July 25, 2023

WWC: Better than cheese or wine

After a comment from one of my readers, I decided to explore some of our veteran players for this year’s Cup. I couldn’t decide where to draw the line on who to highlight, so I played with a few different possible lines.

If I look at the oldest player on each team, that list of 32 players ranges from Nigeria’s Onome Ebi at 40 years, 73 days to Haiti’s Roselord Borgella at only 30 years, 110 days. This feels like the wrong approach, because there are 136 players older than Borgella but not the oldest player on their teams, including fully half of South Korea’s roster.

So I asked: What is the average age of retirement for professional soccer/football players who are women? I did a little digging around, and found a few different numbers to this question:

I found one that suggested 32-34, which as someone on the verge of 34, feels like a really wide gap. Of the 736 players at the World Cup this year, 106 are over 32, and 45 are over 34.

Meanwhile, the average retirement age for male footballers is 35. One website posited a few, unsurprising guesses as to why: pregnancy, injuries, lower pay, and lack of support.¹

If I look at players over 35, that brings the list down to 31 players, which feels manageable. I won’t go too deep into this, but I do want to name these players, who are likely all competing in their last World Cup. (Though many said that about Christine Sinclair in 2019, when she was 36, and here she is again.)

Part of why I’m laying out all of this is to highlight the amount of incredible experience and maturity represented at this year's Cup. There are 46 players under 20 who will get to meet, watch, and compete with or against these experienced veterans. And when I speak of their experience, I mean both on and off the pitch.

For Sinclair, Ebi, and Brazil’s Marta,² this will be their 6th World Cup.³ They all first appeared at the 2003 Cup, 20 years ago. The 2003 Women’s World Cup was to be hosted in China, but due to SARS, was relocated to the US. The US hosted the 1999 Cup and, therefore existing infrastructure and people with recent-past experience in place to support a quick turnaround. 16 teams played a total of 32 matches, with all the group stage matches being held in doubleheader format in the same stadiums. The total attendance for the Cup was 679,666. 

By contrast, this year 32 teams will play 64 matches and so far the average match attendance is 30,328 which, extrapolated out, would estimate just under 2 million expected to attend. I can’t find numbers for the 2003 broadcasts, but the 2015 World Cup, the 4th for these three players, had around 436 million viewers. This year is expected to have about 2 billion viewers. Stadium Australia, which will host the final, holds four times as many people as the Home Depot Center in Carson, CA, which hosted the final in 2003.

What about money? Well. In 2003, Germany won the Cup and the team took home a trophy. That's it. There was no prize money for the first four Women's World Cup. This year, thanks in part to the organizing and vocal protests of players, all 736 playing at the Cup will receive at least $30,000 and each team will net a minimum of $1,560,000 which is, if I’ve done my math right here, about 30 times what the Jamaican team had to crowdfund to get the players and staff to Australia. The winning team will get $4,290,000,⁴ with each player also taking home $270,000 of their own. Unlike the men’s game, for some players at the Cup, this is the life-changing kind of money.

All of this is to say: The game has changed and grown dramatically since these three players attended their first World Cup two decades ago.

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With all of that set up, let me dive into the stats. A few things to note:

• I included a couple of 34 year olds who will be 35 before the end of the Cup
• Of the 31 players on this list, 15 are under 36.
• The stats for goals and caps (aka appearances) are as of the beginning of the Cup, for the sake of consistency.

Almost 35 year olds

Player	Nation	Position	Date of birth	Age	Caps	Goals
Sanne Troelsgaard Nielsen	Denmark	Midfielder	1988-08-15	34.94	176	55
Trần Thị Thùy Trang	Vietnam	Midfielder	1988-08-08	34.96	60	7
Kelley O'Hara5	USA	Defender	1988-08-04	34.98	157	3

35 year olds

Player	Nation	Position	Date of birth	Age	Caps	Goals
Bárbara	Brazil	Goalkeeper	1988-07-04	35.06	69	0
Sophie Schmidt	Canada	Midfielder	1988-06-28	35.08	221	20
Cho So-hyun (조소현)	South Korea	Midfielder	1988-06-24	35.09	144	25
Najat Badri (نجاة بدري)	Morocco	Midfielder	1988-05-19	35.18	5	0
Lydia Williams	Australia	Goalkeeper	1988-05-13	35.20	102	0
Alyssa Naeher	USA	Goalkeeper	1988-04-20	35.26	90	0
Sandra Sepúlveda	Colombia	Goalkeeper	1988-03-03	35.39	49	0
Carolina Mendes	Portugal	Forward	1987-11-27	35.66	113	23
Ali Riley	New Zealand	Defender and captain	1987-10-30	35.74	154	2
Yoon Young-geul (윤영글)	South Korea	Goalkeeper	1987-10-28	35.74	27	0
Niamh Fahey	Ireland	Defender	1987-10-13	35.78	106	1
Tamires	Brazil	Defender	1987-10-10	35.79	140	7

36 year olds

Player	Nation	Position	Date of birth	Age	Caps	Goals
Linda Sembrant	Sweden	Defender	1987-05-15	36.19	136	17
Tochukwu Oluehi	Nigeria	Goalkeeper	1987-05-02	36.23	14	0
Mônica	Brazil	Defender	1987-04-21	36.26	42	6
Park Eun-sun (박은선)	South Korea	Forward	1986-12-25	36.58	42	20
Fabienne Humm	Switzerland	Forward	1986-12-20	36.60	78	25

37 year olds

Player	Nation	Position	Date of birth	Age	Caps	Goals
Carol Sánchez	Costa Rica	Defender	1986-04-16	37.28	36	2
Marta	Brazil	Forward	1986-02-19	37.43	175	115
Gaëlle Thalmann	Switzerland	Goalkeeper	1986-01-18	37.52	104	0
Noko Matlou	South Africa	Defender	1985-09-30	37.82	161	64

38 year olds

Player	Nation	Position	Date of birth	Age	Caps	Goals
Megan Rapinoe	USA	Forward	1985-07-05	38.06	199	63
Caroline Seger	Sweden	Midfielder and captain	1985-03-19	38.35	235	32
Aivi Luik	Australia	Defender	1985-03-18	38.35	43	1
Kim Jung-mi (김정미)	South Korea	Goalkeeper	1984-10-16	38.78	135	0

39 year olds

Player	Nation	Position	Date of birth	Age	Caps	Goals
Vanina Correa6	Argentina	Goalkeeper	1983-08-14	39.95	41	0

40 year olds

Player	Nation	Position	Date of birth	Age	Caps	Goals
Christine Sinclair9	Canada	Forward and captain	1983-06-12	40.12	3237	1908
Onome Ebi	Nigeria	Defender and captain	1983-05-08	40.21	107	3