Mal Swanson Is Back! And So Are The Red Stars

Almost a year ago, the USWNT played Ireland in two friendlies. As much as I appreciate Ireland’s grittiness and physical play, I deeply, deeply, do not appreciate that those things, along with inept refereeing, led to a terrible injury for Mallory Swanson—one that would keep her away from professional soccer for 11 months, including the most recent World Cup. 

Swanson had been on fire, scoring seven goals for the national team in January and February of 2023 alone. And some end-of-year stats made her dominance at the beginning of the year even more obvious: Despite not playing at all after April 8, the day of her injury, she was the USWNT’s top scorer of 2023. Put another way, she scored seven to everyone else’s combined 29 goals—that’s almost one-fifth of every U.S. goal scored in 2023—all by one player in just two months (the national team didn’t play any games in March). The team wasn’t functional in 2023, but Swanson sure was. Until she wasn’t.

No team wants their star shooter to suffer an injury, but it shouldn’t be debilitating. The U.S. was winning games in the beginning of 2023, and winning games can obscure a lot of issues within how a team is actually doing. So when Swanson was cruelly taken out of the picture, it became painfully clear that, in many ways, the team had been riding her coattails.

The USWNT suffered, and continues to suffer from, a yearslong spate of injuries that doesn’t seem to be letting up. What might have happened at the 2023 World Cup if we had had a healthy Cat Macario? Sam Mewis? Christen Press? Tobin Heath? Who knows. But those possibilities feel more removed; each was injured for quite a while before the World Cup, so they never could have been considered in any substantial plans for the tournament. But when it comes to Swanson, there’s an alternate universe in which she was spared by the soccer gods that fateful April day and went with the USWNT down to New Zealand and Australia. If her pre-injury form is any indication, she would have scored a shit ton of goals for the team. What hurts the most is that the possibility feels so plausible, like the team just missed it by a millimeter twist of fate. 

Unfortunately, we don’t live in that dreamscape. Swanson did get hurt, and it was awful. In the Ireland friendly, Swanson tore her patellar tendon and, as she told Mewis on her podcast The Women’s Game, her kneecap dislocated into her thigh. She had surgery, and about a week afterward, became seriously ill. Her knee had become infected, she said, deeper than even the patellar tendon lies. The infection, and the pain that came with it, changed her perspective. Whereas after the initial injury, she still had hopes to make it to the World Cup in a few months, later she wasn’t thinking about playing anymore. Instead of dreams of New Zealand and Australia, her mindset was, “I literally just need to feel better, because I was so sick,” she told Mewis. She underwent a second,…