Rodman, Smith, Swanson amongst Ballon d'Or noms

5 United States ladies’s nationwide workforce gamers are nominated for the 2024 Girls’s Ballon d’Or, an annual award offered by France Soccer journal.

Captain and midfielder Lindsey Horan, goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher and forwards Trinity Rodman, Sophia Smith and Mallory Swanson have been all nominated for the award Wednesday, just a few weeks after serving to the U.S. win the 2024 Olympic gold medal.

The U.S. co-leads illustration on the 30-player shortlist alongside 2023 World Cup champion Spain, who additionally has 5 gamers on the listing.

USWNT head coach Emma Hayes, who took cost of the workforce simply over two months previous to its Olympic triumph, is nominated for Girls’s Coach of the Yr.

4 of the 5 USWNT gamers additionally play domestically within the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League (Horan performs for Lyon in France). The NWSL is additional represented by Orlando Pride and Zambian ahead Barbra Banda, who ranks second within the league in scoring in her first NWSL season.

NJ/NY Gotham FC can also be nominated Girls’s Membership of the Yr after successful the 2023 NWSL Championship.

Rodman, Smith and Swanson accounted for 10 of the USWNT’s 12 targets on the Olympics. They every scored a game-winner in three successive 1-0 victories within the knockout stage on the workforce’s journey to its first Olympic gold medal since 2012. The trio dubbed themselves “Triple Espresso” through the event.

Rodman is the one participant to have appeared in each USWNT match because the begin of 2023. Smith was a finalist for the 2023 NWSL MVP Award.

Naeher, who made heroic late-game saves within the extra-time semifinal victory over Germany, and the gold-medal win over Brazil, is the one goalkeeper on the 30-player listing.

Horan began all six matches for the USWNT on the Olympics and performed each minute of regulation, lacking solely further time of the semifinal after being subbed off.

USWNT and San Diego Wave FC center-back Naomi Girma, whom Hayes known as “one of the best defender I’ve ever seen,” through the Olympics, didn’t make the 30-playher listing.

Aitana Bonmatí, Mariona Caldentey, Patricia Guijarro, Salma Paralluelo and Alexia Putellas are the 5 Spanish gamers nominated for the award. Spain completed fourth on the Olympics, one 12 months after successful the World Cup. The award has gone to Spanish gamers in every of the final three years, twice to Putellas and final 12 months to Bonmatí.

England, which was crushed by Spain within the 2023 World Cup last, has three nominees — Lauren Hemp, Lauren James and Lucy Bronze.

The Ballon d’Or is a prestigious award within the males’s sport, having honored the highest participant on the earth since 1956. The award briefly merged with FIFA’s World Participant of the Yr award in 2010 however returned to being impartial in 2016.

A Girls’s Ballon d’Or was first awarded in 2018. Norway and Lyon ahead Ada Hegerberg gained the inaugural award earlier than infamously being requested if she might twerk by the occasion’s host, French DJ Martin Solveig.

USWNT winger Megan Rapinoe gained the award the next 12 months, after gathering the Golden Ball and Golden Boot on the 2019 World Cup, which the People gained. No American has made the highest three since.