The U.S. women's national team will play Costa Rica on July 16 at Audi Field in Washington, D.C., in the final game for the U.S. team before the 2024 Olympics, it was announced Tuesday.
The game will take place three days after the USWNT plays Mexico at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, New Jersey, and nine days before the USWNT's Olympic opener against Zambia in Nice, France.
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The rosters for both games will include USWNT Olympian players, US Soccer announced. Each team can only have 18 players on their Olympic roster, five fewer than the World Cup roster, making for difficult decisions for the USWNT in transition.
Emma Hayes is scheduled to play four games as head coach of the USWNT before the Olympics begin. She will officially take over the team in late May, and is scheduled to accompany them to a friendly match against South Korea in June, before send-off matches against Mexico and Costa Rica in July.
Hayes was hired by U.S. Soccer in November, but both sides agreed the coach would finish the season at Chelsea. Twila Kilgore, Hayes' soon-to-be assistant, had been serving as interim coach since late August.
On Saturday, Chelsea defeated Barcelona 1-0 in the UEFA Champions League semi-final first leg in Spain. It was the first home defeat for defending European champions Barcelona in five years. The UEFA Champions League final will be held on May 25th in Bilbao, Spain. His next USWNT training camp begins on May 27th.
Under Coach Kilgore, the USWNT won the Concacaf World Gold Cup in March and the SheBelieves Cup in April, defeating or advancing five Olympic opponents in the knockout games of those tournaments.
“Right now we're in a testing, real, testing phase,” Kilgore said after winning the SheBelieves Cup. “This is our fifth consecutive match against a team that has qualified for the Olympics. For context, we only have one more match to qualify for the final.”
The USWNT's send-off game on July 16 will be against an opponent the team has never lost to in its past 17 games.
The last time Costa Rica and the USWNT met was in the quarterfinals of the 2022 Concacaf World Championship, with the USA winning 3-0, aiming to win the tournament and qualify for both the 2023 World Cup and 2024 Olympics. .
Audi Field is the home of the National Women's Soccer League's Washington Spirit and MLS's DC United. The only previous time the USWNT was hosted at this venue was in September 2022, when they defeated Nigeria 2-1.
