Iya ✨️

I remember winning Regionals in Hawaii at 13, sprinting across the field with my teammates, leis swinging around our necks, certain nothing could ever top that joy. It hasn’t.

I remember dragging my family to the track on Christmas Eve, running from something scarier than Scrooge: the January camp beep test.

I remember scoring goals that felt like destiny, and missing ones that haunted me just as long. I remember the header when I swear my mom borrowed my body for a moment, guiding the ball home herself. (I hope she’ll come back for one more.)

I remember trying to ground myself on a frozen, muddy Manchester pitch, the sting of cold feet somehow settling, after hours of idly chasing perfection.

I remember subbing into the end of a match with nearly fifty thousand people roaring, and tears streaming down my outside back’s face. With one squeeze of her hand as I came onto the pitch, I told her: I’ve got you.

And, I remember meeting Tobin, who came from an opposite map of sports: she, pure love of the game; me, driven to be great, to make my family proud. We met in the middle and filled the spaces the other left open. From her, I learned that joy itself could be reason enough — that the game could be loved without needing to be justified. From me, she learned that our gifts could be carried for others — that the work we poured in could ripple far beyond ourselves. Together, we discovered that there is no single way to belong to this game. There are many paths to the same field, and walking them side by side made us braver, fuller, and truer.

People will say, this isn’t goodbye. But for me, it is. I need it to be—to explain the conflict and sadness and immensity that sit in the pit of my stomach. “See you around” doesn’t capture that. The lessons you taught me—how to run toward fear, how to lead and follow, how to lose and still be whole, how to see life through the eyes of a Rookie — those are forever.

I have a confession: I don’t think you were ever my Dharma, my destiny, or my purpose. You were, simply, my way. I believe I was given the gift of this game so I could be something else: a fighter for progress. For women, for queer folks, for people of color. For love and freedom and equality.

Somehow — despite never making a youth national team, despite lacking the will to tackle, head the ball, or run through walls — I became a mainstay on the best team in the world for over a decade. And I believe it was all so I could be there, behind the scenes, during our fight for Equal Pay. To learn how to organize, to unite, to lead in the name of justice.

To watch Christen Press play soccer is to watch joy, bound only by the human form.

Case in point, the goal she scored this May for Angel City FC, her first at home after recovering from an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear that took four surgeries and two years to overcome. Watch the way it took 24 seconds from the time she entered the field, the way she drives, cuts, and gets the ball to her left foot, even though she almost loses her footing.

Watch the way it sails to the top corner, finding that 90-degree angle and slicing through it, past an outstretched glove until it sinks, blissfully, into netting in front of a sea of ecstatic faces. Watch the way she turns and begins to sprint, joy overriding her coordination, limbs everywhere, her face split open with exhilaration, a smile that maybe feels a little like a scream, a little like relief and a lot like love.

To watch Christen Press in 2025 is to watch the end now, too.

On Wednesday, the former U.S. women’s national team forward announced her retirement at the close of this season. With Angel City sitting six points outside the playoff picture, that may be sooner than many had hoped. Retirements call for flowers, but also reevaluation. Press’ career defies neat storylines of success on and off the field, even as she retires as a two-time World Cup winner.

These days, Press feels the love and support of the women’s soccer community, but that has not always been the case. She has made multiple decisions throughout her professional career to prioritize her needs, desires and mental health. This has not always been celebrated.

“What is a stubbornness, what is an ego, is also a sense of self-worth and bravery, and those things are all true. I have all of them,” Press told The Athletic, calling from her car on her commute home from the Angel City training facility.

Read through the comment sections of articles from over the years, and you’ll find a range of adjectives: spoiled, selfish, entitled, difficult — that old chestnut. There’s worse, too. It’s the internet after all, and Press is a Black queer woman.

But looking at her choices now, Press was ahead of the curve.

Her pro career has been shaped by so many forces, from toxic work environments to being traded without consent, to expansion drafts and her rights being held, to the seeping influence of the systemic abuse across the NWSL. She was fighting for autonomy in a sport that held it just out of reach, and fighting the public’s perception that she was only out for herself.

“At the time, I remember, in every situation, I felt like the villain,” she said. “It’s been a really long time since I felt that. And now, when I walk into any stadium, I feel like I have been celebrated above what my soccer skills have done for people’s lives because people have come to see why I am the way I am.”

Press is used to walking into rooms and feeling an immediate tension — that people on the other side of the desk were waiting for her to launch into yet another complaint, when in her eyes, she was simply trying to make things better. And not just for her, for everyone. She got used to the feeling that something was trying to dim her light as she was fighting to shine.

“Sometimes you have to take all the criticism as a sign that you’re going in the right direction,” she said.

Her wife, Tobin Heath (former teammate, co-host of the RE-Cap Show and co-founder of their media company RE), uses the word “conviction” when describing Press. It’s hard for Press to change her mind, especially if she thinks something is right or wrong — something she got from her mother, Stacy, who passed away in 2019 at age 58.

“My mom could argue the stupidest thing for hours and hours, like nobody’s business, whatever she believed in. I did not agree with my mom on a lot of things, but whatever she believed, there was no changing her mind,” Press said with a laugh, noting she herself found it hard to live with at times. “I learned through her that when you do what’s right, you will weather the storm like you have to.”

The storms found Press, whether she was looking for them or not.

Look at Press’ professional club career after her time at Stanford, the only through line is the fractured nature of her career.

She played her rookie season with magicJack in WPS before the league shuttered. “Probably the worst environment I was ever in,” Press said earlier this year. “A lot of toxic and unprofessional things went down here.”

Next came her first decision to head to Europe, made in four days at her parents’ house. It was a leap of faith, hoping a career would be on the other side.

She struggled to find much detail about the Damallsvenskan, the highest division of women’s soccer in Sweden, but she went to the city of Gothenburg anyway. In her first season, she won the Swedish Cup with Goteborg FC before making the move to league champions Tyreso for 2013. The team was stacked with talent, with a starting forward line of Press, Marta and Spain’s Verónica Boquete. She’d finish that season as the Damallsvenskan’s leading scorer, though the team would come up just short in the Champions League final against Germany’s Wolfsburg.

In 2014, Press returned to the U.S., joining the Chicago Red Stars as an allocated player two months into the season. By 2016, she captained the team. But by the close of 2017, she was on her way out following a NWSL Best XI-caliber year.

It wasn’t until the fall of 2021 that her experience in Chicago was fully revealed. Press had tried to report then-head coach Rory Dames for a toxic environment as early as her first season with the team. The reports went nowhere. She was long gone by the time the NWSL gave Dames a lifetime ban for his part in perpetuating a culture of abuse.

“The second time I went back to Sweden was after I was traded, without consent in my sleep, from Chicago to the Houston Dash,” Press said.

She woke up to the news on Twitter, with the massive three-player trade of Press, Carli Lloyd and Sam Kerr dominating the headlines of the 2018 college draft in January.

Press never acknowledged the trade. Coverage of whether she’d go to Houston, of who said what and when between the Red Stars and the Dash, and her representatives and even Press herself in terms of her preferred landing spots in the NWSL spiralled. Press got a healthy portion of the blame. She didn’t report to Houston’s preseason.

“I was with Tobin in Portland. There was a preseason tournament where Houston, Chicago, Portland and Seattle were all in Portland. I was hiding out in the city of Portland from my own preseason, dating someone in another preseason, and my former team were also there. I was hiding from everyone,” she said.

Her conviction took her back to Sweden.

“I believed that I was a full human and that I didn’t have to go to a team, being shipped off like cattle. Most people at the time felt what I was doing was wrong and rude.” She said people considered her ungrateful. Press wanted — “deserved,” she says now — a life beyond football, but her decision to stand her ground had consequences beyond needing to return to Sweden. It impacted her standing with the national team under former head coach Jill Ellis ahead of the 2019 World Cup.

She made the 2018 SheBelieves roster, but only picked up about 30 minutes as a substitute — then was left off the next roster entirely. In 2018, Press only earned 445 minutes in 10 appearances; by the next year, her playing time had rebounded to nearly three times that at 1181 minutes.

Her second stint with Goteborg was cut short after Houston made a deal with the Utah Royals, sending Press to Salt Lake City in June 2018, the same month she returned to the USWNT roster.

That chapter ended with COVID-19 disrupting the 2020 season. The NWSL was the first pro league to come back during the ongoing pandemic, something the league was touting.

“I didn’t feel happy about that,” Press said. “I felt terrified.”

She and Heath opted to wait for the start of the Women’s Super League (WSL) in England, signing with Manchester United. By November, the Royals left her rights unprotected in the expansion draft for Racing Louisville FC. She (and Heath) were selected. No one in Louisville confirmed they’d want to head there, she said. Neither of them went.

“Europe, for the early days of my career, was freedom,” Press said. “I kept choosing my own freedom.”

Eventually, Press’s rights were traded to the newest NWSL expansion team.

“#BringCP23toLA wasn’t just a hashtag — Angel City signed me because of you,” Press wrote in her retirement letters on The Athletic, describing how the fans advocated for her return.

What should have been the triumphant closing act in her birthplace of Los Angeles instead went sideways. Press tore her ACL in a 2022 match against Louisville.

Press said she never felt like her career was easy, adding that no decade-long national team career is easy. As she phrased it, it “never looked like a dream come true.”

When she spoke to her Angel City teammates this weekend, she told them that no one would write the final chapter like this: tearing an ACL, riding the bench, scoring a couple of goals and playing 15-minute spells to close out matches.

“It does, in a way, feel true to my life,” she said. “It’s not fair, and it’s not a storybook. This is also not the final chapter of my life. It’s a chapter, and the lessons and the pain and the circumstances teach me and help me feel things that are important to get to my next place.”

When Press returned from the ACL injury, she wanted to be herself, putting the team on her back, scoring goals, and winning trophies. That’s always been the expectation.

Even though that’s not what the final season has looked like, does she still feel like maybe it was a middle finger to the injury — proof that she could come back and end it on her terms?

“I’m trying really hard not to write a happy ending to this,” Press said, though she wouldn’t actually change it. She didn’t return to her old form, but she did play as her “happiest version”.

“I laugh every time I score in practice, I take time, I care about how other people are feeling,” she said. “I don’t have to disconnect and be so honed in on scoring on the weekend and doing my job that I can actually be a mentor, a friend, a listener.”

This, too, belongs in the full evaluation of Press’ career, along with what she has helped to build in her time with the USWNT and as a professional player — made all the more important by the public misconception that she was only out for herself.

“I got this season to play in a fully professionalized environment and in a lot of ways, it feels like the house that we built,” she said. “Now other people get to live in it. That’s such a gift that I got to live in it for a year and see the fruits of our labor.”

Press is moving out, but like many of the other builders of her generation, she isn’t going too far.

Press has a four-point list of what’s next: stay fit, she’s still 90 minutes match fit, with some measure of relief she could keep going if she wanted to; embrace the wanderlust, with four months’ worth of travel already lined up across the globe; have more time to focus on her and Heath’s media company; and a break. A real one, an escape from that ever-present sense of being dimmed.

“I want to spend six months around people who think I’m awesome,” Press said. She wants to find people with an abundance mindset, do think tanks, friend trips, “just be around love.”

She doesn’t want to hold her tongue. She wants to shine. She wants, simply, to be herself.

Before she can start on that list, there are still at least a couple of games to go — and time not just for Press to get her flowers, but a full appreciation of her career with a revised accounting for the choices she made.