Across the 2024 and 2025 NWSL seasons, Temwa Chawinga scored 35 goals—more than many players could hope to score in their entire careers. She won the Golden Boot and MVP both years, and deserved to. The Kansas City Current forward was simply inevitable.
There’s a real pleasure in watching an athlete like Chawinga, who provides the near certainty that if you flip on a game they’re playing in, they'll do something that knocks your socks off. Scoring is the hardest thing to do in soccer, not to mention doing it with such consistency and for so long. Chawinga’s scoring pace over the last two years left little doubt that she’d sweep the league’s end-of-season awards.
This year, we’ve been treated to nine goals from Chawinga so far, putting her at an astounding rate of 1.06 goals per 90 minutes played. That she’s kept up her scoring is all the more impressive considering that Kansas City is nowhere near as good of a team as they have been the last two campaigns; she’s able to put a team on her back and not feel the weight of it.
But, inevitable as she might be, even Temwa Chawinga can’t score when she’s not playing. Absences due to injury and leading Malawi to a place in the Women's Africa Cup of Nations final are about the only things limiting her goal count this year. What we’ve gotten in return for less Chawinga is a bona fide thriller of a Golden Boot race.
Barbra Banda, the other star who took the NWSL by storm upon her entry to the league in 2024, has led the league in goals for the vast majority of the season. Like Sam Kerr at Sky Blue in 2017, Banda is producing mountains of goals for a team that is otherwise not very good. The Orlando Pride are a far cry from their 2024 form, but Banda, with 12 goals in 17 appearances, is scoring at an even faster clip this year.
Her last goal came back in July before she too left for WAFCON, but on Sunday, in her second game back, her greatness came through anyway. After stealing the ball at midfield, she drove down the flank. Like moths to a flame, four Washington Spirit defenders trained their attention solely on her instead of the onrushing Haley McCutcheon. Banda sent a precise pass across the top of the box, and in the defenders’ daze McCutcheon had a clear lane to put it away. That goal, entirely architected by Banda, secured the upset for Orlando.
Had Banda scored herself, she’d still be in first place in the Golden Boot race. Instead, that distinction is held by Ashley Sanchez, whose game-winning brace against the Boston Legacy on Saturday pushed her into the lead with 13 goals. Her first goal was the kind she’s scored over and over again this season. She ran the ball down the sideline and into the outer edges of the penalty box, shimmied her hips just enough to unbalance her defender, and drove a hard shot into the far post.
Ashley Sanchez at it again.
— Our Game Magazine (@ourgamemagazine.bsky.social) 2026-08-22T23:53:17.796Z
Her second goal was an altogether different beast. Aïssata Traoré had equalized for Boston seven minutes into second-half stoppage time, and it looked like Boston would steal two points that the Courage desperately wanted to get some cushion above the playoff line. Then, Bianca St-Georges turned her brain off and conceded a foul in the box on the other end of the pitch. After a long VAR review, the ref gave a penalty to North Carolina. It wasn’t obvious, however, who the Courage would send to take it; the team's previous two pens were taken by the prodigious Manaka Matsukubo, who has since departed for Chelsea. Ultimately, Sanchez stepped up to the spot in the 17th minute of stoppage time. The penalty kick had both her team’s place in a tight Shield race and Sanchez’s place in the Golden Boot race in the balance. Rock solid as ever, she put it away calmly.
Sanchez has been in something like a flow state all season, and she stayed there in Wednesday night’s game against Angel City. She scored both of the Courage’s goals in the 2-0 win, and they each demonstrated how dangerous she’s become as a winger who is always looking to run in behind the opponent’s back line. Her first goal of the night was the product of a nifty sequence in which she sprinted off her defender’s shoulder and latched onto a one-touch pass around the corner. The second was even more direct: She ran right past Angel City’s defense to catch up to a long ball from her keeper, and slotted the ball between the other keeper’s legs.
Sanchez has had a turbulent career. She was drafted by Washington in 2020, so her first year as a professional was spent in COVID bubbles. No matter: In that summer’s NWSL Challenge Cup, she performed so well (watch this heel flick!) that she was given the Future Legend award. In 2021, she played in all 22 matches on the way to the Spirit’s Championship win. In 2022, the creative attacking midfielder led the team in assists. In 2023, it was no surprise that Vlatko Andonovski named her to the USWNT’s World Cup roster; the shock came when he didn’t play her for a single minute all tournament. Another nasty surprise came in early 2024 when the Spirit traded her to North Carolina without warning on draft day. “Shocked and heartbroken,” she posted on Instagram at the time. She’s stayed with the Courage since, and while there has been a victim of a classic NWSL coaching carousel; current manager Mak Lind is the third head coach she’s played under at the club.
It’s Lind who has best figured out how to harness Sanchez’s skills. Playing her out on the wing has given her the freedom to run at defenders in a way she couldn’t do as much when she was quarterbacking teams from the center of the pitch. Now, she puts her creativity to use in ways that are more directly lethal. She’s scored a whopping 15 goals on the season already, with nine games left to play.
Ashley Sanchez got hops 🐇😮💨Here is your week 16 Goal of the Week presented by @canonusa!
— NWSL (@nwslsoccer.com) 2026-08-11T18:47:21.924Z
Below Sanchez and Banda in the Golden Boot race are three players with 10 goals. One of them is Evelyn Ijeh, a teammate of Sanchez in North Carolina. It’s Ijeh’s first season in the NWSL, and it took her a few months to warm up. But in the last 12 games, the Swede has netted 10 goals, marking just the third time an NWSL team has had two players reach double-digit goals in the same season. (The other two were, fittingly, North Carolina in 2022 and its predecessor, the Western New York Flash, in 2016.) Ijeh’s on a tear, able to finish seemingly any ball served up to her.
The other two players on 10 goals right now are more predictable figures: Trinity Rodman and Sophia Wilson. The league legends, however, are having redemption seasons of their own. Rodman was in and out last year with injuries, and now she leads second-place Washington in both goals and assists. Wilson missed last season entirely on maternity leave, but she’s more than retained her striker’s instinct, forming alongisde Pietra Tordin a terrifying front line.
Tied with Chawinga at nine goals is Kat Rader, a rookie leading the Houston Dash’s underdog season. Below them, at eight, are Trinity Byars of the San Diego Wave, Janine Sonis of the Denver Summit, and Mina Tanaka of the Utah Royals. Byars missed all but 19 playoff minutes of her rookie season with an ACL injury, so this year marks her first full campaign; Sonis is a league veteran finding vintage form captaining her hometown team; Tanaka had always been better than the Royals deserved, until this year, when it’s all clicked together for the fourth-place squad.
With a third of the season still remaining, all of the above players are in the running to win the Golden Boot. Soccer is a complex team sport, of course, but it rarely offers anything more immediately satisfying than watching an in-form forward rack up goals. So many players consistently finding the net has made this season particularly thrilling to watch, and the competition between them will only heat up as we come into the final stretch. The best thing to do is sit back and enjoy the rest of the show.
