Marta already has an illustrious legacy, but this year with the Pride was one of her best ever

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Last week, Marta was mad.

Usually, when she’s on the field with her nose toward goal, the three-time Olympic silver medalist visualizes repeating what she’s done many times over her lengthy career. She allows the joy to flow through her, down to her left foot and into the ball.

But she got a little heated with the opposition during last weekend’s NWSL semifinal between her Orlando Pride and the Kansas City Current.

“I tried to be nice most of the time during the game,” Marta said Thursday, to a rapt audience of reporters around her table at the NWSL championship media day.

There was a player on the Current who she exchanged words nicely with, according to the Brazilian. But the player, Marta declined to name names, was being “a little bit diva”.

“And I said, ‘Wow, all right. You made me mad. I’m going to go one-on-one against you’,” Marta said.

Marta picked up the ball in the center circle after forward Barbra Banda poked it away from Current defender Kayla Sharples. Marta faked out both Sharples and center back Alana Cook as they tried to challenge her, juked past goalkeeper Almuth Schult and got the shot off before outside back Hailie Mace could do anything, scoring the Pride’s crucial third goal in the 82nd minute of an eventual 3-2 win.

It was another reminder, as if it was needed, that Marta is truly one of the greatest to ever play.

She celebrated with mixed emotion, anger and joy battling for dominance. But for Marta, it felt the same as so many other goal celebrations before. At media day, she nearly reached for her phone to pull up a photo of her celebrating a goal with Brazil to compare with what proved to be the game-winning goal that sent her to her first NWSL final.

“Honestly, what I see is maybe we should try and make her mad. She turns on a whole other level,” Pride teammate Morgan Gautrat said with a laugh.

Other Pride players talked about watching the goal on repeat, from different angles, but no one expressed surprise. They see it regularly.

“Nothing’s changed,” Marta said. “I have passion for this game, and that’s why I still play.”

Much like the potential of finally earning an Olympic gold medal back in the summer with Brazil at age 38, Marta doesn’t need an NWSL championship trophy to cement her legacy as a force in American women’s professional soccer. She has already won a title and a shield here in 2010 with FC Gold Pride during the previous professional league era of the WPS. And the Pride already captured a trophy this year, winning the NWSL Shield for most regular season points.

She reiterated Thursday that she’s planning to play for another two years, though she’s a free agent heading into the NWSL offseason. But when she does finally hang up her boots, Marta has one of the best chances of an international player making it into the National Soccer Hall of Fame based on a club career.

This season is special, though. Marta said it’s the best she’s ever had at the club level, even compared to her days in Sweden with one of the strongest sides in Europe at that time, Umeå IK.

“If I achieve this big goal with this amazing team, good,” Marta said. “If not, this season was so special from the beginning to now, like not even close to the best dream I can imagine.”

When asked during the last press conference before the final where this NWSL championship ranks amid her illustrious career, Marta emphatically held up a finger: number one.

“I think because of the way we did during the season from the beginning to now, it is something very special that I have never had before in any other club that I’ve played for,” she said. “It’s hard to win the games in the first place (in NWSL), like almost all the games.”

Marta joined the Pride in 2017, a year after their inaugural season as an expansion team. The team had some big-name talent, from Alex Morgan to Ali Krieger. They had good results in Marta’s debut year and made the playoffs. However, the Pride never finished higher than seventh for the following five seasons (not including 2020, when no regular season was played due to the pandemic). In 2023, they achieved seventh place again, missing the playoffs by a two-goal difference in the standings on the last day.

“(Marta) remembers the hard times. She remembers when we were the laughingstock of the league,” head coach Seb Hines said Friday. “Now, she’s enjoying it. Now, everything’s coming together. We’ve got a great culture. We’ve got great players here. We’ve got structure within the top to the bottom now, and so she probably just reminds herself of, like, what it was like before, and just enjoying every single moment of what it’s like now.”

As much as the external focus is on Marta this week, especially after that semifinal goal, she’s not feeling that external pressure at all. She’s not thrown off by the high demand for her from the media, or sitting down for a couple of video features during a championship week. She’s never experienced the madness of an NWSL championship as a finalist, but she’s been to plenty of World Cups and Olympics. She’s also not focused on herself as an individual.

“It’s not this player, (or) this player, it’s the team,” she said. “We do it together. This is exactly how it’s supposed to be. It’s not about the one or two players, it’s about the project. It’s about the work that everybody put in. If the trophy comes to us, amazing. If not, we’re going to keep working hard.”

From the outside, it is easy to assume that the team would love to win a championship title for Marta. And while that’s not inaccurate, said Pride general manager Haley Carter, it’s also not the only internal narrative driving them. From her front-row seat, Carter said Marta embodies the team culture every day and that this is a group of players that truly loves each other.

“This is actually what makes her great,” Carter said on media day. “This is what gives her legendary status: everything is about the team. It’s not about, ‘I’ve never won a NWSL title. I’ve never won the league’. It’s not about that. It’s about getting the team in the space to be successful. That’s her priority.”

Marta has been crucial on the field for the Pride as well. So much of her success this year, including her nine goals and an assist during the regular season, as well as her two playoff goals so far, comes not just from her return to form, but a slightly more advanced position on the field. She’s been closer to goal, and adding Banda to the mix only helped.

When you look at her touches over the past three seasons, this year the Pride are essentially getting 12 percent more of Marta in the final third.

It has worked, to say the least.

There are still the intangibles, too. And for a player with Marta’s stature and legacy, those are impossible to overlook.

“She’s given so much to this club. She’s given absolutely everything. She hasn’t been at another team in this league, and so it’s part of her. She knows what it means to play for this team. She knows what it means to play for this badge,” Hines said Friday at his pregame press conference. “Take away all the individuality of the dribbling and shooting and stuff, her fundamentals of football when you see someone with stature doing it, there’s no questions for anyone else to do it, young, old, whatever.”

Tonight against the Washington Spirit at CPKC Stadium in Kansas City, Orlando’s captain will lead her team one final time in 2024. She’ll almost certainly be facing a hostile crowd, including locals who haven’t forgotten last week’s goal or Marta shushing them in the Pride’s 2-1 win over the Current there before the Olympic break.

But there will be at least one person in the stands who has never seen her play before in America: her mother.

Marta told The Athletic Thursday that she had finally managed to help arrange a visa for her mom to attend a match in the United States and that a family member had managed to take two weeks off to travel with her and help her get around. For Marta, it was the perfect time for her mother to finally see her play a professional game in the States. Sure, they had to run around Thursday morning buying her mom more cold-weather gear so she was prepared for the chill of Kansas City in November, but it was all worth it.

“She told me this year, ‘If I don’t come to America, and then I pass away, I’m gonna pass away so sad’.” Marta couldn’t help mimicking her own incredulous face at the heightened levels of maternal guilt. “And I said, ‘Mom! Why do you have to be like that?’.”

All this week, Marta’s been nothing but smiles and jokes, soaking in a game that is the culmination of her eight years in Orlando. But despite the clear joy emanating from the Brazilian, maybe tonight she’ll get a little mad too, and provide one more moment of magic this season.

Jeff Rueter contributed to this story.

(Top photo: Nathan Ray Seebeck / Imagn Images)