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If there’s one position on the field that illustrates the Portland Thorns’ roster-building disarray this year, it’s goalkeeper.
The club started 2024 without its starting keeper of the past three years—Bella Bixby announced she’d be missing a significant portion of the NWSL season due to pregnancy—and having lost its iconic goalkeeper coach, the former Thorn and German national team player Nadine Angerer. At the time, it seemed Shelby Hogan was next in line to stand in the net: She was the only one of Portland’s three remaining keepers with NWSL minutes and had gotten the starting nod over Bixby in Portland’s 2023 semifinal loss to NJ/NY Gotham FC.
Hogan did start at the beginning of the season, but she looked shakier than she had in 2023. She struggled with her distribution out of the back, and it was clear the Thorns needed another option. The club signed Houston Dash backup Emi Alvarado in April, but if she was supposed to challenge Hogan for the first-string role, the notion quickly fizzled. (Little shock there, since Alvarado—though a regular starter when she played for Stade de Reims in France—had never appeared in a NWSL match.)
So the Thorns signed Australian international player Mackenzie Arnold in July, with the expectation that she would join the club after competing for her country in the Olympics, and waived Alvarado in August.
Arnold filled a couple of big holes for the Thorns. Unlike the other four goalkeepers who featured on Portland’s roster at the time of Arnold’s acquisition, she boasted an array of club and international experience. The 30-year-old made her debut for the Australian National Team in 2012. She’s played in Australia, Norway and most recently in England for West Ham United’s women’s side. In a statement from general manager Karina LeBlanc at the time of the signing, the Thorns front office proclaimed Arnold would “help us achieve our championship winning goals.”
One of Arnold’s strongest skills is her distribution, an area where Hogan has struggled throughout the season. “It is vital in modern football that a keeper can use their feet, distribute short and long,” Thorns head coach Rob Gale said in a press conference after Portland’s Sept. 4 victory over Club América.
But Arnold hasn’t been the magical cure-all goalkeeper for the Thorns. In the three league games she’s played for Portland, the club has allowed six goals. That puts Arnold at an average of two goals against per game to Hogan’s average of 1.29 per NWSL match this year. Arnold has saved only 62.5% of the shots she’s faced in the NWSL, while Hogan has saved 71% in 2024.
In other words, the new and improved keeper has been worse at keeping the ball out of the net than the goalie she replaced.
Granted, Arnold’s stats are based on a significantly smaller sample size, but it’s not a trend that’s unique to her NWSL performance. In England’s FA WSL, where Arnold played club soccer for four seasons before joining the Thorns, her save percentage ranked in the 15th percentile of goalkeepers in the league in the 2023-24 season, according to the stats site FBref. That means 85% of WSL keepers saved a higher percentage of the shots they faced than Arnold did.
This isn’t to say that Arnold is a bad keeper and the Thorns were wrong to sign her. It does mean Portland brought in a player who is very strong in a handful of areas and weaker in others, and by choosing to start her, the club is prioritizing what Arnold brings to the team over her drawbacks.
For instance, Arnold is fast to come off her line and put attackers under pressure, but she sometimes overcommits to that pressure and leaves space where opponents can beat her in the process.
We saw this in Portland’s recent 2-1 loss to the Washington Spirit, when, in the 10th minute, Arnold came out to close down Spirit attacker Ashley Hatch. Arnold was able to get a foot on the ball, but it deflected centrally where forward Rosemonde Kouassi was lying in wait. The Thorns didn’t concede a goal in that play, thanks to defensive midfielder Sam Coffey dropping back and kicking the ball off the goal line. Goal-line heroics are cool on a highlight reel, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense for a club to put itself in a position where it is regularly asking that of its field players.
For now, it looks like Arnold will continue to get the start. Her contract with Portland—which runs through 2026, with an option to extend the agreement through 2027—and the minutes she’s played already are a show of management’s endorsement of her.
But it’s been a chaotic journey for the Thorns to settle on her, to say the least—one that’s indicative of the larger sense of confusion that’s surrounded Portland’s front office this year. And Portland’s goalkeeping identity crisis is far from resolved: Arnold still has a lot to prove, and Bixby will be challenging for the starting role as she works her way back into form post-pregnancy.
Leo Baudhuin (he/they) has been writing about the Portland Thorns and the NWSL since 2019. When he’s not working or watching soccer, you can find him reading, crocheting or obsessing over his cats, Sully and Camas.