USWNT announce game against Sweden in April

The United States women’s national team will travel to Sweden next month to play a friendly that will be only their second game on foreign soil since the 2019 World Cup final.

The USWNT have won 28 of their last 29 matches of a dominant run stretching back to the 2019 SheBelieves Cup and started the new year in top form with comprehensive back-to-back victories against Colombia and a perfect record at the recent 2021 SheBelieves Cup.

The upcoming game against Sweden has been arranged for Saturday 10 April at the Friends Arena in Stockholm. Kick-off will be 1pm ET (7pm local time) and broadcast on FOX. A second friendly in Europe is currently being finalised for Tuesday 13 April and will be announced soon.

The game against Sweden, who are fifth in the current FIFA world rankings and finished third at the last World Cup, will be an important test for the USWNT ahead of this year’s Olympics.

“We want to play as many of the top teams as possible to prepare for the Olympics and Sweden certainly falls into that category,” coach Vlatko Andonovski told ussoccer.com.

“They are proven winners, have tremendously athletic players, are led by an excellent coach and are tactically savvy and experienced. We need as many tests as possible like the ones we’ll face at the Olympics and these games in Europe will give us that.

“We only have a few matches left before we have to pick the Olympic Team so we need the players to show how they can impact the success of our team and we need to see them do it against world class teams.”

The last meeting between the teams finished saw the USWNT win 3-2 in November 2019 in Columbus, Ohio, thanks to goals from Carli Lloyd (2) and Christen Press.

The U.S. also beat Sweden 2-0 in the World Cup group stage a few months earlier, yet it was famously the Swedes who stood in the way of an Olympic medal in 2016, winning a tense quarter-final tie following a penalty shootout. It is the only time so far in history that the USWNT has failed to pick up an Olympic medal of any colour.

The last time the USWNT actually played against Sweden in Sweden was June 2017 and Rose Lavelle scored the only goal of the game in a 1-0 win.

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