When Orlando Pride midfielder Ally Watt came into preseason camp this year, she thought while she watched a scrimmage: “This is gonna be a good year.”
What a good year it turned out to be.
On Saturday night, the Pride capped an NWSL Shield-winning season with the ultimate hardware by defeating the Washington Spirit 1-0 and lifting the 2024 NWSL championship trophy.
Barbra Banda — who else? — scored the lone goal for the Pride with a near-post slice in the 37th minute, taking one of the Pride’s limited chances in the match. It was her 17th goal of the NWSL season overall and fourth in the three postseason games.
The Spirit heavily outshot the Pride, 26-9, and forced Orlando to defend to the last in the final 15 minutes. While the Spirit was high volume in its attacking, it lacked intensity and could not get Trinity Rodman — struggling with a recurring back injury — into dangerous positions.
GO DEEPER
Orlando and Marta win first NWSL championship
It’s easy in hindsight to apply words like destiny to a winning team. There were plenty of doubts, especially when Orlando had two losses in a row last month near the end of the regular season. But as the team recovered its balance and fought its way through the playoffs, it managed the tricky balance of all championship teams: getting the players bought in and hyped, but not too hyped.
“Good nervous-energy, excitement,” defender Kerry Abello said two days before the final, describing how she felt. “There’s so much hype built around this game. And, I mean, we’ve had such an awesome season, and this is like the pinnacle of that.”
The Pride players seemed loose the week of the championship, as loose as any team can be facing the ultimate win-or-go-home scenario. They laughed and joked with each other and with head coach Seb Hines during media day, heckling him as he got on stage to accept his NWSL Coach of the Year award. Marta examined her own trophy as a member of the league’s Best XI, a shiny little crystal beacon, and tink-tinked it with her ring, joking, “Is this diamond?”
Marta was a central figure in the championship narrative. After seven losing seasons for the Pride, there was a sense of repayment for the Brazilian superstar’s many years of service and everything she’s given to the club. Her mother was at the game too, the first time getting to see her daughter play in the United States live.
Marta was a key part of the success (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
Her teammates described Marta, now 38, as a player of extraordinary talents and extraordinary passion, someone who would become so emotional in her motivational gameday speeches to the team that she would cry.
“I think there’s a huge feeling of doing this for Marta,” said Abello. “Every time she talks to us, in like the team huddle, there’s so much passion sometimes she even sheds a tear. She wants it so badly. And I think we’re all super-inspired by her and just what she’s given to the game. … I don’t know, whenever she talks in the huddle, I’m like, ‘I’m ready to run through a wall for this woman, over and over again’.”
Orlando did run through walls — and occasionally Spirit players — for Marta yesterday. And when the final whistle blew, the team mobbed her on the field as she sank to her knees, with her mom watching from the stands.
(Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
“I see players come and then leave, come and leave,” Marta said after the game of her years with the Pride. “We had ups and downs. Some seasons, we were OK, but not good enough. And I always ask myself what I’m looking for, because I’m still staying (in) Orlando.
“Tonight, I had all the answers.”
But Marta is just one woman. Her best club season in recent memory arrived on the back of a sustained effort at the Pride to right the ship, a testament to patience and the power of continuity under the right leaders. NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman boasted during championship weekend that this league is a place where bottom-placed teams can surge to the top in just a season or two — like Orlando, the Spirit and 2023 champions Gotham FC.
But for Orlando, it wasn’t just a case of pouring money in and waiting for the results.
Sure, money helped, as neatly demonstrated by the soaring success of last night’s matchwinner Banda, who the Pride paid a reported $740,000 transfer fee for.
GO DEEPER
Barbra Banda: The softly-spoken Zambian goal scorer making noise with Orlando Pride
But Orlando’s 2024, built on years of work, showed there’s a place for longer-term planning and a willingness to build. It’s not the only way to operate, and it requires the right owners with the right sporting team, but it has now panned out under the Wilf family’s ownership, Hines, team captain Marta and general manager Haley Carter.
Banda has been a huge success (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
So, what’s next for Orlando? Despite their success, they were on the lower end of the league in terms of average attendance, pulling 8,340. Compare that to the league leaders, San Diego and Angel City, both averaging above 19,000. The Spirit averaged 13,937.
Co-owner Mark Wilf told The Athletic on Saturday night that he would continue to invest in off-field improvements.
“We’ve done a lot in our stadium on that front, in terms of food offerings and family-friendly experience with pregame and postgame,” he said. “We have dedicated staff now to the Pride on the business side and the soccer side. We didn’t always have that.”
Wilf also said the team has seen massively increased social engagement and sponsorship. And while he left it to Carter to answer any questions about extending Marta’s contract as she enters free agency, he also acknowledged there are always things teams can do to create continuity year by year in terms of trying to go from winning season to winning season.
“The main thing you can control is having a culture where players can thrive and hone their craft where they want to come,” Wilf said. “With free agency becoming more preeminent in the league, you want to be a place where people come to and they want to play around coaches and staff that are supportive. And that’s not always the case in every franchise. And I think as ownerships become more seasoned, more experienced, more resourced, it’s going to become a more highly competitive league.”
Hines and his players have mused over the past few months how they don’t think they could repeat this season: the unbeaten streak, the clean sheets, Marta’s resurgence, the Shield, the championship trophy. Sustained excellence takes sustained effort, and in a league this competitive, ranking yourself first over 26 regular-season games and then surviving three rounds of a single-elimination playoff tournament while juggling coast-to-coast travel and keeping everyone healthy is a complicated task.
Yet Hines said this is the standard for the team now. “It’s going to be incredibly difficult to beat that,” he said.
Next season, they’ll try to.
But questions about carrying over their league-leading defense, finding Banda’s ceiling and keeping Marta in town can wait. For one night, the Pride could be the team that went from having to be motivated by being told nobody respected them to being the one everyone admires (or, at least, envies).
Maybe it wasn’t destiny, but it was the closest thing to it.
(Top photo: Kyle Rivas/Getty Images)
