Christine Sinclair is the World Cup’s quietest megastar

When Christine Sinclair faces Cameroon in Canada’s first match at the 2019 World Cup, she will have 181 international goals to her name. With four more, she’ll have the most of any soccer player in the history of the sport, surpassing Abby Wambach. She will almost certainly break that record during the tournament, at which point she will be, by one objective measure, the most successful player ever at the international level.

File that alongside a laundry list of other accomplishments, both individual and team, club and country: two NCAA championships, two MAC Hermann trophies, four club championships across two leagues, two Olympic bronze medals. File that alongside the fact that at age 35 (with her 36th birthday falling during the World Cup), she’s still both the best and most important player for Canada. No matter how you look at Sinclair, she is undeniably one of the greatest to ever tie on a pair of cleats.

And yet, despite her long list of superlatives, Sinclair is somehow one of the game’s most underrated players. For all her accomplishments, and for how much she matters back home — and she is, by far, the biggest deal in Canadian soccer — very few people fully appreciate how good she is.

There are reasons for that. One is that she’s Canadian — which, within the landscape of the women’s game, means that she’s spent her international career as the best player, by a wide margin, on a middling team. Another is that she is, famously, very private, and has never taken on a starring role off the field, even as she carries her team on it.

More than anything, though, the specific way in which she’s good seems engineered to elude notice. But if she’s neither as recognizable to the general public as Alex Morgan or Mia Hamm, nor as lauded among diehard fans as Marta or Michelle Akers, the people she plays with and against every week know full well what she can do.

They’re happy to explain what she would never say herself: Christine Sinclair is one of the best players on the planet, and nearly impossible to stop.

“You know, she’s a little bit different to me,” says star Australian striker Sam Kerr when asked about Sinclair, before correcting herself. “Not a little bit. She’s completely different to me.”

Kerr, widely considered the best player in the world right now, is a marvelous foil for Sinclair. Where the Canadian, in person, is soft-spoken and has a way of shrinking her imposing frame, Kerr has a jovial straightforwardness and exudes easy, unstudied cool. Both players are capable of picking up their teams and dragging them to victory, but Kerr does it with speed and style, while Sinclair — well, let’s let Kerr explain.

“She’s just that player that pops up in those annoying spaces and always scores,” Kerr says. “If she gets one opportunity a game, she scores it.”

This is a slight exaggeration, but what’s absolutely true is that Sinclair never shoots carelessly, and never takes low-percentage shots if another option is available. Where lesser players would go for a volley, she’ll settle the ball, take a touch, and place her shot. Where others would take a wild crack from outside the 18 — one that will look incredible if it works, but rarely does — she holds up play, waits for help, and makes a pass.

“She’s so clutch in and around the box and yeah, she scores good goals, but most of the time, she scores little, annoying, tap-in goals, and that’s what makes a good striker,” Kerr says. “And she’s one of the best in the world at it.”

Sinclair has plenty of highlight-reel goals (score as many as she has, and some of them are bound to be dingers), but that’s not what makes her great. Perhaps the Platonic form of a Christine Sinclair goal — what Kerr means when she says “little, annoying, tap-in goals” — is one where she lurks somewhere near her marker, then suddenly, at exactly the right moment, slips out of her marker’s line of sight. When the ball lands at Sinclair’s feet, and chaos breaks out all around her, she calmly puts it away. Goals like that can look, frankly, like luck.

But when someone scores them over and over, year after year, it isn’t a coincidence.

“When you sit in the stands and you literally just focus your attention on her, you just see that she’s constantly thinking,” says Stephanie Labbé, a goalkeeper for Canada and the North Carolina Courage. “It’s the smallest adjustments that she’s constantly making to make sure she’s always in a defender’s blind spot, or she’s playing off of someone’s shoulder; she’s playing in a space where people don’t really know who should be marking her.”

For a player who stands 5’9, with broad shoulders, Sinclair’s game is surprisingly un-physical. There’s a quietness to the way she plays, matching her personality. She sits between lines, watches, and waits for her moment.

“She’s just so smart, so wise,” says McCall Zerboni, a current Courage midfielder and former Thorn. “She’s not the strongest, fastest, most dynamic player that you’ll see, but she just finds a way to make runs off your shoulder, hide behind you, and get the best of you.”

That understatedness doesn’t just apply when she’s scoring. You also see it when Sinclair sets up her teammates, a role she’s played more and more as age has gradually slowed her down. Several years ago, she moved into the midfield for Canada, a switch she soon also made at the club level.

“Sinc is probably one of the best in the world faced up in that ten pocket,” says Lindsey Horan, her Thorns teammate, referring to Sinclair’s role as a link between the midfield and the forwards. It’s a job Sinclair is ideally suited for, with her combination of sound technicality, passing accuracy, and intelligence. But here again, she plays in a way you could miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

Mark Parsons, head coach of the Thorns, illustrates this with a hypothetical. “Let’s say Sinc plays to Tobin [Heath], Tobin crosses, and someone gets a shooting opportunity,” he says. “No one remembers Sinc. They remember Tobin crossing, and they remember the finisher making a run.”

Earlier this season, when the Thorns played Sky Blue, Sinclair made exactly that kind of play. She scooped up a clearance by Thorns defender Emily Sonnett and passed to Heath, a couple yards away, as midfielder Julie James went in for a tackle. With that line of pressure broken, Heath sprinted into space, where Paige Monaghan was forced to foul. On the resulting free kick, which Heath sent into the six-yard box, Carli Lloyd and goalkeeper Kailen Sheridan lunged for the ball, staying goal-side to block Sinclair’s shot. When they both fell to the ground, the Canadian calmly tapped the ball around both of them to Sonnett, who scored.

Portland was down 2-0 before that goal, which nobody will remember. Few people will even remember the game, which was an unspectacular draw on the road. But those results add up over the course of a season, and if you go back over the seven years of the NWSL’s existence, Sinclair has made those simple, game-changing contributions in nearly every game she’s played.

“She just finds a way to be effective in every single game,” Zerboni says. “There’s never a game that I’ve watched her where she wasn’t a tool piece that you had keep your eye on.”

That effectiveness is something Rory Dames, coach of the Chicago Red Stars, knows all too well, and it’s what he means when he calls Sinclair “arguably the most intelligent player in the league.” Few people appreciate just how much of the game of soccer happens off the ball, which means Sinclair’s world-class movement often goes unnoticed.

Dames drills down to specifics: “One game we went in last year, and we had Nikki [Stanton] man-mark her, and she never found her way into the game on the score sheet,” he remembers. “But when you went back and watched the film, she kept dragging Nikki out of spaces to open up spaces for Lindsey [Horan] ... She sees the game a step ahead of everyone else. Maybe not Lindsey and Tobin, but pretty close to everybody else.”

He’s referring to a 1-1 draw in Chicago last year, when Stanton doggedly followed Sinclair around for 90 minutes. Assigning a dedicated marker to Sinclair worked for the Red Stars in one sense. Sinclair didn’t score, and Stanton did well to intercept several passes intended for her. But Portland’s goal came off a free kick drawn by Horan as she sprinted into the midfield hole left when both Stanton and Danielle Colaprico tracked Sinclair back towards Portland’s goal.

Sinclair’s headiness made the difference.

“When she’s ready to move on,” Dames says, “we’ll send her a big bouquet and wish her well.”

For all her lack of flash, that one fact about Sinclair remains, the one that makes her stand out despite her efforts not to: she has scored an incredible number of goals.

Somehow, she’s even managed to do this quietly. Unlike, say, Marta in 2007, or Alex Morgan in 2012, Sinclair has never had a single year when she stood out above everyone else in the world. What she’s done, instead, is score at a respectable, if not remarkable, rate year after year, for almost 20 years. For her career, she is averaging just under one goal every two games. The only real outlier years are 2007, when she scored 16 goals in just 13 games (ironically, you’ll note, a year when she was overshadowed by Marta’s outstanding World Cup performance), and 2014, when she scored only one goal in 11 games. In the NWSL, she has scored roughly once every three games or better every year except 2015, a season when the Thorns struggled as a team.

There’s no other player on the planet who has scored so consistently for so long, and that’s what makes her downright superhuman once you look at her career from afar.

Yet that’s not to say Sinclair hasn’t had moments of brilliance.

If you ask any of her Canada teammates (or any Canadian, for that matter) to name one, they’ll likely tell you about the 2012 Olympic semifinal, the day Canada almost — almost — beat the USA.

“I just remember her being untouchable,” says Desiree Scott, a longtime defensive midfielder for Canada who now plays for the Utah Royals. That day, in what was perhaps the game of her career, Sinclair scored a hat trick (she is one of just three players we know of to have ever done so against the US; the other two are Marta and Norway’s Ragnhild Gulbrandsen), and singlehandedly went blow-for-blow with the best team in the world. The game went to overtime, and Morgan scored a game-winner at the death.

But the biggest impression Sinclair left that day was what she did afterwards, a moment that has since become the stuff of legend.

“She brought us together and said, ‘Look guys, we’re not going home without a medal,’” Scott recalls. “‘Take your 24 hours and get over this, then the next day we’re back on the field and we’re going to bring a medal home to Canada.’”

And then, dutifully, and on the absolutely inhumane Olympic schedule, the team scraped themselves off the emotional floor and beat France to win the bronze.

It’s the way Sinclair responds to losing, either as a game is happening or once it’s over, that defines her as a player as much as anything. All professional athletes hate losing. You can’t push your body the way that elite athletes must if you don’t. But different people hate it in different ways.

Sinclair seems to be driven not quite by the losing itself, but by the possibility of not doing absolutely everything in her power to avoid it. “If she has a bad touch, if she has a bad game,” Thorns teammate Emily Menges says, “she hates it. Like, can’t live with it.”

Sinclair is incapable, at a cellular level, of not doing her best. You can see it on her face, and in the way she moves. You can see it especially in big games, whether the match is coming down to the final whistle like that Olympic semifinal, or her team is getting blown out, like the Thorns did in the 2018 NWSL championship.

“Sinc was the hardest worker,” says Parsons. “She never stopped. It’s three-nil and she doesn’t know how to stop, because it’s always, ‘Be my best, be my best, be my best.’”

Many of us, world-class athletes and mere mortals alike, respond to losing by giving up, or getting mad, or pointing fingers at everyone but ourselves. These are ways of protecting ourselves from the pain of defeat, and they don’t do anything to change the situation. Sinclair responds by working harder.

That attitude is the reason she always seems to perform in big moments, why she trains with obsessive, meticulous attention to detail, and how she’s been able to adapt and improve with age rather than fade into obsolescence.

And it’s why, when we speak on the phone ahead of the World Cup, and I ask about her goal total, she gives a quintessential non-answer. She politely tells me she tries not to think about it, “ever.”

It’s all she needs to say. If it’s up to her, Sinclair will score goal number 185, and you won’t even notice.