Carli Lloyd’s brutally honest analysis shines amid USWNT's World Cup disaster

Fox Sports analyst Carli Lloyd will be the only American looking good after this year’s disastrous World Cup.

The rookie TV analyst correctly sounded the alarm that an overconfident, under-prepared USWNT was heading for a fall. 

Lloyd was proven right Sunday as Sweden eliminated USWNT in a 5-4 penalty shootout. It was the earliest exit ever for Team USA in the Women’s World Cup. And it ended the dream of a three-peat for the pre-tournament favorites. 

Coverage of Sunday’s loss focused on the winning shot eking over the goal line by a millimeter.  But like the best sports analysts, Lloyd smelled this upset on the breeze. She didn’t mince words or make excuses for her old teammates on Fox’s postgame show. She blamed the players, the coach and the program.

“No, it was not a millimeter. This was years in the making. This is going to haunt the players. I’ll give them credit in saying that they came out and they played; they played well, they just didn’t score a goal. But you can’t stay complacent and not evolve, and that is exactly what has happened,” Lloyd said.

“This is on the players, this is on coach Vlatko Andonovski, U.S. Soccer, that has contributed to this failure and this exit at the World Cup. The team was not prepared, and a lot of these younger players, we’re going to see a new era, and a lot of these younger players, I hope, will use this as a huge learning experience to get better in the future.”

Her Fox colleague Alexi Lalas correctly noted the USWNT would only have had to play the powerful Swedish team if they had under-performed in the Group Stage.

“Instead of playing South Africa, you ended up having to play Sweden, the number three team in the world. Having said all that, this was without a doubt a failure of historic proportions,” Lalas said. “This U.S. team has never finished worse than third in a World Cup, so obviously, going out in the Round of 16 is not good. And when I look at the previous versions of this team that won the World Cup in 2015, in 2019, this is the weakest of the three, and so ultimately, they just weren’t good enough.”