Regret, superstition, and trauma-bonding: two champions on what it’s really like to play in the World Cup

With eight appearances and three World Cup wins between them, soccer legends Abby Wambach and Julie Foudy peel back the curtain on life at the top of the sport.

Illustration by Mia Wu

The 2026 World Cup matches have been watched nearly 12 billion times worldwide thus far. It’s a moment that arrives only every four years, one that intertwines pride of country with pride of sport, aspiration with indignation, hope and heartbreak. And bolstering it all are the players, trying to stay afloat, if not thrive, under a wave of overwhelming pressure.

Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach know a bit about what that’s like. Foudy, who played on the U.S. national women’s team from 1988 to 2004, and Wambach, who joined from 2003 to 2015 and holds the second-highest record for international goals, have not only helped blaze a trail for women’s soccer but, between them, have participated in eight World Cups, clinching three championship titles for their country. On the pitch, they dealt with the kind of stress involved in elite competition—from proving their merit to processing regret.

Now they, alongside tennis legend Billie Jean King, co-host Welcome to the Party, a twice-weekly women’s-sports podcast here on Substack. The Post asked Foudy and Wambach to give us the inside scoop on what it’s like to play at the highest level, the euphoria that comes with winning and the devastation with losing, and how they managed all the chaos of performing on a world stage.

When you’re in the tournament, what is downtime like? Especially while you’re abroad, is there ever a chance to do a little exploration, or are you just locked in?

Julie: Well, you [Abby] may be different than me, but there was really no exploring, because with the Women’s World Cup, we didn’t have that many days in between games. The men’s is expanded a little bit more. We were playing every third or fourth day, and it gets to be a lot—so I would just shut it down, which is so unlike me, because I’m an explorer and adventurer. I want to go see everything, and I’m so curious, but you just couldn’t. Your body would not allow that.

I would spend a lot of time lying horizontal, watching the World Cup. Or if you’re at the Olympics, watching the Olympics.

Abby: Is that true? You would watch?

Julie: I’d shut down. I would gladly watch all the different games and whatever movies. Anything. But I did not want to expend any energy.

Abby: I did a lot of lying down and nothing. But I’m very, very, very good at doing nothing. Do you know this about me?

Julie: There was no Love Island to watch, however, back then.

Abby: No, but for World Cups, depending on what year we’re talking about, we would bring loads of DVDs to watch movies and to watch shows. And this is back in the day when every TV series had 40 episodes. It was wonderful. When you retired, Jules, we got a little bit more amenities when we would travel, so we would have team rooms where there would be video gaming consoles and places to hang out where we could all gather together. But I never watched any other World Cup games. You want to know the only time I watched a World Cup game? I watched Japan beat, I think it was Germany, in the 2011 Women’s World Cup. And I remember watching the end of that game, and I remember when Japan won—we had just beaten Japan—I remember looking at my mom, and I said, “We’re going to win the World Cup.” And I jinxed us. I’ll never forgive myself.

Julie: If you don’t follow the Women’s World Cup history like we do, [the U.S.] lost to Japan in the final in penalty kicks in 2011. However, I will say that was the year that Japan had been going through so much with the tsunami.

Abby: They deserved to win that game.

For each of you, did you have any pre-game rituals you took with you from game to game, tournament to tournament?

Julie: I played with Abby at the tail end of my career and the start of hers. We overlapped at the 2004 Olympics, and I knew that she had some superstitions, but not until we did an episode on these superstitions. She just kept saying, “And then, and then, and then I have this, and then I do this.”

Abby: I actually attribute it to it being a success meter, because every time I scored or did something well in a game, I would just repeat.

Julie: And she scored a lot of goals.

I did have one superstition with my high school team, because we had been winning, winning, winning, and winning—winning a lot. I had to wear the same underwear, which had teddy bears and soccer balls on it, every game, which was such a pain. Do not have that superstition, people. If you have a superstition, make it not underwear. Because sometimes you forget to wash the laundry that week, and then you’ve got to be like, “Oh god. I’ve got to do it in the sink, and I’ve got to dry it out.” It was bad. They were falling apart by my senior year. When we finally did lose, I burnt those underwear, and I was like, “Never again am I doing that superstition.”

The tournament is essentially the world’s biggest stage. Did you ever feel external pressure while competing? And how did you deal with having so many eyes and opinions on you?

Abby: Yes, there is external pressure. And one of the things that I had to keep reminding myself yesterday, after our U.S. men’s team lost, was that “Oh, you are not a player, Abby. You didn’t play.” This thing, them losing, is not negatively going to affect your life in any way. You are safe. I had to remind myself.

Julie: Because you’re bracing yourself for the aftermath of that?

Abby: When I was playing, I was playing for my livelihood. I knew that if we won, if I scored goals, I knew that more would come for me and the life that I wanted.

Julie: To pay the bills. To pay rent.

Abby: Our women’s national team wasn’t paying us a ton of money, and so all the off-the-field endorsement deals really did matter. So I was playing for my life, and when we didn’t win world championships, I was devastated in a way that felt like maybe my life was over in a weird-not-true way. I knew my life wasn’t over, but it kind of was in some ways. There was a lot of that external pressure.

And how do we deal with it? That’s kind of the way that our women’s national team rolls. We want the pressure. That’s kind of our sweet spot. We train in those environments where our coaching staff always try to create the highest, most pressurized, intense moments in training so that when we experienced some of those similar moments in world championships and World Cups, it wouldn’t feel weird. We’d be like, “Oh yeah, this makes sense. This feels normal.”

What about you, Jules?

Julie: Of course you felt external pressure. I remember when we were hosting the World Cup in 1999—this is the World Cup where Brandi [Chastain] scores the winning penalty kick and takes her shirt off and gets naked—and I remember saying to Billie Jean King, who was a friend in the ’90s, that as we were going into that tournament, I was feeling a lot of pressure because we were the hosts, and we were trying to convince people—because this is before women’s soccer was really popular—that they should come to the games and that women’s soccer was a big deal. We were trying to set a standard for what a world event could look like on the global stage for women.

So there was a lot on the line. And I said to her, “What if we don’t do well and this tournament tanks?” And she’s like, “Foudy, pressure is a privilege.”

She was like, “Yeah, it’s a lot, but damn, you’ve done the work. Embrace it. Wrap your arms around it.” So our huge mantra during the World Cup was “Pressure is a privilege.” Our team was very joyful and loved to have fun and do pranks, and so we tried to strike this balance of keeping it loose yet understanding when you step on the field, it’s game time. I think we did a really good job of that, and we ended up winning the World Cup in 1999. Obviously that worked out fine for us. But this is pre–social media. I always say, thank god we didn’t play in the social-media era, ’cause that’s a whole different beast you have to deal with.

After winning a World Cup, after striving for something for so long and essentially climbing your Everest, what’s the feeling that comes right after?

Julie: We call it post-Olympics, post–World Cup blues, and it’s real. And we talk to athletes about it all the time as they’re going into their first World Cup and Olympics. When you train that hard for so long and are so locked in—because it’s years of training; it’s a lifetime of training, honestly—[the blues] just hit you so hard that first time if you don’t know or aren’t expecting it. I’m sure this is the same for people going through a lot of big life events. You’re planning for a wedding or you’ve got this big event that you’ve been working on at work forever. We used to joke and call it trauma bonding, but there is some trauma bonding that happens around the fact that you spend so much energy and time focused on this one thing, that when it’s gone and that thing is no longer there, you feel like, “Well, what am I going to do with my life?”

And it is real. Winning or not winning, it didn’t matter. Even if you won, you feel this emptiness, especially when you’re playing on a team where you love these women. These are your sisters—this sisterhood that you develop, this bond, by essentially dedicating your life to something that matters so much—and it is really hard.

It is a gut punch in terms of how you deal with that mentally. When we lost the 2000 Olympics after we won the ’99 World Cup, and we lost in the final to Norway, it was a handball [call], and I’m still living with it. I still have cold sweats at night sometimes thinking about that handball in 2000 that was 26 years ago, y’all.

I just remember going through depression and struggling. I am not usually like that. I’m very even-keeled with emotions like that. It was hard, and I wish someone had said, “You’re going to be okay.”

Abby: That’s so interesting that it happened to you for both winning and losing, because for me, when we won, the blues were worse. When we won [the World Cup], I think that I gave myself the night to really celebrate, and then the next day I was just adrift. I felt adrift at sea. But when we lost, I was more laser-focused. The mountain just continued on. When the tournament is over, you just can’t process fast enough all that is going on.

Like, what you’re thinking about during the group-stage games, how you’re interacting with the performance of your personal self and then your team or your forward line or your midfield, the leaders or the new kids, or having the conversations with your coaches and trying to block out the noise, but of course some of that gets in. Trying to think about and dream about lifting the trophy at the end and whether you do or not, it’s impossible to process all of it as fast as it’s happening and as fast as you’re experiencing it and feeling it.

It is a wild couple of weeks post-tournament.

Julie: And you’re young and your frontal lobe isn’t even developed. You want me to handle all this? You’re asking too much of me.

Abby: I know. So I drank, that’s what I did. I drank a lot. Not anymore. I’m not subscribing to it. I think that I would have played much longer had I not chosen to do that.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can read, hear, and see more of Abby and Julie on their Substack, Welcome to the Party.