The United States’ back-to-back friendlies against Spain left Emma Hayes with more questions than answers, and the most pressing of them sits in the middle of the pitch. Spain looked the more confident and effective side across both meetings, controlling the games and forcing the four-time world champions to settle for scraps in the final third. In the first match, Spain raced to a 2-0 lead inside 15 minutes and held that margin for the rest of the game. On Tuesday, the US again went in at half-time facing an identical deficit, and only after Hayes made five changes in unison did her team regain a foothold and pull two goals back through direct, incisive attacks. That is hardly a title-winning blueprint, and not only because a World Cup limits teams to five substitutions rather than the eight the two sides agreed to for these friendlies.
Both squads were missing significant players. Naomi Girma and Sam Coffey headlined the US absentees, while Aitana Bonmatí, Mariona Caldentey and Clàudia Pina were among Spain’s. Yet Spain’s alternates slotted into the lineup and executed the team’s game model, a product of holistic familiarity: each player understood their role after meticulous refinement, so the unit around them kept operating as expected. That kind of synergy can be enough to beat a more talented team, and the days when the United States could expect to overcome another top women’s national team on talent alone are long gone.
Hayes has never implied otherwise, and her staff have been immensely thorough in working towards the best 26-player roster they can build. This year, like 2025, has been a year of deep talent evaluation. The October window included four players without previous caps, along with returns to the pitch for longtime absentees Mallory Swanson and Ashley Sanchez, whose goals earned the draw on Tuesday. Kate Del Fava and Pietra Tordin became the 33rd and 34th players to debut since Hayes took charge in mid-2024. The search has made the pool deeper, but its duration and density may be coming at the cost of the synergy Hayes needs.
A well-organised midfield is borderline mandatory to win a World Cup. Spain dominated the 2023 tournament with awe-inspiring play in the heart of the park, just as the United States did during their successful repeat bid in 2019, when Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan’s exploits were made possible by one of the most balanced midfield trios in recent memory: Sam Mewis as an ideal all-around central midfielder, Julie Ertz as a hard-nosed defensive midfielder and Rose Lavelle’s facilitation to link with the attack. Injuries forced Mewis into early retirement and Ertz called time on her career after 2023, leaving Hayes with the tall task of crafting a worthy sequel.
Her best Chelsea sides were built with midfielders whose technical acumen was bolstered by a tireless commitment to tracking back and pressing. Doing that consistently requires a second-nature understanding of teammates and how they operate, on the ball and especially without it — something that cannot be rushed. Hayes tried to give herself a deadline of sorts to begin that work. “I want to get to the end of June where I have a really strong sense of a core group of players that will form part of the build towards the World Cup,” she told CBS, “but also know that we need to get some consistency in relationships, connections on the pitch, and we have to forego that for now while we’re still evaluating players at an individual level.” That stated aim came before the April 2025 friendly window, with the hope of paving a two-year runway to refine partnerships before the big games in Brazil.
Injuries can partly be blamed for the delay, and more recent first-time call-ups, including this window’s, have been made with an eye toward the 2028 Olympics. But the US still suffers from a specific lack of clarity in the middle of the park. Tuesday’s friendly was the Americans’ 27th match since the start of 2025, and seven midfielders have made at least three starting lineups in that span. Coffey and Claire Hutton have been the preferred defensive midfielders; Lindsey Heaps, Lily Yohannes and the injured Olivia Moultrie as central midfielders; and Rose Lavelle and Jaedyn Shaw in attacking midfield. Heaps has regularly floated between all three roles, the only player to start in each spot. While six of her 12 starts have come as the more all-around No 8, her other six have been evenly split between defensive midfield and attacking midfield.
Despite that consistency of personnel, Hayes has used 17 different combinations of three midfielders over the same period. Tuesday was just the second time Hutton, Heaps and Lavelle opened a match together, and the consensus first-choice trio of Coffey, Heaps and Lavelle has started together only twice in 20 months. The most common combination has been Lavelle playing in front of a Coffey-Hutton double pivot, on four occasions. Testing either of those trios against Spain became impossible once Coffey withdrew from camp with an injured left ankle. The perceived drawback of that setup is that both Coffey and Hutton thrive in more withdrawn deployment, which can increase the gaps between the defensive block and the attack. The full-backs — Emily Fox on the right and, increasingly often, Gisele Thompson on the left — may provide enough progression to mitigate that, but it is also why the No 8 role is one Hayes still wants to incorporate.
It is another factor that makes Moultrie’s torn ACL in August even more impactful. Heaps remains Hayes’s captain and Yohannes has earned regular starts with an improving skill set, but Moultrie was arguably the most natural complement to Coffey, alongside whom she partnered in Portland for four seasons. And yet she has made just three starts since January 2025, none of them alongside Coffey. Injuries are impartial, and no individual can be assumed to arrive at World Cup camp in peak health. But continuous recalibration in midfield — for reasons of circumstance and experimentation alike — and a corresponding lack of system clarity in all phases threatens to keep a viable contender from maximising its potential against fellow heavyweights like Spain.