Coming into last Sunday's match against Arsenal in the Women's Super League, the Chelsea starting lineup was missing some of its, and therefore the world's, best players. Some of these superstar absences were injury-related—the recently recovered Lauren James was only fit enough for the substitute's bench, while Sam Kerr remains at least a few weeks away from her long-awaited comeback from last January's ACL tear. Thankfully, the one big-name omission from Chelsea's lineup that had the stadium and the sport as a whole abuzz was the opposite of depressing. Earlier that day the club had officially announced the signing of USWNT legend-in-the-making Naomi Girma, who came from the San Diego Wave via a record-breaking transfer fee. Girma, who obviously couldn't play on Sunday having only just signed her contract with the team hours before, was on hand at Stamford Bridge before the match began, smiling at and waving to the attending fans, who surely feel like they've won a jackpot some orders of magnitude larger than the $1.1 million it cost to bring Girma across the pond.
But amidst all the excitement about the biggest defensive talent in world soccer moving for the largest fee in women's soccer history, there was a game to play, and an important one at that. Chelsea vs. Arsenal is probably the WSL's preeminent rivalry match, pitting the two best-supported and, along with Manchester City, most serious clubs in England against one another in a crosstown match that always has significant title implications. This edition was no different. Chelsea came in looking to extend its lead atop the table, while Arsenal sought to claw its way back into the title race.
In the characteristically tight and well-played match, Arsenal had more than its fair share of chances to take the lead, especially during a dominant stretch to close the first half, but the visitors kept coming up short when it was time to actually put the ball into the back of the net. Ultimately, the aforementioned James came on and did what superstars do, winning a penalty that won Chelsea the game, 1-0. The victory puts 10 points between the first-place Blues and the fourth-place Gunners. With its seven-point lead on second-place Manchester United, Chelsea already looks like overwhelming favorites to win a sixth consecutive league title.
This context surrounding Girma's move helps demonstrate what it all means. Chelsea, even without Kerr and with only brief cameos from the unfortunately oft-injured James, is clearly the best team in England. Likewise, the Blues won their Champions League group with a perfect record, and, along with Barcelona and Lyon, stand as one of the three big favorites for the biggest trophy in the club game. Yet in spite of this already vaunted status, Chelsea looked at its back line, saw an opportunity to strengthen itself, and did so by spending more money than anyone ever has on a single player. What marks Chelsea's decision to go get Girma is ambition—the ambition to be not just one of but the very best, to be not just a favorite but the favorite for the WCL, to use every resource at its disposal to build the most dominant squad in women's soccer. In Girma, Chelsea has found basically the perfect compliment to match this limitless ambition.
There's not much I need to say about Girma as a player to communicate why exactly she, a central defender, would become the most expensive player in soccer history without anyone batting an eye or arguing that it was an over-spend. It only takes a single word to summarize what she's good at: everything. Anyone who watched her star turn at last summer's Olympics (a group that apparently doesn't include the people who vote on the Ballon d'Or) would've recognized that.
As a defender, she is great at both the anticipatory challenges and clearances that prevent attacks from developing even before they've really started, and at chasing after and corralling forwards who've gotten loose behind her back line. She is fast, strong, and an expert at knifing her legs at unexpected angles to knock away balls that previously seemed well protected. She can play as a left- or right-sided center back with equal adeptness. In possession, Girma is an exquisite passer, specifically with the pinpoint trebuchet balls she flings over the opposing back line and onto teammates' forward runs, which she can hit with astonishing accuracy using either foot. The impression you get from watching Girma in action isn't all that dissimilar to seeing Virgil van Dijk at work: a defender who manages to be everywhere, to stop everything, to win every duel, to make every pass, and somehow doing all of it, even in situations of maximum demand, with a serene expression and a sweatless brow. It has to be so intimidating as an attacker to pick up the ball in a good position, look up, and see Girma bearing down on you, knowing that each step you take just leads you deeper into her web, where she almost always comes away taking what she wants.
Because of the caliber of player she is, Girma's career trajectory will look like whatever she wants it to. There's not a team in the world that wouldn't kill to add her to their roster. She basically has her pick of who to play for and when. It's always telling, then, the choices players like this wind up making. More than anything else, Girma's choice to leave the Wave for Chelsea says something about her own ambition, to be the best and to test herself amongst the best.
Like most great athletes, Girma is surely motivated by the desire to win. And she is no stranger to professional success. In 2022, her rookie year with the Wave and also the expansion franchise's inaugural season, Girma helped lead a star-studded team into the playoffs, where they lost in the playoff semifinals. The Wave built on that success the next season, winning the NWSL Shield as regular-season champions, though they again fell in the playoff semis. Last season, however, was an unmitigated disaster. San Diego got off to an awful start to the league, which led to the surprising midseason firing of highly regarded manager Casey Stoney. The team was then rocked by a lawsuit brought by club employees who testified to an abusive and discriminatory work environment led by club president and former USWNT coach Jill Ellis. Amidst this stink, the team finished outside of the playoff spots, just one point ahead of the worst record in the league. Most of the Wave's biggest players have since left the team. San Diego, which a little over a year ago was one of the NWSL's major success stories, now has to basically build a whole new team from scratch.
It's no surprise that Girma would want out of an environment like that, though reports say her desire to leave the Wave predates the public controversy and the team's bad season. It's maybe a little more surprising that she'd want to leave the American league entirely and look instead toward Europe, but it probably shouldn't be. In a way, the choice is a reflection of the different visions for the sport in the U.S. and Europe.
The NWSL hangs its hat on parity. The case the league wants to make is that it is home to more great players than anywhere else, and that talent is distributed so evenly within the competition that there are no easy games or pushover teams, making the margins between the top teams and the bottom ones vanishingly slim. This has made for a great, exciting league that can make the credible, though subjective and therefore not definitive, claim to being the world's best.
However, there are tradeoffs to worshipping the god of parity. While none of its league peers can match the top-to-bottom strength of the NWSL, I think it's safe to say that the very best teams in Europe are considerably better than any of the best American teams. There's no easy way to test this claim without stuff like team-by-team salary info or a Club World Cup (side note: I cannot wait for next year's inaugural Women's Club World Cup!), but looking at the top women's soccer teams' rosters and counting the number of international-level players who play for the strongest national teams seems to me a solid heuristic. The top European clubs tend to have more than a dozen elite internationals, while even the best NWSL teams usually only have a handful. This heuristic is complicated by the fact that the U.S. is a huge country and produces more very good players than could fit on even two national teams, but it's nevertheless hard to buy any argument that for sure Europe's Big Three teams and probably a few more after them don't have much stronger rosters than any NWSL team. (And here I will reiterate: I cannot wait for next year's Club World Cup!)
If you were someone like Girma, i.e. one of the best, it would make sense if you prioritized playing for a Chelsea or Lyon and against a Barcelona or Man City, i.e. with and against the best. The NWSL can't offer the best of the best; Europe, unencumbered by strict roster rules and salary caps, can. What's more, the rules that ensure the NWSL's parity make it so that a player like Girma can't even guarantee that any hypothetical title-contending NWSL team she might join would continue to be one of the best teams in the league over even the medium term. Girma's own history with the Wave—which in a year went from the top of the league to almost the very bottom, a rise and fall the NWSL model expressly incentivizes—is a testament to this. Chelsea, meanwhile, has a history that proves its commitment to excellence, and competes in an environment that places no real constraints on that ambition. If unfettered ambition, the desire to truly have everything, is what Girma was after, she couldn't have picked a better choice than Chelsea.
It's important not to read too much into any of this big-picture stuff. Girma's transfer to Chelsea is indeed a seismic event in global women's soccer. It does not, however, need to be seen exclusively in terms of what it may or may not say about The State Of The Game. The NWSL is doing a great job building what is, along with the WSL, unquestionably one of the two best and most captivating domestic leagues in the sport. Girma going from one to the other does not mean that the WSL is now better than the NWSL, and it certainly doesn't preclude the NWSL from following up with more earthshaking moves of its own. (It would be silly to forget that last year, headlined by the then-record transfer of Racheal Kundananji and the second-highest fee for Barbra Banda, the NWSL was the league making all the flashy signings and arguing that the balance of power had shifted in its favor.) In fact, the NWSL's new CBA is a good start to address some of these concerns about the league's future. If anything, all the hand-wringing and chest-thumping about whose league is the strongest is evidence that women's soccer is beginning to reach maturity; fluctuating inter-league hierarchies and over-heated arguments about why mine is better than yours have been a staple of the men's soccer discourse for decades and decades.
What will stick with me about this transfer is the ambition it reveals, both from Chelsea and Girma. The club is going all-out to finally win the Champions League. (This move alone doesn't make Chelsea the new CL favorites over Barcelona, but the Blues' chances have certainly gotten better.) The player, at 24 years old and with the world at her feet, has decided to go to the best possible team to hunt for the most glorious possible trophy, and made herself the most expensive player of all time along the way. If the greater women's soccer scene is as healthy as I believe it to be, that show of ambition will give Chelsea's and the WSL's rivals a perfectly necessary kick in the ass, inspiring them to match Chelsea's ambition by continuing the investment and improvement that in the long run is the only path forward for teams, leagues, and the sport as a whole. And more than what this means for the discourse, I'm positively giddy to see what it'll mean for the action on the field.
