significant a win would be for either of those countries. She is thinking about Costa Rica vs. Serbia and England vs. Tunisia (they will be using the British pronunciation, which Rae prefers: too-NEE-zee-uh), and all the matches that will follow. As of now, she thinks France will defeat Spain and take home the cup; Germany and England will play for third place; Portugal, the defending European Champion, will go out early because they “are vulnerable to the break.”
For a woman who, growing up the youngest of four, says she never had to fight for “air time” but that it somehow found her, analyzing the men’s 2018 World Cup is far more than just a job; it’s an opportunity to paint an indelible picture of the game she loves.
(Photo: Andy Mead/WireImage)
