Megan Rapinoe was the argument for a decade. At 41 she is starting over

Megan Rapinoe

Photo: Daniel Nickson / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 5, 1985 Redding
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	The Guardian Footballer of the Year · The Best FIFA Women's Player · Presidential Medal of Freedom

One thread of Rapinoe, the documentary Rebeca Huntt made about her, returns to the scene her admirers usually skip: Megan Rapinoe on one knee during the national anthem, in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, and a United States locker room that did not agree on what it had just watched. Kaepernick, Sue Bird and Alex Morgan are among those interviewed. For more than a decade Rapinoe was the player every argument in American soccer ran through: pay, visibility, who is allowed to protest. Now she is watching that argument told back to her in the past tense, and by her own account she is still working out who she is without it. “I feel like I was old when I retired and quite young in my life,” she told NPR.

She grew up in Redding, Northern California, one of six children and the fraternal twin of Rachael Rapinoe. She started playing at three because her older brother Brian played. Brian later spent years in and out of prison, including Pelican Bay, and she has spoken publicly about the white supremacist groups he joined while inside. Her parents drove two and a half hours each way so the twins could play for Elk Grove Pride. At the University of Portland she won an NCAA title as a freshman, then tore an anterior cruciate ligament in two consecutive seasons, injuries she later called one of the best things that ever happened to her.

Her professional start came in a league that kept collapsing. The Chicago Red Stars drafted her second overall in 2009 and folded the next year; magicJack bought her while she was in Germany for the 2011 World Cup, and the league itself was gone by early 2012. That World Cup is where the public met her. After scoring against Colombia she grabbed a pitchside microphone and sang “Born in the U.S.A.” into it. Against Brazil in the quarterfinal her long cross found Abby Wambach for an equaliser in the 122nd minute, the latest goal ever scored in a World Cup match at that point. The United States lost the final to Japan on penalties.

The London Olympics the following summer were her best tournament as a creator: three goals and four assists, two of the goals in a 4–3 semifinal against Canada, the first struck straight from a corner kick, something no player of any gender had done at an Olympic Games. The United States beat Japan at Wembley for gold. Shortly before those Games she had come out publicly in Out magazine. After a league and cup double with Lyon, Seattle Reign became her club from 2013 to the end of her career, with three NWSL Shields along the way.

The peak came in France in 2019. She had already won the 2015 World Cup on the wing; four years later, as co-captain, she scored twice against Spain, twice against the hosts, and converted the penalty that opened the scoring in the final against the Netherlands. It was her 50th international goal and made her, at 34, the oldest woman to score in a World Cup final. She left with the Golden Ball and the Golden Boot, then added the Ballon d’Or Féminin and The Best FIFA Women’s Player award. That spring she had also been one of 28 players who sued U.S. Soccer for gender discrimination.

The tidy version misses the cost. Her first kneel, at a club match in September 2016, was followed by a federation statement that players were expected to stand, and Hope Solo later claimed Rapinoe had almost bullied teammates into kneeling, without saying when; Huntt’s film sits inside that division rather than resolving it. The equal pay fight did not end in a courtroom victory either. A judge threw out the core pay claim in 2020, and the February 2022 settlement, $24 million plus a commitment to equal pay for the men’s and women’s teams, fell well short of the more than $66 million the players had sought. The victory was a contract. The last act as a player was crueller still. She missed her penalty when Sweden knocked the United States out of the 2023 World Cup in the round of 16, and called the miss “dark comedy.” Three months later, in the NWSL Championship that closed her career, she went down with an Achilles injury in the opening minutes and watched Gotham beat her team 2–1.

Rapinoe, born on July 5, 1985, finished with 203 caps and 63 goals for the United States, an Olympic bronze from Tokyo to add to the London gold, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded in July 2022. Her final home game in Seattle drew 34,130 people, then a league record.

Retirement was supposed to be shared. She and Sue Bird, who met at the 2016 Olympics in Rio and got engaged in 2020, had turned their pandemic Instagram show A Touch More into a Vox Media podcast and a production company of the same name. On April 17, 2026, they used the podcast to announce the end of their ten-year relationship and of the show. “It’s a decision that we made together,” Rapinoe said. Six farewell episodes followed, then a solo run during the men’s World Cup. On August 6 she launched Why Are You Like This?, a weekly Vox Media interview show with athletes, artists and activists, named after a question she says she got a lot as a player.

Most of her screen work has been about herself. She voiced herself opposite Zlatan Ibrahimović in Netflix’s animated The Soccer Football Movie, appeared in the Netflix docuseries Under Pressure about the 2023 World Cup squad, and published a memoir, One Life, which Sony Pictures Television optioned. Rapinoe is the most personal of these. Dan Cogan of Story Syndicate brought Huntt to the project after Rapinoe saw her earlier film Beba, and the documentary treats her coming out to her conservative parents as seriously as the equal pay case. It opened the Toronto International Film Festival’s documentary section on September 10, 2026, and HBO bought the North American television and streaming rights shortly afterwards. “Everything comes to an end,” she said at the festival.

No HBO premiere date has been announced. The next fixed point on her calendar is the Women’s World Cup in Brazil next summer, a tournament she has already promised “is going to be lit,” and she will reach it as a broadcaster with a weekly show rather than a player with a cause. The question her podcast puts to its guests is the one her documentary leaves open about her: what she is for, now that the argument no longer needs her to win it.

Tags: sports, athletes, Megan Rapinoe, soccer players, Seattle Reign FC, The Soccer Football Movie

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