USWNT defender Naomi Girma has accomplished her transfer from the San Diego Wave to Chelsea and change into the costliest switch in girls’s soccer historical past.
The Athletic reported earlier this week that Chelsea had agreed phrases with the Wave for the switch of Girma for a report $1.1million charge, in response to sources briefed on the negotiations who spoke on the situation of anonymity.
The 24-year-old had been underneath contract at San Diego till 2026, which is why the deal required a charge, and this has made her the primary $1million-plus girls’s soccer participant.
The deal surpasses the earlier report sum of €735,000 paid by Bay FC for Zambia forward Racheal Kundananji from Madrid CFF in February 2024.
Girma attracted appreciable curiosity from elsewhere in Europe, with eight-time European champions Lyon tabling a $1m provide of their very own.
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“I’m so glad and actually excited to be right here,” Girma instructed the Chelsea web site. “It doesn’t really feel actual.
“There are a whole lot of issues about Chelsea that made me need to come right here — the tradition, the profitable mentality, employees and gamers. It’s a high surroundings to study and develop in.
“Proper now, that’s what I’m trying to do. It was a straightforward selection for me.”
Girma was offered on the Stamford Bridge pitch forward of their Girls’s Tremendous League sport towards Arsenal (Bradley Collyer/PA Pictures by way of Getty Pictures)
The Wave have been ready to lose the center-back for the 2025 season, having signed 17-year-old Trinity Armstrong out of the College of North Carolina to a three-year deal final week.
Girma joined the Wave as the primary decide within the 2022 NWSL draft after taking part in for Stanford on the collegiate degree. She was named NSWL defender of the yr in 2022 and 2023 and was a part of the Wave aspect that gained the NWSL Protect in 2023.
Chelsea have now added additional depth at centre-back after dropping Canada worldwide Kadeisha Buchanan to an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) damage in December.
Sonia Bompastor’s aspect lead the Girls’s Tremendous League and have progressed to the knockout levels of the Champions League — the one competitors they’re but to win.
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When the U.S. gained 2024 Olympic gold, Girma’s praises have been sung as loudly as these of the aspect’s attacking trio of Sophia Smith, Trinity Rodman and Mallory Swanson.
Even with the development of recent metrics, it’s tough to quantify the extent of a defender’s worth in numbers. As an alternative, a mix of knowledge, the attention take a look at and skilled endorsement helped drive one level residence: Girma had shortly entered her place’s highest echelon.
“She’s the perfect defender I’ve ever seen,” U.S. head coach Emma Hayes, previously supervisor of Chelsea, mentioned after a shutout Olympic semifinal victory towards Germany. “Ever. She’s acquired every thing: poise, composure, she defends, she anticipates, she leads.”
In that Germany win, Girma had a better variety of accomplished passes than every other participant even tried. She locked down Germany’s attackers every time they neared the ultimate third. She carried the ball for 687 meters, 24 per cent of the USWNT’s mixed distance, giving essential time for her teammates to make off-ball actions.
For now, Girma is in a category of her personal. She is, by many individuals’s estimation, the perfect participant at her place within the girls’s sport worldwide. That standing additionally vaults her into the broader dialog in regards to the sport’s biggest gamers. And on that entrance, she’s heading in the direction of being among the many greatest in USWNT historical past.
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How does Girma’s charge evaluate to others in girls’s soccer?
Girma’s charge marks the fourth time the ladies’s switch report has been damaged in lower than three years. It was damaged twice within the area of a month in 2024.
It additionally marks the third time Chelsea have signed a participant for girls’s switch report charge, following the additions of Mayra Ramirez from Levante in 2022 and Pernille More durable from Wolfsburg in 2020.
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Ordinarily, it takes a couple of video games to grasp the total skill of a centre-back, however one thing about Girma is totally different. A superb reader of the sport, good at overlaying area in behind and able to battling bodily with out leaning on physicality, she appears the whole defender.
Maybe the one factor she lacks is true aerial dominance. At 1.68m (5ft 6in) tall, she’s not a towering presence and he or she gained solely 51.5 per cent of her aerial battles within the NWSL final season, which isn’t a very reassuring determine for a centre-back. However the reality she will be able to dominate her personal penalty field regardless of that relative lack of aerial energy virtually provides to her aura.
It additionally says one thing in regards to the improvement of the ladies’s sport general. Whereas the boys’s sport has steadily weaned itself off a weight loss plan of lengthy balls and crosses, the ladies’s sport has advanced differently, extra primarily based round attacking on the bottom by way of approach or velocity. There are solely round 75 per cent as many aerial battles within the Girls’s Tremendous League in comparison with the Premier League, for instance.
Being essentially the most invaluable footballer on this planet doesn’t translate to being the outright greatest footballer, after all. Nonetheless, centre-backs really feel unusually outstanding. Even earlier than Girma’s transfer, 10 of the 50 costliest transfers within the girls’s sport concerned defenders, in comparison with simply six of the highest 50 costliest transfers within the males’s sport.
For as soon as, the subsequent technology of footballers may simply develop up eager to play in defence.
(Prime picture: Luis Robayo/AFP by way of Getty Pictures)
