Becky Sauerbrunn and the U.S. women defeated South Africa in a July 9 friendly. (AP Photo) Imagine being the best in the world at your job.
Now imagine nobody recognizing you as being the best in the world at your job.
That’s more or less the predicament Becky Sauerbrunn, the rock of the United States women’s national team’s defense, finds herself in. Except she doesn’t seem to really care all that much. Not that she is the world’s most underrated player. Or that she wasn’t among the seven best defenders in FIFA’s All-Star Team after shepherding the back line through the Women’s World Cup last year, playing a major — major — role in the Americans ending their 16-year title world title drought. Head coach Jill Ellis calls her “essential” and says “she’s one of the most important pieces for us.”
But the 31-year-old central defender from St. Louis wasn’t among the four defenders in the fans’ Dream Team, either. Or on FIFA’s Player of the Year long list for 2015. Or in the FIFPro World XI.
When she’s confronted with this litany of grievous oversights of her accomplishments, she chuckles. And then she shrugs. “Well …” she begins.
“I mean …”
“I can’t …”
She shrugs again.
“That stuff is out of my control,” Sauerbrunn finally says. “And if I constantly thought of myself based on what other people thought of me, I would not be a happy person. It’s nice when people are kind of mystified on my behalf, but at the end of the day …”
Co-captain Carli Lloyd needs no convincing. “I’m a huge Becky fan,” she says. “I think that she has gotten so much better over the years and continues to improve. She’s one of the best defenders in the world, no question.”
Improving is what Sauerbrunn draws her gratification from. “I know I have levels to get to,” she says. “I don’t think I’m where I’m going to end up with my career. I think I have places I can reach as far as being a player. And so that’s kind of my motivation.”
Becky Sauerbrunn will focus on herself, thank you very much, and let all the acclaim be damned.
**********If Sauerbrunn has gone unnoticed, that’s probably because she arrived largely unnoticed as well. She didn’t become a full-time starter until after the 2012 London Olympics, by which time she was 27 and a four-year veteran of the team. She just kind of slipped in there amid the turnover from Pia Sundhage’s departure as head coach and the short-lived tenure of Tom Sermanni, which served mostly to shake up the ossified lineup and team hierarchy.
Since then, she has been so efficient at her job that most don’t notice her doing it. In that sense, she’s kind of like a referee, or a cleanup crew. If you don’t even realize they’re there, their work is well done.
“I think there’s something to that,” Sauerbrunn concedes. “There’s not a lot of glory in that position and you very easily can be noticed for doing the wrong thing.”
It’s sort of inherent to the task of a defender. “You look at someone like [attacking midfielder] Megan Rapinoe, who is going to take a risk all the time,” Lloyd explains. “Sometimes it’s good; sometimes maybe not. But it’s flashy. People are noticing it. [Becky] keeps it very simple and she makes very effective choices on the field. There’s not many times where she has to slide, where players get by her. She just makes everything look easy.”
This is by design and a credit to her craft. “Soccer can be very subtle, it’s a very nuanced sport,” Sauerbrunn says. “If I happen to make things easy and people don’t see it, that could be a reason why someone might stand out more than I do. But that’s just the way I’ve grown up playing the game.
“Julie Johnston is what I would call a loud central defender, as far as how she tackles and how she plays — you notice her,” she continues, referring to her partner in USA’s central defense. “And you notice her in a positive way. She’s a destroyer. She interrupts plays and tackles the crap out of people. That’s a very visual thing.”
But that isn’t the 5-foot-7 Sauerbrunn, who is undersized for an elite defender in the women’s game yet remarkably hard-nosed, although not literally — she broke her nose in her U.S. debut in 2008. Her all-time favorite defender was Italy and AC Milan legend Paolo Maldini, who once said, “If I have to make a tackle then I’ve already made a mistake.”
Sauerbrunn anchors the U.S. defense. (Getty Images) “If I could play a game and not have to tackle I know that I did everything right,” Sauerbrunn echoes. “I organized everyone the right way, read every play the right way. I’ve never been the tallest or the strongest or the fastest. But I’d like to think that I can read the game well enough, that I can position myself well enough, that I can level the playing field when it comes to physical differences. When it comes to height, whoever wants the ball more is going to win it.”
She isn’t much for the tackling statistics that are often — and wrongly — used to measure defenders.
“Tackling happens because every once in a while something is going to break down, because 11 people on the field can’t do the exactly right thing all the time,” Sauerbrunn says. “I like to think I can tap into my oh-[expletive] speed that I have to use sometimes when something really broke down. But if I don’t have to tap into that or tackle, it’s a good day.”
Maybe she goes unnoticed because she’s an actual defender. Most national team defenders were forwards or attacking midfielders in college and early on in their careers, and they play accordingly. Kelley O’Hara, Julie Johnston, Ali Krieger, Crystal Dunn, Whitney Engen, Christie Rampone and Meghan Klingenberg were all unnatural defenders. They were gradually pulled backwards to fill needs.
Not so with Sauerbrunn. If she ever left the back line for midfield, it was as a defensively minded one. As such, her mentality is more conservative, and she is often her team’s tether between defensive responsibility and outright chaos in the back.

And that’s where her concern lies — the greater good of the entire national team.
“What matters to me is that my team respects me and my coaching staff respects me and they want me on the team and they want me playing,” she says. “At the end of the day, that’s all that’s really important to me.”
It seems they do. Sauerbrunn was recently made co-captain.
Plus, she says, “I would rather be underrated than overrated.”
**********Sauerbrunn showed up to her interview clutching a book. She is prone to tweeting and Instagramming about her #nerdsquad on the national team. They’re a group of self-proclaimed nerds who like to explore, read and see movies when they’re on the road. “It’s dwindling right now,” she says. It’s just her, Heather O’Reilly, Klingenbergh and Hope Solo.
Lately, they’ve lost Nicole Barnhart, Amy LePeilbet and Rachel Van Hollebeke. Time has laid waste to the nerdsquad.
So Sauerbrunn has put her spare time into boning up on her German — she’d like to play in Germany someday — and studying to become a trainer. Something to do after her career if she doesn’t become a coach.
Another job in which you’ve excelled when nobody really knows you’re there.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.