When the World Cup starts on Thursday in Australia and New Zealand, the best women’s football players in the world will be there.
Spain’s Alexia Putellas
Many people think that the 29-year-old aggressive midfielder is the best woman football player in the world.
The last two years, she won the Women’s Ballon d’Or. In February, she kept her title as The Best FIFA Women’s Player for 2022, even though she missed the second half of the year because of a major knee injury.
Putellas, a star player for Barcelona, is the first woman to get 100 games for Spain. They missed her flair and goals at the 2022 European Championship, where they lost in the quarterfinals to England, who went on to win the tournament.
Putellas was one of the Spanish players who wanted changes to be made to the national team. However, he did not join the 15 players who did not want to be called up last year because of disagreements with coach Jorge Vilda and the Spanish football federation.
Sam Kerr (Australia)
If the co-hosts want to do well at the World Cup, Chelsea forward Kerr will need to be at his best.
The Australia captain, who is now 29 years old, made her international debut when she was just 15. She has played for her country more than 120 times and has scored a goal on average every other time. At the 2019 World Cup, she got five goals.
At Chelsea, where she has played 38 games and scored 29 goals, her numbers are just as amazing.
Kerr is so well-known in Australia that she carried the country’s flag at King Charles’s coronation.
Megan Rapinoe, who is from the U.S.
She is the most famous woman football player and doesn’t need to be introduced.
The shooter has played for the U.S. 199 times and has scored 63 goals and set up 73 others. Two times, she has won the World Cup. Rapinoe now plays for OL Reign in the United States.
She plans to stop at the end of this season. At 38, she isn’t as strong as she once was, but she is still the face of women’s football.
Rapinoe is publicly gay, and when he’s not on the field, he speaks out about a number of problems that have nothing to do with sports, such as fighting for LGBTQ rights.
Keira Walsh (Great Britain)
The injuries of several key players have hurt England’s chances of winning the World Cup for the first time, putting even more pressure on defender Walsh.
Last September, Barcelona reportedly bought her from Manchester City for 400,000 pounds ($508,000), which was a world record for a woman player.
Walsh helped Sarina Wiegman’s England win the Euro on home soil in 2022. She was good at playing, reading the game, and getting the ball back.
When England beat Germany 2-1 in extra time in the final at Wembley, she was named star of the match.
Ada Hegerberg (Norway)
In 2018, the Norwegian was the first person to win the Women’s Ballon d’Or. She is a great shooter for the top French team Lyon.
Her work in Norway has been stop-and-go, though. She left the international game in 2017 because she didn’t like how the Norwegian league treated the men’s and women’s teams differently. She didn’t come back until last year.
The forward, who is 28 years old, has also been hurt a lot.
But when she’s on, she’s one of the best players in the world, and she scores more than one goal a game for her club on average when she’s playing well.
She has scored 59 goals in the UEFA Women’s Champions League, making her the player with the most goals ever.