Reign Drop Bad Home Opener Loss to Royals, Fishlock Suffers Big Injury

SEATTLE - It's hard to find any other words to describe what the Reign suffered in their 90 minutes against the Royals, so disaster will have to suffice. Some combination of disaster and misfortune.

Disaster because the team found themselves outscored 3-0 in a game against the Utah Royals. Misfortune because the Reign had more than enough chances to get right back into the game, even with the steep deficit at their feet. And both disaster and misfortune wove themselves together on Jess Fishlock, as she had to be carried out of the game following her fall to the ground in the 65th minute.

There were many more ways it could have gone wrong. No other Reign players had to come off with injury, and no matter how bad a league loss is, only three points at a time are contested. Going scoreless and giving up multiple goals didn't, in this fixture at least, come after going up two players against Portland. I suppose that, for whatever reason, Seattle's losses in 2026 have been bad ones.

"Obviously, we're really disappointed to lose any game, especially at home, and especially in the manner that we did," head coach Laura Harvey said after the match. "If you're 2-0 down and it's the last 10 minutes and you're pushing and you concede a third, it would feel different, you know?"

Seattle began the game on the back foot and the Royals roared to an early lead.

The first disaster was the score, all of which happened in the first 45 minutes. On the face of it, both Seattle and Utah produced chances during the half, but much of the (eventually successful) opportunities Utah got came off the back of preventable giveaways from the Reign, as they seemed unprepared for the high pressure they knew was coming.

The Reign had about the worst possible opening seven minutes a team could have. On the first run of play in the match, a missed Maddy Curry pass intended for Phoebe McClernon wound up going to Royals midfielder Mina Tanaka, who tapped it back to Paige Cronin. The visiting winger found the upper left corner of the net, an area Reign keeper Claudia Dickey had little chance of reaching, and it was one minute, one goal for Utah.

The visitors didn't let up the pressure. Nearly everything during the early game took place in Seattle's half, and the possession the Reign did accrue early on wasn't especially threatening.

Utah won a corner in the 7th minute, and although the initial service fell on the other side of the crowd as the goal, Narumi managed to get to the ball and rattle off a longshot towards the upper right corner. Dickey got a slightly late jump on the ball and it soared over her outstretched arm for the second Royals goal.

"We'd spoke for the last two weeks about, Utah are very aggressive in their pressure, they're gonna come in the front foot, and we need to make sure that we're gonna put the ball in areas where they can't hurt you," Harvey said after the game. "Unfortunately, we didn't do that well enough at times at got really punished for it."

Seattle started taking more charge of the action as the half wore on, but they weren't able to put a scoring drive together. Most of their possession consisted of solid ideas axed due to an overeager touch, a missed pass, a muffed aerial, or a moment of hesitation.

And yet the Reign had three prime opportunities to claw their way back in the first half.

First up was a giveaway on the visitors in the 18th minute, as Nérilia Mondésir stole a careless pass inside the Royals box. But she hesitated just long enough so that the window closed, and a following shanked cross and offsides call ended the run of play.

The second missed chance again came about thanks in part to Mondésir, who whirled up the right side to grab a ball up from Sofia Huerta and sent the ball to Mercado, positioned about a foot from the goal line. But as she needed a split second to gain control of the ball, and all she could do once she had it was send it backwards. Sally Menti got the ball back to Mondésir and the winger rattled off a left-footer towards the goal, but Royals keeper Mia Justus snared the ball.

Third up to barely miss was Jess Fishlock. In the 33rd minute, Huerta rattled off a cross to a box with Brittany Ratcliffe, Maddie Mercado, and Fishlock, and the first headed it towards the last. With a defender between the keeper and Fishlock and the ball floating above her, Fishlock attempted a bicycle kick, but the ball went a couple meters wide of the post.

Not that these chances came during any sort of uninterrupted run of possession. Tanaka tried for a screamer of her own over the crowd and towards the top of the goal, but a stellar jumping save from Dickey kept the Reign deficit to two points.

The three chances that Seattle had were interspersed with others where the offsides flag went up, including a Fishlock curler off the crossbar that wouldn't have counted regardless due to an earlier offsides call on Mondésir.

And despite all these chances and despite the fleeting sharpness that created them, at the very end of the first half, the Royals struck for the third time. As Ana Tejada and Cloé Lacasse broke away from the pack, Sofia Huerta and Emily Mason tried to contain her, but Huerta's attempted tackle was short and Mason wasn't able to keep up. Lacasse drilled the ball in the net, and Utah went from the proverbial dangerous lead to truly in the catbird seat.

The Reign kept giveaways off the board in the second half, but they didn't flip the script and the score held.

Harvey's view on the first half was twofold: that the team had failed to execute on the gameplan early on, and that there had also been some bad luck going against them, specifically mentioning a collision in the late minutes of the half between Mercado and Justus that she felt should have been a penalty. But even with the bad luck, the first half wasn't anywhere near what the Reign were looking for, and Harvey sought to tweak their approach.

But while the tweaks stemmed the bleeding, they didn't come close to building a comeback. There were chances, but like in the first half, they went unfulfilled.

Fishlock had an open shot to launch a screamer towards the net in the 49th minute, but as she hesitated and cut back, the Royals were able to fall back and prevent anything more dangerous from forming.

Mondésir stole the ball away deep in Royals territory during the 61st minute and barreled in from the side, but Justus got in the way and all Seattle got out of it was a corner. Incredibly, Seattle managed to produce a second opportunity, with a cross going in for Mercado, but her boot managed to tap the ball up over the crossbar. A 72nd minute left-footed screamer from Mercado became the second Reign shot of the evening to hit the crossbar.

But after that, the resurgence in cohesion that had allowed the team to produce so many unfulfilled chances began to fall by the wayside. Even when the substitutes came on, it didn't give the team the kind of big spark they were looking for. Maddie Dahlien had a shot on goal in the 63rd minute while Mia Fishel entered the game in the 78th minute, her first appearance since the season opener in Orlando. She didn't become the center of the action during much of her time on the pitch, but she did look solid on the ball when she was part of a play. But with such a big hole already dug, they needed extraordinary play from everyone on the pitch and extraordinary connection from those players, and they didn't get it.

Seattle suffered a longer-term disaster as Fishlock went down in the second half.

A loss is a loss is a loss. Three points are no longer available for the Reign on the table, but given that few expected the team to be a Shield contender, having two losses in their first six fixtures is not that much of an issue. Sure, both their losses have managed to be uniquely bad, but the table would look the same if they had lost 2-1 to Utah and 2-1 to Portland. They're still fourth in the table with 10 points.

What matters more for the team going forward is the injury Jess Fishlock sustained. Although the 39-year-old Welsh international has been on limited minutes since last year, she has usually brought an extra electricity to the pitch with a physical brand of play and good quality on the ball. She hadn't been playing quite to that level for the first 65 minutes of Sunday's match, but she had still had solid moments (though perhaps her best had been a first half screamer off the crossbar that wouldn't have counted anyway thanks to the earlier Mondésir offsides).

She fell to the ground in the 65th minute and had to be carried out of the match, clearly in a lot of pain related to her ankle. The immediate impact on the field was a diminishing of the team's energy, though they still managed to get a couple of drives going before finally tapering off between the 70th to 80th minutes for probably unrelated reasons.

Given that they had to use an air cast as they took Fishlock off, the injury is probably quite serious. I'm not a doctor, but that level of immediate pain is usually not good.

Without Fishlock, the team will probably bring Mondésir to the number 10 spot, and although she has looked very solid on the wing, she will have to step up in a much bigger way as the 10.

What is the Reign's outlook going into the rest of the season?

The Seattle Reign didn't come into 2026 with sky-high projections, with the lack of a star pushing most to deem them a mid-table team at best. That isn't the way the Reign have approached their team, but this does put the onus on them to prove that a team that isn't built around one elite player can still play with all the teams that do.

Utah isn't one of those teams, either. But they approached the game with a plan that, despite the Reign knowing what would be coming, the home side didn't end up prepared for.

This theme of missed opportunities was evident, though some in the team found reasons for optimism in the wreckage.

"We were off by just a hair, but in the next game, those go in," Ratcliffe said about her side's missed opportunities. "I think for us, we have to be hard on ourselves, and take today and be like 'okay, that's not acceptable, we are better than that,' and then tomorrow, 'okay, how can we improve, what can we do? Can we finish our chances, can we make our passes a little bit cleaner, can we make better decisions, can we go forward, can we read the game better and make adjustments?' ... we have a game on Friday, and that's an opportunity for us to fix the mistakes we made today."

Now, the statistically minded will note that the Reign were one of the luckiest teams by expected goal differential (xG) compared to actual goal differential in 2025 and had gotten off to a similar start in 2026. It was only a matter of time before as game like Sunday's would happen, where Seattle's 1.03 xG and Utah's 1.10 xG were basically tied but Seattle ended up way down in the actual score. On the other hand, there is an actual reason (Claudia Dickey) why the team tends to overperform its xG, and she didn't have her best game on Sunday.

When a team suffers a big loss like the Reign did on Sunday, there are multiple reasons for the crooked score. The team will have to make sure to take things one at a time in training and simplify their approach to improvement, since the worst thing a player can do in any sport is overthink. Examining why they came out of the gates as flat as they did will probably be the best place to start.

"Really honing in on why that happened, everyone taking accountability, being honest with each other, and just moving forward," Huerta said of the team's approach to fixing that opening backfootedness. "I would say, actually, the last five games we'd started off quick. So I'm not exactly sure why, this game, it was like that."

Of course, one of the reasons having a superstar - a Sophia Wilson, a Temwa Chawinga, a Trinity Rodman, and so on - can push a team into that next echelon is the mental effect on the opposing team, who has to especially prepare for that one player and may forget the solid supporting cast who can also strike. Another reason is that, if you fall under early, you can also get bailed out by said superstar.

The Reign have a different approach than building a team around one big player. That's something Jess Fishlock talked about in her retirement announcement presser, that the team's identity is built around being greater than the sum of their parts and having a collective that can go toe to toe with anybody. That's also something that is an evident work in progress, with the team looking to develop a host of young players into great players. There's no doubt that, if they're successful, a team built around four strong attackers, two strong holding midfielders, four strong defenders, and a USWNT goalkeeper can go toe to toe with the best of them even if there isn't a bona-fide superstar.

But as of yet, while they have looked better than their last two seasons, the Reign haven't had the consistency to make that style of play work. Building without a superstar can run into what can be termed the Seattle Kraken problem if handled poorly; a team full of solid depth pieces but without the top line it needs. The good news is that the Reign seem to be developing their youngsters a whole lot better than the Kraken have been, but that isn't exactly the highest bar out there.

Enough dunking on Ron Francis, because I could do that for hours. This isn't a hockey website in any event.

Even if the Reign don't use the Huitema money to get a true superstar, they could do well with some great-but-not-elite additions to the midfield and back line. Aside from a solid performance from Phoebe McClernon, the back four didn't have a great performance on Sunday, and they have looked like a notable weakness at numerous points in the year. Sam Meza and Sally Menti are solid options in the midfield - Meza had some good moments that went under the radar on Sunday - though a prolonged absence of Fishlock will deprive the team of a true number 10 (and Fishlock's limited minutes had already made that something of a semi-question mark, though one more geared towards 2027).

But even with the Reign's continued expected goal luck, I still think they will finish the year better than their preseason projections and will probably settle as an upper-mid table team (though a less lucky one than their 2025 upper-mid table finish). There is plenty of room for improvement, however, and if Seattle truly wants to take the NWSL field by surprise, they can't have a lot of results like Sunday's.