In a swank but empty hotel lounge, Emily Fox shuffles in directly from a post-training team meal. Her Arsenal kit is incongruous against the plush armchair, and periodically other hotel guests wander in and glance curiously at what is clearly a professional athlete of some sort having a meeting.
Fox is at home, not necessarily in this lounge, but in Washington, D.C., where her family reside, where she likes to spend time in the Georgetown district getting coffee and Italian food. She’s had a bit of time at home this year, between the USWNT playing in D.C. before heading to the Olympics in France, and now her club being on a week-long preseason tour in the U.S. capital.
“This is the first time I’ve been home for, like, more than two weeks,” she said.
Nice as it is to be home, it has not been a vacation.
Fox has been in high demand as the lone American Olympic gold medalist on Arsenal’s roster, doing media rounds and being front and center of the team’s local community events. At a DC Scores event, schoolchildren clamored for her, asking if the hometown hero would be there until being reassured by an Arsenal staffer that, yes, Fox would be coming.
(David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Fox, who calls herself an introvert, is reserved but game to answer questions. Her gold medal is with her parents at the moment; she got flooded with congratulatory messages from her Arsenal teammates and staffers; she managed to stop at her grandparents’ beach house to decompress after the Games.
It is also an interesting place to be, mentally, coming off of the high of an Olympic victory with a team trying to put their disappointing 2023 World Cup campaign behind them, to joining a club preseason camp and starting a new climb towards trying to win something.
But it is not a new place for Fox, who joined Arsenal in January — a move some fans deduced early by spotting a blurry image of her in the background of a training photo — and has been seesawing between two worlds in the seven months since. It’s one thing to sign with a new club; it’s another to change team internationally in an Olympic year.
“Kind of feels like you’re living two lives, in a way,” she said. “I feel like coming in January to Arsenal was really good, because I had that experience of going to the (CONCACAF) Gold Cup for, like, a month and a half and then coming back. Obviously, it was such a difference in terms of the Olympics, but kind of the same in the sense of duration and having to come back to my team and relearn: this is how we’re playing, this is our connection.”
(Patricia De Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images)
This week-long camp in D.C., part of a tour meant to give Arsenal some hard competition while also expanding their American footprint, has also been about bonding, leveraging the experience of all being in a hotel together for a while — that summer camp feeling of fast friendship and quick trust. It is a feeling that perhaps carries more weight for Arsenal’s preseason preparation than other teams; they finished third in the Women’s Super League last season, did not qualify automatically for the Champions League, and lost several players, including long-time forward Vivianne Miedema as a free agent.
“It was bittersweet,” Fox says of how 2023-24 ended for the north London side. “This season, our eye is on winning the league and starting off strong with the Champions League.”
Last season is last season. Fox said the emphasis right now is on the team being present and staying oriented on where they are in a long season. The Olympics were good for that, the breakneck pace of six games in 17 days forcing her and the rest of the USWNT to accept what happened in their last match, for good or bad, and to move on to the next one.
Fox in particular did not have time to dwell. She started and played the majority of all six of those games, including the quarterfinal against Japan that went into extra time. She only got substituted before the 90th minute once, when Casey Krueger came on for her in the 65th minute in their third group-stage game against Australia.
The static nature of Emma Hayes’ starting lineup and sparing use of substitutes raised eyebrows, at least until that final whistle in Paris on August 10, when the U.S. won 1-0 against Brazil to become Olympic gold medalists.
“We knew before the Olympics just how demanding it was playing every three days,” Fox said. “We were ready to embrace that. Emma was saying, ‘Expect to be tired’.” Fox says the USWNT medical staff did a “fantastic” job in staying on top of recovery.
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“We had to be able to grind it out and lean on each other, and make those 10 sprints that we need to do to end the game,” says Fox. “We just needed to suck it up and just do it.”
Again, Fox points out the necessity of trust, how the team relied on the camaraderie of suffering together. There was a moment before the final where fellow defender Naomi Girma, who had felt sick earlier in the tournament, told her teammates she might need more motivational help, more communication.
“She doesn’t need that. She kills it every time,” says Fox.
Girma reached out to her teammates for support at the Olympics (Yukihito Taguchi-USA TODAY Sports)
But the important part was Girma being vulnerable with the group. Fox says the players had done an exercise where they wrote down the types of communication they wanted and what they found helpful from teammates. They were honest. That episode with Girma was only one of many times when the players asked each other for help.
“Being vulnerable allows you to be honest and allows trust and allowed us to win,” Fox said. “When you get to extra time and you get to the sixth game, both teams are going to be tired, and technical and tactical might not be as sharp. The extra thing that puts you over is the social and the emotional connection you have with your teammates.”
That last game was emotionally loaded for both sides. The U.S. wanted to cement a new era, a new generation, a complete letting go of the 2023 World Cup and crashing out in the round of 16 and the strange interim period of waiting for a new head coach.
Brazil had fought through the tougher side of the bracket, eliminating host nation France and reigning World Cup champions Spain, both without captain and on-field heartbeat Marta, who got a two-game suspension after a red card in the group stage. They had climbed to the final for their departing icon as much as for themselves, and there was no way to ignore their emotion and energy.
“We definitely were aware of it,” says Fox. “It’s important to be aware of things that can draw you out of your bubble. We knew that emotion and that force was going to be potentially something that could happen.”
(Graham Denholm/Getty Images)
Fox is trying to build the same trust at Arsenal. She has already stepped into her tactical role, with head coach Jonas Eidevall expecting his fullbacks to be attack-oriented. Fox can get high and wide or invert from right fullback and has been asked to make a difference in the attacking third through assists or putting the ball in the assist zone or generating crosses.
However, she is still getting down to the granular parts of connection, such as reading forward Beth Mead’s body language to know when and where she wants the ball, or tightening up her partnership with centerback Leah Williamson. She’s trying to feel more at home in London, visiting its different neighborhoods, exploring Arsenal’s community volunteering opportunities, showing her parents around her new spot when they visit.
“We have new players, and I’m also still kind of new,” she said. “With a lot of them, I’m kind of rolling in from a busy summer.”
She ducks her head, smiling at a joke about underplaying her “busy summer”.
“We’re just excited for the new year,” she says.
(Top photo: Alex Gottschalk/Getty Images)