Angel City Football Club will conduct an Olympic sendoff celebration for captain and defender Ali Riley following Saturday evening’s game at BMO Stadium against the NJ/NY Gotham FC, the reigning National Women’s Soccer League champion.
Riley will play for New Zealand, her father’s homeland. This will be the fifth Olympics Riley has played for the Football Ferns. She has been their captain since 2017.
The 36-year-old Riley was raised in Pacific Palisades and graduated from the Harvard-Westlake School in 2006. She played for Stanford from 2006-09, for FC Gold Pride in 2010 and the Western New York Flash in 2011 in the defunct Women’s Professional Soccer, for the Swedish first division team Rosengard from 2012-18 and in 2020 (it was known as LdB FC Malmo before December 2013), Chelsea of the English FA Women’s Super League in the 2018-19 season, and Germany’s Bayern Munich in the 2019-20 season.
Riley has played for Angel City since its inaugural 2022 season.
The 7 p.m. game is Angel City’s last NWSL game before the Olympic break.