“Gotham’s one of the best teams in the league,” Sofia Huerta told the broadcast after her Seattle Reign managed to hold the accelerating side to a scoreless draw. “Third place, really hard team to beat.” Then came the kicker, punctuated by a dark chuckle: “They just acquired Jaedyn Shaw, you know?”
That Huerta, one of the league’s best defenders, mentioned Gotham’s newest arrival unprompted proves the notoriety that Shaw has already earned in her short career. In her first full professional season, Shaw, then 18, was a core part of the San Diego Wave team that won the 2023 shield. In 2024, she had a standout year with the senior USWNT, earning 17 caps and Olympic gold.
But Shaw quickly hit rocky shores. Circumstances at San Diego declined last year; scandals and poor decisions from the Wave's front office hampered the on-field product, and Shaw’s offseason move to the Courage was one of the two biggest pieces of a bona fide exodus from the faltering side. There’s never enough managerial chaos in women’s soccer, so of course it popped up again in North Carolina, where the agony of watching Sean Nahas fail to get the most out of Manaka Matsukubo, Ashley Sanchez, and Shaw was cut short by his sudden firing. After less than a season at the Courage, Shaw got traded to Gotham in a record-setting deal in September. In 2025, Shaw has earned just 5 senior national team caps.
To the relief of Shaw-believers everywhere, Huerta’s quip illustrates that Shaw’s underwhelming stint in North Carolina does not seem to have significantly dampened that reputation. But the comment wasn’t even needed to show that Shaw’s brilliance has remained in coil, potential energy just waiting for the chance to unleash itself in full. Her performances with Gotham—four appearances in the NWSL and two in the Champions Cup—have been littered with moments that made me gasp and giggle because, teehee, Jaedyn Shaw is having fun again.
It took Shaw no time at all to show Gotham fans what she can do. Twenty minutes into Shaw’s debut for her new team, Esther won a scrappy battle for the ball and flipped it out toward the center of the pitch. Shaw picked it up and sent a one-touch pass out to an oncoming Bruninha. Bruninha then passed it to Jaelin Howell, who sent a sharp cross into the box. There was Shaw, who had deftly created space between herself and the defenders around her, and with a falling header she redirected it into the net. Even when she scored, she stuck to her skillset: instead of pushing the back line, she made her space through it.
A couple weeks later, in Gotham’s 3-0 rout of Portland, Shaw pulled off some of her classic moves: a delicate little slipped pass snuck between multiple defenders and teed up Rose Lavelle for an easy 1-v-1 with the keeper; a tightly angled through ball split an army of defenders, and gave credence to suspicions that she may in fact have eyes on the back of her head; a spin-turned-shot surrounded by Thorns at the top of the box. After the match, Lavelle, queen of fancy footwork, talked to reporters about her new teammate. “I think we’ve just scratched the surface of what she can do. She has a high ceiling, which is crazy to say because we’ve already seen such great things from her,” she said. “She’s so fun—I always say she has little futsal feet, just so technical.”
On Sunday Gotham played Seattle, one of the best defenses in the league, but Shaw still managed to shine in her first full 90-minute outing for her new team. She earned a corner by carrying the ball a couple dozen yards to the top of the box and evading her defender with a nifty touch behind her legs before she shot. She redirected a pass from Midge Purce towards Lavelle, who was running towards her back, with a nastily simple flick. Seemingly trapped inside a Bermuda Triangle of defenders, she nutmegged one to complete a pass to Lavelle. Later, she had an outrageous sequence evading a torrent of Reign players that included a give-and-go with Lavelle and ended with a shot on target. A true escape artist, Shaw so often emerges unscathed from impossible situations. (Multiple Gotham players were showing off that afternoon—the single coolest kick of the game came in the 37th minute, when Mandy Freeman curved a pass so severely that a banana would be jealous.)
(Quick aside: I hope you are watching the blossoming Lavelle-Shaw partnership, Emma Hayes! See, it's perfectly fine—and actively good, even—to put out a starting lineup that features more than a single technically advanced player! Maybe give it a try with these two sometime!)
Shaw has managed all of this despite playing in a system that doesn’t quite maximize her strengths. Too often she’s been stuck higher and wider than you’d like, hovering around the last line of defenders waiting for someone else to send a ball her way and invite her into the play. This is because manager Juan Carlos Amorós has typically positioned her as a wide forward, not deeper and more centrally. An ideal system would quite literally center her, allowing her the range and authority to run the show from between the lines, instead of always being pressed up against the back line.
I can forgive Amorós for this, and even accept it—for now. Mid-season transfers are always a little weird. Teams build their styles of play throughout the length of a season, and newly added interlopers threaten to throw that gradual work off-kilter, especially if they don’t naturally slot perfectly into the long-developing system. But letting those potential difficulties scare a team out of making ambitious midseason transfers would be cowardly, and thankfully Gotham under Amorós has proven to be eager and ever-evolving.
And, to be fair, Gotham’s offensive fluidity does provide Shaw plenty of opportunities to get into the spaces where she does her best work, and the targets to catalyze those plays. Ultimately, I’m optimistic about Shaw’s future with Gotham because Amorós really seems to get just how valuable a gift his front office brought him. “Jaedyn is a fantastic player who can make a difference on the pitch at any moment. She has a special ability, and while it hasn’t been an easy transition—changing so much both on and off the field—she’s handled it incredibly well. … She’s done a very good job so far, and she’s going to be important for us. That’s why we signed her,” he told reporters on Sept. 25.
Shaw’s comments to the press on the day her trade was announced suggest that she’s been burned before by getting her hopes up about a new move getting the most out of her in her best position. When asked how she hoped to fit in at Gotham, she said, “I’m not even gonna just say one thing specifically—I’ve been there, done that.” I am here, a mere observer unburdened by past disappointments, to take up the mantle of saying one thing specifically: in any team she plays for, Jaedyn Shaw deserves a central position, in more than just one sense. If Gotham can commit to being the team that finally molds itself around her talents, they’ll find those $1.25 million well spent.
