Angel City believes it finally has right chemistry to be competitive amid rebuild
Gisele Thompson was 5 years old when Claire Emslie made her professional soccer debut. She now plays behind Emslie on the right side of Angel City’s formation and, if you ask Emslie, the difference in age hasn’t hurt their chemistry.
“We don’t even need to talk because we have that relationship on the pitch,” Emslie said.
Off the pitch, it’s a different story. They could talk all day and still not understand one another.
“I don’t know what she says half the time,” Emslie said. “And I’m sure she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.”
Read more:Commentary: For Alyssa and Gisele Thompson, Angel City 2.0 was too good to pass up
The problem isn’t language. It’s culture. And it’s pervasive on a team with one of the widest age spreads in women’s soccer.
Angel City FC, which opens its fourth NWSL season Sunday by hosting the San Diego Wave, has five players who aren’t old enough to buy a drink and seven others who meet the age requirement to run for the U.S. Senate.
Consider that forward Christen Press, 36, and defender Ali Riley, 37, were playing together at Stanford the year teenage teammates Kennedy Fuller and Casey Phair were born. And forward Sydney Leroux won a World Cup before defender Savy King had finished grade school.
That can make for some awkward moments on a team in which more than half the players are a decade or more apart in age.
“I actually think the difference in musical tastes, of difference slang, it’s kind of fun. People get close in ways that you wouldn’t really think of because of the age,” said goalkeeper and vice captain Angelina Anderson, who at 23 has become a kind of interpreter for women on both sides of the generation gap.
So has Phair, 17, who is both a World Cup veteran and the youngest player on Angel City’s roster.
“Casey is oftentimes teaching the older players the younger slang,” Anderson said. Phair, who was born the day the first iPhone hit the market, is also good at tech support, she added.
And while that’s welcome — “I need a lot of tech support,” Press said — that’s not why Angel City has become a team for the ages.
“You need senior pros and you need youth to be winning now and winning next year and winning the year after,” said Mark Parsons, who is entering his first season as Angel City’s sporting director. “You need this balance.”
Parsons had it at Portland, where he won three trophies in his final season with a team that had 38-year-old Christine Sinclair and 36-year-old Becky Sauerbrunn play alongside 16-year-old Olivia Moultrie. Age spreads like that are becoming more common in the sport, with higher salaries allowing women to play longer at the same time teens are skipping college or leaving early to go pro.
Read more:Angel City FC picks Mark Parsons, who's won an NWSL championship, to build a winner
Last year about 5% of NWSL players were younger than 20 with the Athletic reporting that 13 players, including 14-year-old Mckenna Whitham, jumped from club soccer to the NWSL since 2024. That number is certain to increase with the abolition of the league’s college draft.
Angel City’s youth movement has created a new role for players such as Press and Emslie, who are being counted on to mentor the youngsters.
“Bringing in Riley Tiernan, who’s on fire right now, Julie Dufour, Alyssa Thompson, Casey Phair; they get to be around Christen Press,” Parsons said. “It’s great. It saves a lot of time for the coaches. A lot of work’s happening.”
It’s a responsibility Press has embraced after missing most of Angel City’s first three seasons because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament.
“For me to be able to be a resource for them has brought me a value and a role that I never imagined I’d have. And I really do enjoy it,” she said.
“I sit next to Alyssa Thompson in the locker room and we are both attacking players. And we’re like on the bookends of a career, right? She’s looking up at all the things that she could accomplish and I’m in a place where I’ve done a lot. I have that experience and information and knowledge and what it takes to be successful at the level for over a decade. There’s a lot of positive that gets exchanged.”
Press, an L.A. native who was Angel City’s first signing, re-signed in January, the day after Parsons was hired. That was part of a busy winter in which the team parted ways with Becki Tweed, its second manager in three seasons, and completely remade the front office under new majority owners Willow Bay and Bob Iger.
“This is absolutely Angel City 2.0,” Parsons said of a franchise that launched with great fanfare and ambition only to struggle, losing more games than it won and conceding more goals than it scored in three mostly disappointing seasons.
Read more:Angel City unveils new facility in effort 'to build a winning culture'
“It’s next moment, it’s next phase. It’s been three years and now it’s time to launch a new era.”
The team will begin that era Sunday under interim coach Sam Laity, who is expected to remain with Angel City in some capacity when a permanent manager is hired this summer. In the meantime, Parsons said, he’ll be focused on how the team plays and not necessarily whether it wins.
“I hope the result is wonderful. But I care about the performance, I care that we show our identity,” he said.
“We know we’ve got to get some points. We know we’re going to compete. But it takes four games to get a taste of what your team’s going to look like. It takes eight games to know what your team’s going to look like. I’m really excited for these next eight games to really understand and know where we are.”
For the teenagers, the players Anderson calls the “young’uns,” the deliberate timeline feels right. A lot has gone wrong in three years and it will take a lot to fix it. But for the likes of Emslie, a Scottish international who is the franchise leader in goals with 16 in all competition, time is short.
“You have to live in the moment as a player. You can’t ever look to the future. You can’t look to the next game,” she said.
“It’s a long-term project we’re in now and we’re just at the start. That will take time, so I can understand what they’re saying. But as a player, we want to win, no matter what.”
2025 schedule
(All times Pacific)
March: 16 – vs. San Diego, 3:50 p.m.; 21 – at Portland, 7 p.m.; 30 – vs. Seattle, 5 p.m.
April: 12 – at Houston, 2 p.m.; 18 -- vs. Gotham, 7:30 p.m.; 25 – at Orlando, 5 p.m.
May: 2 – at Washington; 5 p.m.; 9 – vs. Utah, 7:30 p.m.; 17 – at Bay FC, 7 p.m.; 24 – vs. Louisville, 7 p.m.
June: 7 – vs. Chicago, 7 p.m.; 14 – vs. North Carolina, 7 p.m.; 20 – at Kansas City, 5 p.m.
August: 1 – at Seattle, 7:30 p.m.; 9 – at San Diego, 7 p.m.; 15 -- at Utah, 7 p.m.; 21 – vs. Orlando, 7:30 p.m.
September: 1 – vs. Bay FC, 6 p.m.; 7 – at Gotham, 2 p.m.; 13 – at North Carolina, 9:30 a.m.; 18 – vs. Washington, 7:30 p.m.; 27 -- at Louisville, 4:30 p.m.
October: 6 – vs. Kansas City, 7:30 p.m.; 12 – vs. Houston, 2 p.m.; 19 – vs. Portland, 2 p.m.
November: 2 – at Chicago, TBD
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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