Ex-USWNT midfielder Tobin Heath retires: Broken-foot goals, slugs and building new worlds

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Former U.S. women’s national team midfielder Tobin Heath has retired from professional soccer, the player announced Thursday. The news comes three years after her final professional appearance and a serious left knee injury that required multiple surgeries.

She leaves the game — on the field, at least — as a two-time World Cup winner and two-time Olympics gold medalist with the U.S. women, a two-time NWSL champion with Portland Thorns FC and a three-time NCAA champion with the University of North Carolina.

But for Heath, the news of her official retirement is almost secondary as she grapples with the long-term impact of her knee injury. She’s lost the ability to play the game at even a casual level and with it a part of who she was.

“I had a personal journey back in January that I came to my own acceptance of not playing anymore,” Heath told The Athletic on Wednesday. “It was me grieving not being able to play soccer anymore. For me, that was the greatest gift that had ever been given to me and such a core part of my identity and how I express myself and know myself to be.”

Heath said she struggles even with running in a straight line. She described the heartbreak of having a ball roll up to her, knowing her ability isn’t there anymore — that the way she previously expressed herself in the world was no longer available to her.

Tobin Heath spent a decade playing soccer in the U.S. and Europe. (Marc Atkins / Getty Images)

“Football is a 360-degree sport, and I can’t do it. If I ever would try to do it, it’s really sad. So that part is the hardest part,” she said. “The actual playing of soccer is gone, not even the professional or playing in a World Cup and stuff like that. The actual gift that was given to me when I first started. That gift is gone.”

What started as a feeling of a pinch in her knee during preparations for the 2020 Olympics (held in 2021) turned into something much more: the discovery of a hole in her knee cartilage and two surgeries, including an eventual cartilage replacement. While Heath was able to play in the Tokyo Olympics, earning a bronze medal with the USWNT in her final major tournament, the rest of her soccer career was hampered by the injury including brief stints at Manchester United and Arsenal, before returning to the NWSL and a handful of final matches with the Seattle Reign.

Her final NWSL appearance was August 14, 2022, a 4-1 win over Gotham FC. Heath’s USWNT career ends with 181 appearances, 36 goals, 42 assists and 10,171 minutes played.

She described an emotional conversation she had with her wife and former teammate, Christen Press, earlier this year. She said she had forgotten how she was as a soccer player, not just in terms of playing ability, but also her personality and competitiveness.

“There was a long period of time where I knew that she would not be signing another professional contract,” Press said in a phone call with The Athletic on Wednesday. “It was my job to leave space for her to find that out on her own.”

For the last three years, Heath always thought she would come back. She had a plan to retire after a lengthy career. She had a plan to evolve as an older player, a desire to mentor the next generation in the locker room. She never expected the 2019 World Cup to be her last one.

“I thought I was literally going to be peeled off the field,” Heath said.

Even with months of coming to terms with who she was without kicking a ball, Heath never intended to announce her retirement. It has been three years since her last appearance; she’s been plenty busy co-hosting the RE-CAP show with Press, their other endeavors through RE, helping start World Sevens Football and serving as the only woman in FIFA’s technical study group for the men’s Club World Cup this summer.

The absence from playing will also make her eligible for the National Soccer Hall of Fame in the upcoming voting cycle. The USWNT Players’ Association informed Heath they wanted to honor her alongside other retired players at their upcoming Players Ball event. These two external prompts, along with some prodding from Press, helped her realize she hadn’t actually taken time to close the door to playing.

In a recording of Thursday’s episode of The RE-CAP Show, Heath’s emotions are on display as she describes coming to terms with her injury and retirement. Press jokes that if it weren’t for her, the retirement celebration wouldn’t have come together, while fondly acknowledging that Heath “really has evolved” by allowing herself this moment.

Press adds a brief imitation of Heath: “I’m a purist. I’m a footballer. I just play to play.” But, as Press reminds Heath, a moment like this is also for her family, for the fans, and most importantly for Heath herself.

“You can see how emotional she is in the episode. She’s having this cathartic moment that she didn’t want to have because she hates feelings, but she needed to have in order to really have closure,” Press said.

“I was four years old, and I just immediately felt a click as soon as I touched the soccer ball. It was like destiny,” Heath said of her childhood in New Jersey.

“Everything that I was obsessed with in football, I had to go out and seek and crave, and create my own pathways,” Heath said.

Her parents weren’t soccer people; she didn’t have a sibling who played. It was something entirely of her own.

“I’m lucky because Jersey is a hotbed for soccer,” she said. “I was extremely fortunate where I was born, but this was just self-motivated destiny, something inside me, knowing I was supposed to play soccer.”

Heath found her way to the University of North Carolina, winning three national championships in her four years, and making her USWNT debut in 2008 while still in college. She nutmegged a Finnish player in one of the first touches of her debut. That same year, Heath earned her first gold medal with the USWNT as the youngest player on the Olympic roster, making three appearances off the bench.

Heath was drafted first in the 2010 WPS draft, a precursor to the NWSL, by the Atlanta Beat. Her rookie season was mostly a wash after an ankle injury kept her out for most of the season. She was traded to Sky Blue FC for her second season, but by the end of the 2011 season, the league shuttered. She played a single game for the New York Fury in the gap year of 2012 in WPSL Elite, the same summer she and the USWNT picked up a gold medal at the London Olympics.

Her next move changed everything.

Tobin Heath spent the bulk of her club career with the Portland Thorns. (Craig Mitchelldyer / Getty Images)

“That was another click-destiny moment, because I don’t know how I ended up in Portland,” Heath said.

Ahead of the NWSL’s first season, every national team player was given the option to rank their top three preferred teams. As an East Coaster, Heath hadn’t even ranked Portland, assuming there was no way she’d be sent there. Instead, U.S. Soccer allocated her to the Thorns, alongside forward Alex Morgan and defender Rachel Buehler. Though she detoured through Paris on a six-month contract with Paris Saint-Germain, she made it to Oregon for the back half of the 2013 season.

Heath scored the winning goal for the Thorns in the inaugural championship while playing on a broken foot. Thinking back on her career, she focused less on the results of her tenure and more on what her time in Portland revealed.

“It showed what women’s sports could be, and that was the beginning of it all. I felt like I was dreaming when I was in Portland. I was dreaming of the world that I wanted to create,” she said. “It was such a gift to be seen as a professional, to be valued in the craft that I had dedicated my life to.”

That level of appreciation and support unlocked something for Heath over a decade ago.

“It pushed me on the path of believing what I think women’s sports could be,” she said. “They showed me a value and a worth that I never knew could exist in women’s sports, and made me want to fight for it.”

On the field, Heath is the player the current generation unanimously crowns the most technical the U.S. has had. She had creativity, a silky touch, an ability to break a defender’s ankles and endless nutmegs.

Clips of a signature Tobin move went viral after USWNT games. Sometimes that desire to create would get in the way of making the right call on the ball, as coach after coach drilled into her that the willingness to try things didn’t have to be abandoned, but harnessed. It wasn’t just being able to dribble at players, but serve up a cross or get on the end of one too.

Heath scored the final goal in the USWNT’s 5-2 romp over Japan in the 2015 World Cup final, adding the final exclamation point in the team’s ascension back to the top of the world.

Tobin Heath celebrates scoring in the second half against Japan in the 2015 Women’s World Cup final. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)

The memory of who she was as a player was central to Heath’s journey to this moment, but Press has also been reflecting on decades of memories over the past few months. She noticed how their memories sometimes differ.

“When (Heath) talks about scoring in a World Cup final, she talks about it from the perspective of dreaming of scoring a World Cup final more than actually having done it,” Press said. “I think the intensity of professional sports means sometimes that you can’t remember. It’s been challenging and beautiful and emotional for me to be by her side throughout this process, and try and leave her space to grieve and to refuse to grieve and to be stuck and to have movement, and be supportive of wherever she is on the journey.”

The memories of the 2019 World Cup are clearer, though her initial description of how she remembered the USWNT’s back-to-back World Cup wins was surprising.

“It was horrible in a lot of ways. It was so much pressure, so many expectations on the footballing side, the pay equity side, so much tension politically,” Heath said. “If any of us pretended we were in control, we were completely out of control. For me personally, going into that World Cup, I was playing some of the best football of my life. I was poised to have an incredible World Cup. Obviously, contributing to us winning was incredible, and to have it culminate in how it did was beyond control and was complete destiny.”

The USWNT’s 2019 World Cup win came after a tournament of immense pressure for the Americans. (Zhizhao Wu / Getty Images)

The small moments offered a reprieve from the mounting pressure on the team.

“One time, we were eating a salad at a meal,” Press said, barely holding in her laughter as she told the story. She described a moment during the preparations for 2019 when the team trained at Tottenham Hotspur’s facilities. “Everything was grown on the campus, and there was a big slug in her lettuce. Everyone else would have been like, ‘This is disgusting!’ And she was like, ‘This is amazing! So organic!’”

The silly moments, the human moments, the surreal moments of that summer all helped keep that team of destiny on track for a win in front of 50,000-plus delirious fans in the Lyon heat, all chanting for equal pay as the USWNT lifted the trophy. That tournament has shaped Heath, and the rest of her teammates forever.

“That’s why the whole team is doing what they’re doing now,” Heath said. “You can’t feel what we felt leading up to that tournament, during that tournament, when we won. You can’t feel that and not believe that you’re doing something so f—king important for the world.

“You feel that responsibility — and that’s what it is — and you want to keep carrying that responsibility as far forward as you can.”

When players retire, the first question is, “What’s next?”

For Tobin Heath, that question has already been answered in a myriad of ways, but probably not definitively. Not yet.

“We deserve the right to explore because we started this job when we were three years old. We didn’t choose, it chose us,” Press said. “Now, she gets to choose what she does next, whether it’s coach, whether it’s to be an entrepreneur, whether it’s one of the millions of things she wants to do. She’s an artist, she’s a world builder. What I’m most excited for is to see her try things.”

That’s where projects like World Sevens and the technical study group for the Club World Cup come into play — they’re likely not permanent career paths, but explorations of options.

Though Heath had to accept that nothing would take the place of football.

Tobin Heath was the only woman on the technical advising committee for the men’s Club World Cup. (Leonardo Fernandez / FIFA via Getty Images)

“The point is, that space is never going to be filled. I’ll have more space for things, but nothing will ever fill that void. I got into cycling, and I’m a maniac, and I crush myself,” she said.

“I don’t know if she told you, but she’s riding a stage in the Tour de France,” Press said. Heath will ride it a few hours before the pros, a 60-mile stint with plenty of incline. “She’s training for it. And to see her — she can barely run — but to see her using her physicality and trying new things and learning and being at the bottom of something, it’s really beautiful.”

Instead of trying to replace soccer, Heath said she is “acknowledging and celebrating how awesome and how deeply meaningful that gift was to me, and being able to mourn it.”

Thursday marks an ending for Heath, a complicated one. Still, there’s a freedom to that door having fully shut behind her, even if she didn’t realize it three years ago.

The catalyst of 2019 still drives her, as does the dream she saw in Portland. There are other ways to create.

“Right now,” Heath said with her usual smile, “I feel like I have an abundance of time and energy to really build lots of worlds.”

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photo: Douglas P. DeFelice / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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