Wolfpack: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game

Retired soccer champion Abby Wambach presents a manifesto rooted in her experiences as co-captain of the U.S. Women's National Team. Growing out of her commencement address at Barnard College, the book proposes eight "New Rules" to replace the cultural norms she believes keep women small, isolated, and compliant. Drawing on her athletic career, marriage, and post-retirement struggles, Wambach argues that women are a collective force capable of transforming society if they stop following rules designed to maintain the status quo.

In a prefatory note, Wambach acknowledges that she writes from a woman's perspective but contends that her leadership ideas are universal. She notes that while she uses terms like "women" and "men," she understands gender as a spectrum and hopes the book speaks to people of every gender identity.

The opening section, "Welcome to the Wolfpack," establishes the book's origin and introduces the Wolfpack, Wambach's term for a collective of women acting together. Shortly after retiring, Wambach was invited to address Barnard College's 126th graduating class at Radio City Music Hall. Reflecting on her career, she realizes that what she valued most was not individual achievement but the collective experience of shared joy, suffering, and sisterhood. She reframes her mission: Her new team is "All Women Everywhere" (6). Her central analogy draws on a TED Talk about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995. A small number of wolves transformed the park's ecosystem by changing deer behavior, allowing vegetation to regenerate and rivers to stabilize. Wambach draws the parallel: women, long feared as threats to existing power structures, will become society's salvation. She supports this with the story of the 1999 U.S. Women's National Team, which defied FIFA (soccer's global governing body) when FIFA insisted women could never fill NFL-sized stadiums. The team mounted a grassroots marketing campaign and sold out the Rose Bowl for the World Cup final, drawing over 90,000 spectators and 40 million television viewers.

In Chapter One, "You Were Always the Wolf," Wambach contrasts the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, whose moral is to stay on the path and stay quiet, with her own experience, in which every good thing came from defying prescribed paths. She recalls being forced into dresses as a child and the transformation she witnessed at her all-girls high school, where without boys present, quiet girls became opinionated. She dated boys because her religious upbringing dictated she should, but discovering her attraction to a girl revealed love was meant to be something more. Fearing the loss of her family, she decided being openly gay was not an option and began her first relationship with a woman in secret. She also recalls wanting to become a professional soccer player without knowing women's professional soccer existed, only to learn that other women had been fighting for Title IX (federal legislation mandating equal opportunities in education and athletics), building professional leagues, and striking for livable wages.

Chapter Two, "Be Grateful AND Ambitious," centers on the pay gap. Wambach describes receiving the Icon Award at the ESPY Awards alongside NBA player Kobe Bryant and NFL player Peyton Manning. She initially felt gratitude at being included in their company, but as the three walked offstage, she recognized that despite comparable achievements, Bryant and Manning were walking into financial freedom while her hustling days were just beginning. She cites specific figures: the 2018 FIFA Men's World Cup winning team received $38 million in prize money, 19 times what the 2015 Women's World Cup winners received, even though the U.S. Women's National Team generated a $6.6 million profit compared to the men's roughly $2 million. Broadening the argument, she notes that in early 2018, women in the U.S. earned 81.1 percent of what men earned, with Black women typically paid 63 cents and Latina women 54 cents for every dollar paid to white male counterparts. She argues that the pay gap persists not only because of male entitlement but because of women's gratitude: Power uses the tokenism of a few women to keep the rest in line.

Chapter Three, "Lead from the Bench," redefines leadership. In 2015, at 35, Wambach and her coach decided together that she would no longer start during her final World Cup due to declining speed and chronic pain. She describes the difficulty of watching from the sideline and channels the example of her longtime teammate Lori Lindsey, who was never a consistent starter but elevated the team through tireless encouragement. Wambach threw herself into bench leadership, and she credits the bench's energy as a key reason the team won the 2015 World Cup. She expands the concept beyond sports, asserting that leadership is "not a position to earn, it's an inherent power to claim" (41).

Chapter Four, "Make Failure Your Fuel," addresses women's relationship with failure. Wambach recalls visiting the national team's locker room as a youth player and noticing a photograph taped by the door: the Norwegian national team celebrating after defeating the U.S. in the 1995 World Cup. Veteran players later explained that the team never denies failure but insists on remembering it, because yesterday's loss fuels tomorrow's win. Veteran teammate Julie Foudy added that the team brought home its first Olympic gold the following year. Wambach then shares her own failure as an ESPN commentator during the 2016 UEFA European Championship, a major international soccer tournament, where her brain went blank on live television. She reframed the experience not as proof of inadequacy but as useful information: She was not destined to be a commentator. The realization led her to found her leadership company.

In Chapter Five, "Champion Each Other," Wambach argues against the scarcity mentality that pits women against one another. She uses the soccer goal celebration as her central image: When a goal is scored, the bench erupts and teammates rush the scorer, celebrating every player who made the moment possible. She identifies scarcity as an illusion that power uses to keep women competing for a single token seat rather than building a new, bigger table.

Chapter Six, "Demand the Ball," urges women to stop dimming their talent. Wambach recounts a formative scrimmage at 18 alongside her hero Michelle Akers, then the best player in the world. When Akers's team fell behind by three goals, Akers ran back to her own goalkeeper, screamed for the ball, dribbled through the opposing team, and scored repeatedly until her team won. Before witnessing Akers, Wambach had operated at 75 percent capacity, dimming her talent to avoid outshining others. She applies this principle to her personal life: Falling in love with Glennon, a woman with three children, she felt unprepared for stepparenting but decided to show up before she felt ready. She married Glennon, becoming "bonus mom" (67) to Glennon's children. She, Glennon, and Glennon's ex-husband Craig form a Pack built on respect and collective peace.

Chapter Seven, "Bring It All," challenges dominance-based leadership. Wambach describes the arrival of Swedish coach Pia Sundhage, who told the team she wanted them to win beautifully and then stunned the players by pulling out a guitar and singing Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'." The team initially believed Sundhage had no idea what she was doing. Gradually, Sundhage's vulnerability transformed the team's leadership structure from a top-down model into a collaborative one in which every person began to see herself as a leader.

In Chapter Eight, "Find Your Pack," Wambach argues that women cannot thrive in isolation. She describes a post-retirement running challenge and the misery of running alone despite 30 years of athletic training. Glennon identifies the problem: Wambach has lost her Pack. Wambach then recounts the viral spread of her Barnard speech and shares a message from a woman who uses the speech as a bedtime story for her daughters, articulating the isolation of being the only woman in the room and longing for her own Wolfpack.

The concluding section, "Time to Change the Game," addresses identity beyond achievement. Wambach describes her televised farewell message upon retirement, in which she urged the next generation to forget her, to accomplish things so great she would no longer be remembered. She recounts coaching her 10-year-old daughter's soccer team and discovering that one player had no idea Wambach had played professionally and was far more interested in whether Wambach knew Alex Morgan, a younger star on the national team. The humor masks a deeper crisis: without soccer, Wambach did not know who she was. Glennon wrote her a letter insisting that Wambach's magic was never on the field but inside her, in her dignity, ferocity, and the fire she rekindles in others. The book closes with its final argument: What a person does will never define them for long, but who they are always will. Wambach urges readers to ask not just what they want to do but who they want to be, and calls on the Wolfpack to unleash their power, unite, and change the game together.