Carli Lloyd insists she wasn't referring to 'race or gender' in comments slamming the US Women's National Team's culture

• Carli Lloyd publicly slammed the US Women's National Team culture that formed late in her career.
• Fans took Lloyd's comments as a reference to the team's internal divide over political issues.

Carli Lloyd was not happy with the culture she left behind on the US Women's National Team.

And just a few months into her retirement, which she announced in October 2021, the two-time World Cup winner and two-time Olympic gold medalist started sharing those feelings publicly.

During several podcast appearances over the last five months — including one with former USWNT teammate Hope Solo and another with Fox Sports' Alexi Lalas — Lloyd revealed that she "hated" playing with the national team in the final years of her career because "the mentality changed, and it became toxic."

Fans and analysts alike interpreted Lloyd's comments as a thinly veiled criticism of the USWNT's increasing social, racial, and political justice efforts in recent years. Players were divided on the issues of kneeling during the national anthem and fighting for equal pay, among others.

As Alexis Guerreros, co-host of popular soccer podcast "The Cooligans," said, "'culture' doesn't mean like, you know, 'everybody show up early and bring snacks.' By 'culture' she means, like, 'too diverse.'"

"The fan bases are suggesting that this might mean that it's 'a little too progressive,'" he added on a recent episode.

But Lloyd pushed back on that narrative. In a recent interview shortly after her initial controversial comments, the 2015 FIFA Women's World Player of the Year told Insider that she was simply "referring to the culture that is out on the field."

"The culture for me is what the culture has been on the national team since the inception," Lloyd told Insider. "All of those players, they brought a fight. They brought a hunger. They brought a desire. They brought mentality. They brought a never-say-die attitude. They brought finding a way, whether it's the 91st minute, to get a ball in the back of the net. That has slowly dissipated from 2015 on."

She explicitly denied that she had been "referring to culture on race, on gender, on any of that" in her initial comments, then criticized the social media landscape. "People just take clips and they take what people say and they throw their own spin on it and their own narrative," she said.

"I wish the world wasn't like this," Lloyd added.

The retired striker further clarified that "it's just human nature" for players on teams as successful as the four-time World Cup-winning USWNT to "become complacent." But she stressed her belief that "you have to constantly keep elevating, and you have to constantly keep playing and performing as if you haven't achieved anything" in order to continue thriving in any competitive space — including international women's soccer.

Lloyd then claimed that she wasn't the only member of the USWNT who felt that the team's drive to win had subsided.

"I was in the situation feeling that way, and several other [players] — if not, the entire squad — felt the same way that the culture was not good," she said. "The culture was not good at training sessions. The culture was not good when we'd leave the training field, in our meal rooms, out together."

"We weren't a team, and teams win championships," she added.

Lloyd blames that lack of cohesion for the USWNT's less-than-perfect finish at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The national team still walked away with bronze — an objectively successful result, but a disappointment for a team that was fresh off of winning the 2019 World Cup and has never in its history been ranked lower than second in the world.

"If anyone has watched the bronze medal game and the Tokyo Olympics, everybody could see that we were disjointed," Lloyd said. "We had some of the best players out there. Talent-wise, on paper, we should have won, and we should have went in there, and we should have thrashed teams, but we didn't because we weren't a team. And because we didn't have the culture of what has made this team so successful over the years.

"If we continue to go in the direction of where we were at, the team won't win anything," she warned.

But the former captain is optimistic that the younger USWNT players have what it takes to turn it around. While watching the national team's most recent games against Czech Republic, New Zealand, and Iceland during the 2022 SheBelieves Cup, Lloyd said she "saw that hunger back" that she feels the team has been lacking.

"I saw that drive. I saw glimpses of that, and that's what we need," Lloyd added. "That's the duty of these younger players, if they're going to continue to play for this team, is they have to continue to keep sharing that culture and bridging the next several generations with it."