USWNT defender Naomi Girma has accomplished her transfer from the San Diego Wave to Chelsea and turn into the most costly 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 file $1.1million charge, in line with 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 file sum of €735,000 paid by Bay FC for Zambia ahead 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 supply of their very own.
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“I’m so blissful and actually excited to be right here,” Girma advised the Chelsea web site. “It doesn’t really feel actual.
“There are quite a lot of issues about Chelsea that made me wish to come right here — the tradition, the successful mentality, employees and gamers. It’s a high setting to be taught and develop in.
“Proper now, that’s what I’m trying to do. It was a simple selection for me.”
Girma was introduced on the Stamford Bridge pitch forward of their Ladies’s Tremendous League sport in opposition to Arsenal (Bradley Collyer/PA Pictures by way of Getty Pictures)
The Wave had 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 choose within the 2022 NWSL draft after enjoying for Stanford on the collegiate stage. She was named NSWL defender of the yr in 2022 and 2023 and was a part of the Wave facet that received 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) harm in December.
Sonia Bompastor’s facet lead the Ladies’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. received 2024 Olympic gold, Girma’s praises had been sung as loudly as these of the facet’s attacking trio of Sophia Smith, Trinity Rodman and Mallory Swanson.
Even with the development of contemporary metrics, it’s troublesome to quantify the extent of a defender’s worth in numbers. As an alternative, a mix of knowledge, the attention check and knowledgeable endorsement helped drive one level dwelling: Girma had rapidly entered her place’s highest echelon.
“She’s the very best defender I’ve ever seen,” U.S. head coach Emma Hayes, previously supervisor of Chelsea, mentioned after a shutout Olympic semifinal victory in opposition to Germany. “Ever. She’s received every thing: poise, composure, she defends, she anticipates, she leads.”
In that Germany win, Girma had the next variety of accomplished passes than another participant even tried. She locked down Germany’s attackers each 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 very best participant at her place within the girls’s sport worldwide. That standing additionally vaults her into the broader dialog concerning the sport’s biggest gamers. And on that entrance, she’s heading in the direction of being among the many finest 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 file has been damaged in lower than three years. It was damaged twice within the house of a month in 2024.
It additionally marks the third time Chelsea have signed a participant for girls’s switch file charge, following the additions of Mayra Ramirez from Levante in 2022 and Pernille Tougher from Wolfsburg in 2020.
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Ordinarily, it takes just a few video games to grasp the total potential of a centre-back, however one thing about Girma is totally different. A wonderful reader of the sport, good at protecting house 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 she or he received 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 dominate her personal penalty field regardless of that relative lack of aerial energy virtually provides to her aura.
It additionally says one thing concerning the improvement of the ladies’s sport general. Whereas the lads’s sport has steadily weaned itself off a weight loss plan of lengthy balls and crosses, the ladies’s sport has developed another way, extra primarily based round attacking on the bottom by way of method or pace. There are solely round 75 per cent as many aerial battles within the Ladies’s Tremendous League in comparison with the Premier League, for instance.
Being essentially the most priceless footballer on the planet doesn’t translate to being the outright finest 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.
(High photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP by way of Getty Pictures)