Ashley Sanchez leads the NWSL by three goals. Her last cap was in 2024.

Ashley Sanchez has scored nineteen goals in twenty-five league matches this season. Nobody else in the National Women's Soccer League has more than sixteen.

Emma Hayes has named four United States rosters in 2026. Sanchez is not on any of them.

Those two facts have been true together for most of the summer, and they get harder to hold next to each other every week. U.S. Soccer will publish a squad for the two October matches against Spain in roughly the next fortnight, and it will be the last roster named while the league season Sanchez is dominating is still being played.

Twenty-five matches, twenty-five starts#

The Courage have played twenty-five league matches. Sanchez has started all twenty-five of them.

Her season, from her match log: nineteen goals and four assists, with a hat trick at Chicago on September 6 in a 6-0 win that took her past the league record for goals by an American in a season. That mark had been fifteen, set by Crystal Dunn in 2015 and matched by Alex Morgan in 2022. Sanchez went past it that afternoon and finished the night on eighteen.

She has scored once since, at San Diego on September 12 in a 2-1 defeat. On Saturday, at home to Gotham FC, she took six shots, put one on target, had a goal ruled out for offside and did not score, and the Courage lost 2-1.

Before this season her best return in a league year was five goals.

Set against the players Hayes has been picking, the gap is wide. Sophia Wilson leads them with thirteen goals in twenty-five matches. Trinity Rodman has eleven in twenty-five. Emma Sears has seven in twenty-four. Sanchez has six more than the best of them, in the same number of matches as Wilson and Rodman.

Two things sit behind the jump. The Courage changed head coach, and Mak Lind moved her. Sanchez came up as a central attacking midfielder and U.S. Soccer still lists her as a midfielder; the league, naming her August player of the month on September 3, called her a forward. She is playing on the wing and finishing from there.

Four rosters, and she is on none of them#

Here is the other side, from the federation's own announcements.

Hayes named a twenty-six player roster on January 8 for matches against Paraguay and Chile. She named twenty-six on February 17 for the SheBelieves Cup. She named twenty-six on April 1 for three matches against Japan, and twenty-six on May 27 for two matches in Brazil. Sanchez is on none of the four lists.

The last time she played for the United States was October 30, 2024, against Argentina, a match she started and the United States won 3-0. She has twenty-eight caps and three international goals, all three scored in 2022.

This is not a case of a player the programme has never looked at, and it is not a case of a fringe squad she keeps missing. U.S. Soccer noted in May that the Brazil roster was the third in a row with no uncapped player on it, and that those three are the only such rosters of Hayes's tenure. That is a coach narrowing rather than searching. Riley Jackson, Sanchez's midfield teammate at North Carolina, has been on all four.

Sanchez was asked about a recall on the Full Time podcast in August, and Tamerra Griffin reported her answer in The Athletic. "That's definitely something that I aspire to do and obviously putting in performances like this definitely helps my case," she said.

Where she would actually fit#

A roster is twenty-six places and somebody has to lose one.

The May squad for the Brazil matches carried seven forwards: Michelle Cooper, Trinity Rodman, Emma Sears, Ally Sentnor, Mallory Swanson, Alyssa Thompson and Sophia Wilson. Wilson and Rodman are not the question. Alyssa Thompson has played three league matches at Chelsea and the English season is three matches old, so her short line is the calendar and not the player.

Mallory Swanson is the name that makes this a real trade rather than a free one. She has two goals in ten appearances for Chicago this season, 602 minutes of a possible 2,250 across the club's twenty-five matches, which is twenty-seven percent of the minutes available to her. She is also a forward with a World Cup and an Olympic gold medal behind her, and the argument for keeping her in the group is that the United States knows exactly what she is in a knockout match and does not know that about Sanchez.

The case against Sanchez is not about this season at all. It is that twenty-eight caps produced three goals, and that the finishing she is doing for the Courage from the left wing is not the role the United States has been asking wide forwards to play. A coach can watch nineteen goals and still conclude that she has seen this player in her own system and was not persuaded.

What has changed is that the sample is now large enough that the counter-argument has to be made out loud.

The window that costs nothing, and the one that does#

Hayes said in July, announcing the fixtures, that the Spain matches would be "the perfect tests before we head into World Cup qualifying at the end of the year."

That is the argument for both sides of this. A perfect test is where a coach confirms a group, and it is also the cheapest place on the calendar to look at somebody new. Spain are the world's top-ranked team and the matches are friendlies. The next one after that is the Concacaf W Championship quarter-final against El Salvador on November 27 in Mansfield, Texas, and the four quarter-final winners qualify for Brazil.

The club calendar closes in between. The Courage have five league matches left, sit seventh on thirty-nine points, and the regular season ends on Decision Day, November 1. The playoffs run November 6 to the final on November 21, six days before the quarter-final. By the time Hayes picks her November squad, Sanchez's season will be finished and the evidence will be a spreadsheet. In October it is still a thing a coach can go and watch.

One more date. The October 10 match at Audi Field opens with a retirement ceremony for Crystal Dunn, who set the American record in 2015 that Sanchez broke sixteen days ago.

Called Shot#

Ashley Sanchez is named in the United States roster for the October window against Spain.

The case against is that Hayes has left her out of four straight squads through the whole of this season, has built three of them without an uncapped player, and told everybody in July that these matches are a test of a group she already has. None of that is a coach hunting for a nineteen-goal winger.

The case for is that the cost of calling her in is two friendlies in October and the cost of not calling her in is carrying the question into a tournament year without an answer. She is capped, she is healthy, she has started every match her club has played, and her record now belongs to her rather than to Dunn and Morgan. A twenty-six player roster has room to find out.