In 2019, I stood in a bar in Atlanta, Georgia, surrounded by hundreds of other people adorned in red, blue, and white. It was the semifinals of the Women’s World Cup, and the United States was playing against England. The U.S. women were looking to go on to the final, but this would be no easy feat.

The game moved back and forth: The U.S. scored in the first 10 minutes of the match, and the English scored about 10 minutes later. Then, 31 minutes in, the U.S. captain, Alex Morgan, cut across an English defender and headed in the game-winning goal. She celebrated by pretending to sip a cup of tea. The Atlanta bar went wild, perhaps just as much for the trolling celebration as for the goal. A friend of mine, who spends far more of his time watching the NFL and NBA than women’s soccer, turned to me and said, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had watching sports in my life!”

The U.S. would go on to defeat the Netherlands in the final to win its fourth World Cup. But the 2019 tournament was also a special turning point for women’s soccer in America. It’s clear, looking back, that the emotional investment of so many American fans was tied not only to the team’s accomplishments on the field, but also to the national and sporting politics of the moment. For many, Megan Rapinoe, the star of that World Cup who continuously spoke out against homophobia, racism, and sexism, became a symbolic counterweight to the Trump administration. Watching the top women’s soccer player in the world (Rapinoe would officially win the Best FIFA Women’s Player award a few months later) adorned in the colors and crest of the United States provided many fans with a sense of pride in their country after years of political tumult. The success of the women’s team also coincided with their legal fight to be paid equally to the men’s team. Throughout the tournament, many people got the sense that cheering for the national team also meant rooting for the effort to close the gap between men and women in other areas of American life.

[Read: The Women’s World Cup is about more than soccer]

If the 2019 women’s team represented a soccer culture in flux, this year’s squad speaks to something else: how the women’s game in the United States has never been more stable than it is today.

Rapinoe, now 38 and playing in her fourth World Cup, has announced that this will be her last tournament and that she will retire from professional soccer at the end of her domestic season. Rapinoe is the squad’s oldest player, and her journey has been long. After she left the University of Portland, she decided to go professional in 2009. She became the second overall pick of the inaugural Women’s Professional Soccer league at a time when the average salary of a professional women’s player in the U.S. was roughly $25,000. Just a year later, her team folded, and only two years after that, the entire league suspended operations. Rapinoe then played in Australia and France, and even in an amateur league, before joining the newly formed National Women’s Soccer League in the U.S. in 2013. She has played for OL Reign (formerly the Seattle Reign FC) ever since.

Now consider Rapinoe’s teammate, Alyssa Thompson. She is 18 years old, currently in her first season in the NWSL, and, as of Friday’s 3–0 win against Vietnam, the second-youngest player ever to represent the country in a World Cup.

The gap between the experience of the youngest and oldest members of the team tells the story of women’s soccer in the United States. The NWSL is now in its 11th season. The league and the players have their first-ever collective-bargaining agreement, which includes an increase in player salaries, free housing, health insurance, 401(k)s, and formal parental leave. (The new agreement also put in place new protocols for player safety, something that took on an additional, urgent importance following a 2022 report that found that emotional abuse and sexual misconduct were a systemic issue in the league.) More than 1 million fans attended NWSL matches last season. And this season, the average attendance on the opening night beat the league’s previous attendance record by nearly 50 percent.

Thompson’s team, Angel City FC, based in Los Angeles, represents an unprecedented level of success and optimism for women’s professional soccer. The team is owned by a conglomerate of high-profile celebrities including Natalie Portman, America Ferrera, Eva Longoria, and Serena Williams, as well as former soccer greats such as Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Julie Foudy, and Shannon Boxx. Their games have been attended by Hollywood stars and have an average home attendance of nearly 20,000 people a game this season, which is higher than the average of more than a dozen Major League Soccer men’s teams. HBO produced a three-part documentary about the team this past May. As of last year, the team reportedly has a valuation of $100 million, twice as much as any other team in the league.

Though she is just in her first professional season, Thompson is quickly becoming the face of the franchise. Michael Holzer has been the private coach of Thompson and her sister Gisele (a year younger and a member of the U.S. Women’s Youth National Team) for the past two and a half years. He told me that Thompson was born with a natural gift for soccer but has also competed against boys and older women since she was about 13 years old. Of both sisters, he said, “I would often put them with adult college players or adult pro players to really test and challenge them.” Holzer also said that many of his sessions with the sisters would begin at 5:30 a.m., before school started, and that the two have pushed each other to a higher level. “They’re so disciplined. That’s what separates them, beyond their talent,” he said. He added something else that differentiates Thompson: “She is also incredibly fast.” (Even that might be an understatement. Thompson ran the 100-meter dash her junior year of high school in 11.69 seconds, one of the fastest times in the state, despite making track practice only periodically because of soccer.)

Thompson hadn’t originally intended to go pro this early. She had committed to Stanford, a longtime powerhouse in women’s soccer that has served as an incubator for future national-team players. But Holzer said that plans changed for Thompson following her national-team debut last year. In October 2022, when she was still in her senior year of high school, she made her first appearance for the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT), subbing in for the player she had long admired, Rapinoe. “I think that experience showed her and her family that she’s ready,” Holzer told me. Angel City thought she was ready too, and spent nearly half a million dollars to ensure their selection of Thompson as the first overall pick in the 2023 NWSL draft this January.

Thompson has already shown why Angel City made such a big bet on her. Eleven minutes into her NWSL debut this past March, she received a pass from her teammate on the left side of the field, dropped her shoulder, let the ball run across the front of her body, and fired a shot from about 20 yards out into the top right-hand corner of the net. She became the second-youngest player in the league to score in a debut, and the fourth youngest to score any NWSL goal. She was still two months away from her high-school graduation. A couple of months later, she became the first teenager to make a USWNT roster since 1995.

Still, it is difficult to overstate the amount of groundwork that has been laid for players like Thompson by the athletes who came before them. When Thompson was growing up, many women who played professional soccer had to take on other jobs, most teams struggled to have even a few thousand people show up to games, and little protected the players from exploitation and abuse. The NWSL is still growing, and more can be done to support its athletes, but the landscape of U.S. women’s soccer today is radically different from Rapinoe’s early days. Thompson is acutely aware of this. “I feel like I was born at the right time, because the women’s game is growing so much right now,” she said in a Players’ Tribune interview alongside her Angel City teammate Christen Press, a veteran of the USWNT and winner of two World Cups. Referring to Press, she said, “All the players like you and past national-team players made it to where it is now, and it’s honestly amazing, because this would not be an option” before. In particular, she talked about her amazement at substituting for Rapinoe in her debut: “I could not stop thinking about going in, like, I can’t believe I’m here.”

Thompson isn’t the only one here—a whole new generation of young women are at this year’s World Cup. There’s 21-year-old Trinity Rodman, who has reportedly signed the most lucrative contract in NWSL history, and there’s 22-year-old Sophia Smith, the reigning U.S. Women’s Player of the Year, who scored twice in the opening game against Vietnam. These women, and others, represent the present and future of the U.S. national team. It is a legacy they intend to protect.