No Goals Yet, but the Influence Is There: Five USWNT Players in the WSL After Three Rounds

In the eighth minute at Kingsmeadow, Sophie Baggaley pushed away Alyssa Thompson's close-range effort. The ball spilled out of the Birmingham City goalkeeper's gloves. Lexi Potter pounced, and the net rippled. The scoreboard credited Potter. The replay told a different story: the goal began at Thompson's feet — a player who has now started three straight games for Chelsea and has still not touched the goals column. I watched that match in a small pub near King's Cross, where a single screen carried a single game and a handful of Irish regulars kept asking me why the team in blue had so much of the ball. Chelsea held 72 percent of possession. They won 2-0. Across the 87 minutes Thompson was on the pitch, Birmingham City barely had the sense of playing in the same division. That was only matchweek three. The pitch is a page, and every season is a long stanza. The opening stanza of this WSL season is three rounds old and already changing key. Last year, Thompson was one of Chelsea's most prolific young scorers, while Phallon Tullis-Joyce stacked up clean sheets that gave USWNT fans plenty to celebrate from across the Atlantic. This season, both still shape games, but the moments that get framed on the back pages are harder to find. Five names stood out across one weekend: Thompson and Naomi Girma at Chelsea, Emily Fox at Arsenal, Tullis-Joyce at Manchester United, and Sam Coffey at Manchester City. Five players, four matches, three different outcomes, and one shared question underneath all of it: is what they are doing at club level enough to hold a place in the United States squad with the 2027 Women's World Cup in Brazil drawing closer? Less than two years separate this autumn from that tournament. Two years is enough for a starting spot to change hands, enough for a 21-year-old to become a pillar or to be left behind. And in England, where the WSL gets faster every season, the question of minutes has become a question of professional survival. The league is no longer an appetiser. Matches are broadcast into more than a hundred countries, big stadiums fill up, and leading clubs spend on women's squads in ways nobody imagined a decade ago. That rapid professionalisation carries a price: minutes have become a scarce asset, and every start is the outcome of a quiet negotiation between form, fitness, fixture load and club ambition. There is a detail that rarely gets mentioned. Emma Hayes, the USWNT head coach, is the person who built the Chelsea that Thompson and Girma now play for. She knows that dressing room better than anyone. Every selection decision at Kingsmeadow therefore becomes a signal the U.S. camp is obliged to read, whether it wants to or not. Thompson played 87 minutes against Birmingham City. She did not score. She did not register an assist either. But break the match into individual actions and you find a player doing almost everything else. Her eighth-minute shot forced Baggaley into a save, and the rebound became Lexi Potter's opener. She later had another effort blocked, slipped Ellie Carpenter into a shooting position, and delivered the cross that Sjoeke Nüsken headed off the bar in the first half. This is the kind of player coaches call an uncredited goal creator. At 21, Thompson is shifting from a pure finisher into a cog inside a collective attacking system. She dribbles less, runs more, and picks her positions more intelligently. That shift has a cost: when a young player learns to play for the team instead of the stats column, the numbers dip before they can rise. But for the USWNT, Thompson's ability to create space for others is worth as much as her ability to finish herself. A team made only of pure finishers is a team that is easy to read. Chelsea won 2-0 and held 72 percent of the ball. It was not a hard test. But three consecutive starts is the clearest signal a young player can receive from a coaching staff. In another corner of the same match, Naomi Girma sat on the bench for ninety minutes. Three WSL rounds have passed, and the defender widely regarded as the most important piece of the U.S. back line has yet to play a single league minute. Her appearances have come only in the Champions League, where she played all 180 minutes of the two qualifying ties against Real Sociedad and scored in the 5-2 first-leg win. That record rules out any suggestion that Girma cannot play. But the question of her place in Chelsea's plans remains open. The club has yet to see a consistently top version of Girma, and her limited role is worth watching from a USWNT perspective. The concern is not form. It is rhythm. Centre-back is a position built on repetition: reading situations, covering, holding the line, escaping pressure with a short pass. Those skills are not built in training sessions; they are built on tense weekend afternoons against forwards who run like machines. Skip that accumulation phase, and a defender can return to the national team physically sharp but a few percentage points slower in judgement — and at this level, a few percentage points is the gap between a clean interception and a conceded goal. Tullis-Joyce was one of Manchester United's standout performers in the 1-1 draw with Arsenal. She made six saves in a match where her side faced 17 shots. Her biggest stops denied Stina Blackstenius and Caitlin Foord, keeping United ahead until Arsenal's stoppage-time equaliser. That workload puts her among the busiest goalkeepers of the round. With seven USWNT caps and five clean sheets, she has established herself in Emma Hayes' goalkeeper pool. Performances like this against strong opposition only strengthen her case. On the other side of that match, Emily Fox helped limit United's chances for long stretches. Hers is the kind of full-back whose value lies in what does not happen: attacks broken up before they take shape, crosses cut out at the source. Nobody gives out awards for a well-timed cover run, and nobody puts it in a headline. Glory falls in the end; only the poetry written about it keeps standing. For Tullis-Joyce, distribution remains the area to improve. United's direct style plays to her strengths, but it offers fewer chances to develop the composure and passing range needed to act as an extra defender when building from the back. That is the paradox of the modern goalkeeper: you can make six saves in a match and still be judged incomplete, because the standard for the position has shifted towards playing with the ball. Against a USWNT whose opponents increasingly press high, that ability is no longer a bonus. It is a requirement. Coffey came on in the 62nd minute of Manchester City's 4-2 comeback win over Liverpool, replacing Laura Blindkilde Brown as City looked to regain control after falling behind 2-1. She played the final 28 minutes. No goal, no assist. But City scored twice late to complete the turnaround, and the rhythm of the home midfield visibly changed from the moment she stepped on. There is an unmeasured value in football: the value of the steady player a coach can turn to when a match needs settling. Making an impact does not always mean getting on the scoresheet. Sometimes it means helping a team find its rhythm and giving those around you a platform to push forward. Coffey is showing she can offer that for City. The next step is a larger role. She has played just 71 minutes across City's first three WSL matches, coming off the bench in each, in a crowded midfield. From a USWNT perspective, the question is how that role develops — and whether these contributions can build a case for a starting spot. So where is the real blind spot of this weekend? It is the habit of judging players by the final product while ignoring the entire process that produced it. Thompson did not score, but Chelsea's first goal was born from her shot. Tullis-Joyce conceded in stoppage time, but without her six saves United would have lost before the second half began. Coffey posted no headline numbers, but City's midfield only really played once she was on the pitch. And Fox could finish with a blank sheet while in reality she snapped a string of opposition attacks. That old reading is especially dangerous in a pre-World Cup window. It makes fans worry about the wrong thing. While debate swirls around Girma's lack of league minutes, the real issue is how Chelsea manages the load of a cornerstone defender across a season that includes both the Champions League and the domestic league. Not every bench is a punishment. Sometimes it is a calculation — and sometimes a correct calculation looks exactly like a mistake. One wider point deserves mention. Women's football in England is going through a strong physicalisation phase, and that trend reaches down into youth levels. Coaches under pressure for results tend to choose athleticism over technique, the strong runner over the skilful ball-handler. The consequence is that players like Thompson — who live on feel and positioning — take longer to find a foothold in an increasingly rough environment. That is why three consecutive starts matter more than they appear to, and why her unnamed contributions deserve recognition rather than being counted in goals. There is risk in the other direction too. When a player like Coffey has played just 71 minutes in three rounds, patience needs a limit. Club football waits for nobody. A season passes faster than we think, and at 26 Coffey does not have many seasons left to spend on the bench. Consistency is a virtue, but if it lasts too long without opportunity, it becomes a trap laid out with a nice carpet. Nobody remembers the scoreline; people remember the moment their heartbeat stopped. But in the space between two stopped heartbeats, quiet work is being done. Thompson is learning to become a player her team cannot ignore. Tullis-Joyce is proving that the nights she works hardest are still the nights she keeps her side standing. Fox is doing what nobody films. Coffey is waiting for a bigger chance. And Girma, the most important of them all, sits inside a question without a clear answer. Three rounds do not define a season, and a bench does not define a career. But when October arrives and the calendar thickens, we will learn what Chelsea really thinks of its centre-back. And the USWNT, alongside Emma Hayes, will be reading the answer first. Based on my experience following matches in England across many seasons, I have learned one thing: a stat sheet is a map, not the territory. It tells you where the goals are, not how the match was built. To understand that, you have to watch the tape, notice the runs without the ball, and listen to boots on grass in the moments nobody cheers. Football does not reward the most patient. It rewards those who are patient at the right moment. And for five American players waiting for something in England, the question is no longer whether they have enough talent. The question is whether they choose the right moment to claim back what is theirs.