This Is the Best U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Ever

There are, at most, four games left in the U.S. women’s national team’s 2019 World Cup, but we’ve seen enough to go ahead and call it: This is the best U.S. women’s national team ever.

Not just for what it did to Thailand, Chile, and Sweden in the group stage—outscoring its three opponents 18–0, outshooting them 82–10—but for what it looked capable of doing to them. Head coach Jill Ellis has stocked her team with the most skillful, most multifaceted attacking talents in the program’s history, and their successful integration into a team that still looks balanced on the field has the U.S. capable of reaching new heights.

The knock against the U.S. during its fallow period—it went three whole World Cups without winning from 2003 to 2011—was an overreliance on athleticism. In 1999, when the U.S. rode set-piece dominance and opportunistic finishing off opponent’s mistakes to win the tournament, its players were more athletic, but also more technically gifted than their peers. It was only in the 2000s that some of the world’s other top teams began to outplay the Americans with the ball, and the U.S. failed to adapt to that new world.