Colombia (Narrowly) and France (Easily) Join the Quarterfinals (2024)

Linda Caicedo of Colombia has long been ready for this moment.

Caicedo’s emergence at this World Cup has not exactly been a surprise. She might only be 18, but her talent has been so obvious, and so prodigious, for so long that she is anything but an overnight sensation. She has long been earmarked as the next big thing: for Colombia, for South America, and increasingly for women’s soccer as a whole.

Her ascent has had a breakneck quality: She played her first senior game for her first club side, América de Cali, at age 14. She made her debut for her country just a few months later. She won one Colombian title by the time she turned 15; she had a second before her 17th birthday.

She has passed milestones at such speed, with such frequency, that it is hard to believe she has been able to take them all in. She made the team of the tournament in the Copa Libertadores at the first attempt. She helped Colombia to the final of the Copa América, finishing as the tournament’s leading scorer.

She played in the under-17 World Cup — Colombia finished second — and the under-20 World Cup, reaching the quarterfinals, almost contiguously. This tournament is, in effect, her third World Cup in a year. To reiterate: Linda Caicedo turned 18 in February.

Hers is the sort of promise that shines so brightly that it attracts almost universal attention. Caicedo has, for years, been courted by a variety of Europe’s major teams: Bayern Munich and Barcelona and Chelsea and all the rest. Earlier this year, she and her mother spent several weeks in Europe, watching games and assessing her potential suitors.

In the end, Caicedo gave her blessing to Real Madrid. Madrid, the world’s biggest men’s club, pitched her on the idea that she would be the cornerstone of its attempts to establish a similar prominence for its women’s team. When the club had first made its interest known, Caicedo was not old enough to drive in Spain.

It is not, then, so much that Caicedo is the breakout star of this tournament; she had, in all the ways that matter, broken out long ago. Instead, it is probably better cast as something closer to an inauguration: her goal against Germany, in particular, acted as confirmation that she is the standard-bearer for the coming generation of women’s soccer.

This has been a tournament defined by an overturning of calcified orders. Most immediately, that has been in terms of geography and primacy, whatever the sporting equivalent of geopolitics might be. The United States has been dethroned. Canada was knocked out by Nigeria. Germany was eliminated in favor of Morocco. The tectonic shifts have had the effect of flattening, broadening the game’s landscape.

But there has been a generational shift playing out in Australia and New Zealand, too. As the sun has set on the likes of Megan Rapinoe and Christine Sinclair, Alex Morgan and Marta, so their apparent successors have bloomed and flourished: a group of players in their late teens and early 20s, bookmarked at one end by the 16-year-old Italian Giulia Dragoni and the other by Hinata Miyazawa, the 23-year-old Golden Boot apparent.

The bright spots for the United States all fell into that pool: Sophia Smith, Naomi Girma and Trinity Rodman. Melchie Dumornay, the teenage Haitian, stood out even when cast against England’s highly polished midfield, one that included the explosive — for good and for ill — Lauren James, 21. Mary Fowler has shouldered much of Australia’s burden in the absence of Sam Kerr. Yet Caicedo stands front and center of that group, one of the sport’s faces of tomorrow.

There is a pressure attendant in that, of course. “When Linda shines, we shine,” as her teammate Jorelyn Carabalí put it. Caicedo is adamant that she does not feel inhibited, that she tries still to play as she did “in the neighborhood, when I was a kid.” But she is human; she knows her country’s “dream” is reliant to some extent on her.

She might already have accomplished enough to last a lifetime, but that does not mean her youth is irrelevant. A couple of days after Colombia’s opening game, a 2-0 win against South Korea, she collapsed on the field during a training session, clutching her chest.

The leaders of the country’s soccer federation downplayed the incident, attributing it to the fact that she was simply “very tired.” “What happened was just a symptom of all the stress and physical demands,” a representative for Colombia said, as if that was not worrying in the slightest. “She is well and all is back to normal.”

There is a benefit and a burden to the sort of talent Caicedo boasts. The speed of her rise has had the effect of increasing the weight of expectation. She has achieved so much already, she has passed so many milestones, that there is a demand — internal and external — that the trajectory should continue, that she should speed up, if anything, rather than slow down.

She will not want to stop now, far from it. Colombia is in the quarterfinals. Why not beat England in Sydney and get to the semifinal, since you’re here?

Caicedo has always been able to meet whatever challenge she has encountered. That comes at a cost. Her roar after Colombia’s goal, the one that made it another milestone passed, was a necessary release valve, the expulsion of all of the pressure that comes with being the next big thing.

— Rory Smith Reporting from Melbourne, Australia

France eliminates Morocco, scoring early and often.

Diani had a hand in all three of France’s goals in the first half, scoring the first and creating the other two. She now has four goals in the World Cup. Le Sommer has three.

Le Sommer added her second goal, and France’s fourth, in the 70th minute, and France could have had even more on a night when they saw more open chances than Morocco did chances of any kind.

All four French goals came from players who were unmarked, a sign that while Morocco had made great strides in its first World Cup — recording its first goals, its first wins and its first trip to the knockouts — it still has a lot to learn if it hopes to run with the world’s best teams regularly over 90 minutes.

The victory was the latest sign of a tournament snapping back into form after a run of surprises, upsets and parity. Seven of the eight quarterfinalists won their first-round groups, and the one that did not — Spain — was on everyone’s list of title contenders. Five of the eight games were decided by at least two goals, perhaps a sign that the contenders that remain are rounding into top form just in time.

France, now humming after a slow start with 10 goals in its past two games, will face Australia, now refreshed by the return of Sam Kerr, on Saturday. With England facing Colombia in the other game on this side of the knockout-round bracket, a first-time World Cup finalist is assured.

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Sam Kerr: Handle with care.

It had, Australia Coach Tony Gustavsson admitted, been a “big decision” to give Kerr an 18-minute cameo on Monday, one that had involved several meetings with both the player and Australia’s medical staff. He had known it was a risk. He had wondered, after Australia scored its second goal, the one that settled things, whether maybe he should not take it.

In that moment, as Kerr lay on the turf, he wondered whether it had been the wrong call. He tried desperately to communicate with her, asking hurriedly if it might be best if she came off immediately. Kerr, though, put out a hand to calm him. She was fine. She had, she said, slipped; nothing more serious than that. She walked it off. The crowd cheered, its fears abated.

All’s well that ends well, then, but still: Those 30 seconds served as a reminder of how delicate Kerr’s situation — and by extension Australia’s World Cup campaign as a whole — remains: delicate enough that she was not permitted to perform the usual warm-down running exercise by the medical team after the game. The co-host is a very different proposition with her in the side. Its self-belief, to some extent, is tied up in her presence. There is no point taking too many risks. Kerr is a precious commodity, and she has to be handled as such.

Nigeria’s players have enlisted help to ensure they get paid.

On Tuesday, the team and the players issued a joint statement in which they said they would work together to press the Nigeria Football Federation “concerning bonus payments, camp allowances and expenses, some of which date back to 2021.”

“During the World Cup, the players expressed the desire to remain focused on their performance without making public statements or facing other distractions,” the statement said. “However, the Super Falcons believe that it is now time for the Nigeria Football Federation to honor their commitments and pay the outstanding amounts.”

Before the tournament, FIFPro had given its blessing to a new structure that guaranteed at least $30,000 in prize money to each player in the tournament, with even more due to players on teams that advanced out of the group stage. For a team like Nigeria, which was eliminated in the round of 16, that should mean payments of at least $60,000 per player.

That money will be paid to national federations, though, rather than directly to players, according to FIFA, world soccer’s global governing body and the organizer of the World Cup. On the eve of the tournament, FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, declined to guarantee that the players would get the bonus payments created for them.

“We are an association of associations,” said FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino. “So any payments we do will be through the associations.”

The Nigerian players, and their coach, the American Randy Waldrum, have implied that could be a problem. Waldrum told a podcast before the World Cup that the Nigerian federation was still months behind on payments of his own salary to coach the team, and he also said the federation had not delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars provided by FIFA to Nigerian officials to pay for the team’s pre-World Cup preparations.

“Up until about three weeks ago, I had been owed about 14 months’ salary,” Waldrum said in July. “And then they paid seven months’ salary. We still have players that haven’t been paid since two years ago, when we played the summer series in the U.S.A. It’s a travesty.”

Now the players are seeking not only that money, but much more.

“The team is extremely frustrated that they have had to pursue the Nigeria Football Federation for these payments before and during the tournament and may have to continue doing so afterward,” the team’s statement with FIFPro said. “It is regrettable that players needed to challenge their own federation at such an important time in their careers.”