Her Journey In Teal Town: Claire Hutton
The headline on her signing didn't even include her name. After one season, NWSL fans know it well. In a few years, casual soccer fans just might too.
Number Of Seasons as a Kansas City Current Player: One
Three Word Description: Quality. Composure. Brilliance.
WARNING: This article is going to be a long one, and come with a fair amount of bias. I’m not even going to try and use a neutral tone here - Claire Hutton is my favorite player in the NWSL and there’s a clear reason for that. She’s incredible.
98% of men’s soccer fans have taken great joy and pleasure in seeing Manchester City’s relative failure of a season, their era of sheer dominance has come to an end, the infallible has started to fail and the bump and the road has turned into a giant pothole. It’s been delicious. Despite having been able to chop and change their attack, their defense, survive near-full seasons without their top playmaker or top defender, the one injury which has proved to be able to derail their entire season was to Rodri, their defensive midfielder, or “number 6”.
The “number 6” role is often called the most important position on the pitch, the one position where the entire game runs through. They’ve got a simple job. All you’ve got to do to be a top level player in this position is: Screen and protect the defensive line, control the tempo of the game, receive the ball from the defense while being pressed, link the passing between the defense and the midfield, initiate attacks through switches of play to the wing or inch-perfect balls through the middle of the pitch, maintain the team’s defensive shape through your positioning, and kick-start transitions by winning the ball through tackles and interceptions.
The players who can do it in this role, frankly, are few and far between. Most clubs are happy with a player who is a great ball winner and can play the simple pass to a midfielder who can shoulder the creative burden, or a possession-retention specialist who’s liable to get caught out positionally - because there just aren’t that many players on earth who can do it all in the base of midfield. Claire Hutton, in her rookie season, has established herself as one of those players.
When I rocked up to CPKC Stadium in March and looked at the lineup, I admittedly hadn’t been following the offseason moves very closely, I was a pretty casual fan who’d been following the team’s social media but not with a super-close eye. I must’ve missed the relatively unheralded announcement with the title "Kansas City Current sign U.S. Youth National Team captain to three-year contract". When I looked at the lineup, I recognized a few names but thought “who?” to a couple - one of those being the player described, Claire Hutton. After the match, I found myself googling Claire Hutton’s name because the lasting impression I got was “who was that, where did she come from?” The announcement of Hutton’s signing used a lot of the buzzwords anyone would expect from signing someone through the Under-18 Entry Mechanism. Potential, future, exciting talent. Yet there she was, starting on opening day in the most important role on the pitch and playing the full 90 minutes.
And it just kept on going. The first seven matches of the season, Hutton played the full 90 minutes. An eighteen year old rookie was the lynchpin of a team that was going from strength to strength. Talk of her potential wasn’t “eventually she’ll be good enough to make an impact on this team”, it’s “look at how much of an impact she is making right now, imagine how much better she’s going to become.” I mean, come on. She’s pulling off passes like this already.
The role Hutton plays isn’t very conducive to the counting stats. She’s still waiting for her first goal (I’m not counting the summer tournaments), and she’s only got one assist on the season. But if you watch the Current’s goals back, she’s involved in so many of them. She’s winning the ball in the heart of midfield, carrying it up the field, and making a well-timed pass before the final ball. She’s spotting the winger in space and giving her the chance to go one-on-one against her defender. She’s creating the pressure which forces the opposition into an ill-advised pass that one of her midfield partners jumps on. When you’re watching from the stands, she’s pretty much guaranteed to have a few different actions during the game that just ooze quality, that make you clap your hands together and go “oh my god, she’s incredible.”
Take this play, for example. Receives the ball in a tight space, rides the contact, makes the pass that leads to an assist. Or look at this next one, where she drifts from the middle of the pitch to where the space is on the left. Picks her head up, plays the through ball to Izzy Rodriguez, who crosses to Michelle Cooper, who scores.
If you look at her history, it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise that Claire Hutton walked into the starting lineup of an NWSL team as a rookie and immediately began to play as if she had 200 games of experience. She joined her high school varsity team in seventh grade. She was named Class AA Player Of The Year in New York in eighth grade. She joined the boys varsity team as a junior in high school because she wanted more of a challenge. That’s not normal.
It brought me so much joy to learn that Claire Hutton was named one of the top 25 in jersey sales in the entire NWSL. Fans in Kansas City absolutely love her. Doing what she’s done as a professional, at age eighteen, makes her a role model for girls across the city playing soccer with big dreams of playing for the Current. I’ve spoken to some of these players, who have pictures of her on their wall, who’ve memorized her “letter to her younger self” and use it as a source of inspiration, who see her as a hero.
Casual soccer fans in KC who’ve become Current fans are drawn to her as well, because if you know ball - you’re blown away by a player with this level of talent. To me, her comparison in the men’s game is Jude Bellingham, who famously wears 22 because coaches from a young age told him that he could be a “number 4 (the traditional English number for the role that’s become colloquially known as the number 6), a number 8, and a number 10”. If you know ball, you can’t help but watch the Current and notice the immense level of talent she possesses. To me, one of the most special things about being a soccer fan is watching players who you can just tell from a young age will blossom into world-class players, or who step into senior football and immediately show that they belong. Claire Hutton gives you that feeling, you happily pay for a ticket to watch her play. You feel lucky to get the privilege of watching her do the damn thing. And similarly to Rodri at Manchester City, her importance to the team was reaffirmed by her absence from it.
The Current had to live without her for a month while she was representing her country at the U-20 World Cup and winning a bronze medal. The team’s dynamics felt different - they had to adjust completely because there just wasn’t a player on this massively talented team that you can plug into her role. Labonta and DiBernardo dropped deeper and worked in tandem to help make up for her loss, the front line had to do a bit more defensive work to cover for the midfield, everyone had to do a little bit more to keep the balance of the team. It’s the biggest compliment you can give a player in this role, in my opinion, that their abilities give the rest of the team a platform to fully express themselves and do what they do best.
One quote from Hutton about her experience at the U-20 World Cup really stood out to me. She suffered a concussion during the tournament and had to spend some of the tournament from a sidelines, and here’s what she had to say about it:
“It was cool having that experience of not being on the field, but being a bench player and having a different approach to the game. Rather than affecting the team on the field, I was able to help more off the field, and make sure everyone was getting ready and prepared. Mentally, it was obviously hard not to be playing, but it’s something that you need to learn as an athlete — and especially as a team player — that there’s different roles that you need to be able to fulfill.”
The fact that she had this sort of perspective when dealing with a setback is telling - this is the quote of a leader. Her technical ability and quality on the ball are plainly obvious to see, but physical and technical abilities are only half of the battle in professional sports. A player’s “mental profile” is also incredibly important. Most players would understandably need a lot of time to adjust, get settled in, and feel comfortable when joining a professional club in a city halfway across the country from the only place they’ve ever lived. Claire Hutton is not most players. She plays with swagger and a big personality, while playing in a midfield trio with top-level players, veterans of the league who have a dozen years on her. She demands the ball in pressure situations, fearlessly takes risks with the ball at her feet in a position where losing the ball leaves your defense exposed. If you put her in a lineup with a bunch of high school soccer players, she wouldn’t stand out to you as the professional, she very much looks like a teenager. Put her in the heart of the pitch, though, and she stands out amongst women ten, twelve, fifteen years older than her. She’s slotted right in, played the full 90, and never looked back.
The hype around her is growing, and for good reason. Sam Mewis has gushed about her. ESPN articles have openly wondered if she’ll be starting as the number 6 in the next Women’s World Cup for the senior team. Playing for the senior national team seems like a matter of when, not if. There’s absolutely no doubt that she’ll be part of the USWNT’s Futures Camp in January. Oh, and have I mentioned that she didn’t play this position before she played on the Current?
The more you learn about Claire Hutton, the more she takes your breath away.