Photograph Copyright Orlando Ramirez for USA TODAY Sports activities

Catarina Macario has a powerful record of honors, particularly for a 23-year-old soccer participant. She gained two NCAA Girls’s Faculty Cups throughout her time at Stanford, earlier than turning skilled with Lyon. Whereas in France, she gained the Division 1 title and the Champions League. Now, having signed a three-year take care of Chelsea, she will likely be aiming so as to add Girls’s Tremendous League success to her resume.

Together with her contract at Lyon coming to an finish, Macario joins Chelsea on a free switch in what constitutes a press release signing for the reigning English champions. Their supervisor, Emma Hayes, described Macario as “some of the clever, artistic attacking gamers on the planet.” On their quest for fulfillment in Europe, this may very well be a game-changer for Chelsea.

It’s not essentially an indication of main change within the wider panorama of European ladies’s soccer, nonetheless. Sure, Lyon had been knocked out by Chelsea on the quarter-final stage of final season’s Champions League, however the French giants had been combating a prolonged harm record. And whereas the WSL has change into an more and more enticing proposition for prime gamers lately, it isn’t an unique house to them.