Nights of magic and fireworks as the new champion was crowned in the early hours of Sunday with NJ/NY Gotham FC earning a National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) Championship trophy for the first time in the club’s history following an abysmal campaign prior to the current one that even the bookies didn’t put a chance on them albeit it did happen in grand style.
Gotham have officially achieved the unthinkable: From last place in 2022 to champions in 2023.
With a record fan attendance at a NWSL Championship final, 25,011 fans were in attendance at the Snapdragon Stadium which is the largest crowd in NWSL Championship history as Gotham produced a 2-1 win, relying on goals from forwards Lynn Williams and Esther González to beat a Reign side that got on the scoresheet via midfielder Rose Lavelle in the first half.
Prior to the defining clash, both sides are chasing a first ever Championship. OL Reign have featured in two championships–back-to-back in 2014 and 2015–but they lost on both occasions while Gotham FC have reached the last hurdle for the first time ever in the NWSL although they did win the old Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) back in its inaugural campaign in 2009 as Sky Blue FC.
NJ/NY Gotham is a pretty new entity having only been established in 2021 after Sky Blue FC was rocked by various scandals in their latter years. The change of name reflected a major administrative overhaul and since the change, their stocks have been up and falling as they qualified for the NWSL playoffs and only lost the Challenge Cup on penalties in the final.
From the off-field trouble with general manager Alyse LaHue, Freya Coombe exit, it went from bad to worse in 2022 to what Sky Blue had been in their dying years: the worst club in the NWSL. They finished rock bottom with just 13 points from 22 regular season matches, having fired Coombe’s replacement Scott Parkinson mid-season and seen out the rest of the campaign with an interim coach.
New season smart recruits in key areas of the pitch both young and experienced players, off-field investments from Carli Lloyd, basketball legend Sue Bird and NBA star Kevin Durant and Juan Carlos Amorós’ Arrival signaled a new dawn of events rightfully as seen.
Either Megan Rapinoe of the OL Reign or Ali Krieger of Gotham FC was going to walk off the pitch and into retirement with the National Women’s Soccer League trophy. Krieger got the trophy. Rapinoe got a heartbreaking end to her brilliant career as she limped off the field for the last time with an apparent torn right Achilles tendon suffered in the first few minutes of the game with Bethany Balcer jumping in with attempt to adapt to the circumstances straight away.
A lot of records made an broken on an eventful night, Gotham FC ends the year on a three-match winning streak, the club’s longest in the regular season or playoffs since July 9-July 23, 2016 as they have also started the same 11 players for all three playoff games and four games overall in 2023, winning all four of them and out-scoring their opponents by a 7-1 margin.
Whilst Juan Carlos Amorós joins an exclusive club of coaches to win an NWSL title in his first year with a club (joining Cindy Parlow Cone (2013, POR), Kris Ward (2021, WAS) and Rhian Wilkinson (2022, POR), Lynn Williams on the other hand played in her fifth final, tying Kristen Hamilton for the league record but Will is now the first player in league history to start in five finals.
After emerging as World Champion with Spain, Esther is now the ninth player to win the Women’s World Cup and the NWSL championship in the same year and the first non-American with Williams extending her record for career playoff minutes to 1,221, incredible.
Founded in 2007, the club has been part of the NWSL since its inception in 2012 wining their first trophy in 2009 after winning the inaugural Women’s Professional Soccer championship. Most recently, the club won its first NWSL playoff match since 2013 during the 2020 NWSL Challenge Cup.
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