In The Journey to the Cup, The Athletic tells the stories of players and teams as they work towards a place in the 2023 Women’s World Cup. Follow along as we track their progress as they prepare both mentally and physically for a chance to shine on the game’s biggest stage.
Melissa Ortiz is, in a word, everywhere.
The Colombia international-turned-broadcaster frequents American soccer screens — and airports. She hit (at least) eight cities in a month before sitting down with The Athletic to discuss her new jam-packed schedule.
This year, Ortiz became the sideline reporter for Warner Bros. Discovery Sports, as it kicked off its eight-year broadcast deal with U.S. Soccer, and a studio analyst for Apple TV+’s new MLS coverage, which puts her alongside the sport’s most prominent voices covering American soccer. But her globetrotting journey began with a familiar hook: the 1999 Women’s World Cup.
“It’s crazy because (I) work with Julie Foudy (at WBD Sports),” Ortiz said. “I told Julie, ‘You don’t understand. The ‘99ers, you guys didn’t just impact U.S. soccer, and not just North American soccer, you literally impacted global women’s soccer from 1999.’ I was only eight or nine years old at the time and just seeing what I was able to bring to South America, that’s a trickle effect.”
That seed initially led Ortiz to the pitch. The West Palm Beach, Florida native represented Colombia at the youth and senior team levels, including the 2010 U-20 Women’s World Cup and the 2012 London Olympics.
“(I) just missed the (2015) World Cup by five days because I got injured and then my goal was to get back on the national team (for the 2016 Olympics),” she said. “I did but then I was an alternate.”
Ortiz’s national team career shared some unfortunate similarities with Foudy’s, as she and ex-teammate Isabella Echeverri detailed on Instagram in 2019. According to multiple players, the Colombian Football Federation once paid players $20 a day but decided to stop paying them altogether. The federation also wouldn’t foot the bill for new uniforms or travel to national team camps if and when they chose to hold them, Ortiz and Echeverri said, with the team going more than 700 days without a training camp after the 2012 Olympics and more than 400 days without one after the 2016 Olympics.
“There was a lot of corruption,” Ortiz said. “After that Olympics, I was so physically and mentally just done, even though I wanted to continue playing, but I just wasn’t in the right spot and I had no money at the time, barely any money.”
The tail end of Ortiz’s career was marred by injuries and the common mental fatigue faced by women’s soccer players, which ultimately ushered in a decision to swap her cleats for a microphone.
“I wanted to be part of our first pro league in Colombia and so I went down and I played, but I ended up tearing my meniscus. … It was so many things that I was just like, ‘I feel like I’m not getting anywhere anymore’ and our national team at the time was treating us like absolute crap,” she said. “I was like, ‘I think I have so much more talent than I have just with the ball at my feet and I just need to find it and how to showcase it.’”
Last year, Ortiz was able to bring that story full circle. With her WBD Sports sideline role, she is tasked with capturing the mood at USMNT and USWNT matches, which brings her back to her roots in women’s soccer. She aims to elevate the game both through her analysis on the field — she believes “there could be a little bit more honesty” during tactical discussions on-air — and off it. One of her first assignments was at February’s SheBelieves Cup, where Canada wore purple as a pre-match “symbol of protest” during a labor dispute with Canada Soccer.
Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images.
“Those are the types of things that I always tried to get us to do on the field, synchronize as a team to do it. We were about to do it in the 2016 Olympics against the USA,” she remembered. “We knew how big that matchup was, how big the coverage would have been. Two other players on my team had planned it all out and it just showed how not together as a team we were because we didn’t end up doing it and a lot of players got scared and that’s what happens. So for me to see Canada Women, those players do it, I was just like, ‘This is amazing. This is exactly what I wanted us to do.’”
Ortiz, again, had a platform to advocate for equality, perhaps larger than the 2019 Instagram post.
“Warner and my producer, Shaw (Brown), they know a lot about my background,” she said. “Right away, my producer was like, ‘We want to do a hit on your take on it, with your experience of what it’s like going through this.’”
Her experience on the pitch also makes Ortiz an asset for WBD Sports, especially because the company is kicking off its soccer coverage during a Women’s World Cup year. Ortiz has had a front row seat as the USWNT prepares for an unprecedented three-peat in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. WBD Sports will broadcast the U.S.’s send-off game against Wales on July 9 in San Jose, California.
Ortiz feels like a natural fit on air, but her journey to the screen wasn’t a straight line. She spent her first post-playing days working at her parents’ company doing accounting and marketing, which everyone quickly realized wasn’t her calling. Ortiz was always interested in broadcasting and interned at Colombia’s Claro Sports during her weeks off from the national team, but the definitive push toward a career in media came from her dad.
“I just remember this one time my mom, my dad and myself are watching BeIN Sports,” she said. “We’re watching a La Liga game or something like that and my dad says out loud, ‘Meli, that should be you up there. You have the personality. You have the knowledge.’”
Ortiz soon drove down to Miami and took a meeting with ESPN Deportes, “but it’s not like they offered me (anything),” she said.
“They didn’t care and it’s crazy because if you have a male counterpart just coming off the U-20 World Cup, Olympics, all these things, you better bet that they’d be hired off the bat,” Ortiz said. “It just showed how unequal it was.”
She decided to forge her own path through the power of social media — and with the help of an audiobook.
“What made me really excited to go at it was Gary Vaynerchuk’s ‘Crushing It!’,” she said. “It just talked about creating your own content and not giving a f––– about what anybody else thought and creating your own brand. I think I listened to it within two days. Swear to god, I think that very week, I bought a small digital camera and I started just creating content around soccer.”
While building a portfolio of work on social media in 2018, Ortiz covered men’s and women’s soccer in the U.S. and Europe. She posted everything from weekend recaps to pre- and post-game shows and soccer drills and handled the post-production responsibilities. She moved to New York the same year and announced her arrival on LinkedIn with a post saying she wanted to cover MLS as a broadcaster.
The internet delivered and she was invited to the league’s studio for an audition with “no script, nothing, was kind of winging it in Spanish and with no analyst or co-host or whatever.”
It didn’t go well.
“I walked out of there and I’m like, ‘That was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.’ The worst,’” Ortiz said.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a defining moment in her broadcasting career. She soon landed her first gig as the in-stadium host for the New York Red Bulls and slowly but surely booked jobs across the U.S.’s vast soccer landscape. She was tapped for MLS All-Star social media content, hosting men’s and women’s International Champions Cup events and was part of Fox’s broadcast team at last year’s World Cup in Qatar.
Between her English-language WBD Sports role and her Spanish-language duties as an analyst at Apple, Ortiz’s body of work encapsulates the American soccer experience. And she hopes her journey can shine a light on Latinas in the industry, who she said are often overlooked.
“Being a woman alone in many of the shows, it’s a challenge but especially (as a) Latina,” she said. “It’s such an honor not only to earn this position that I’m in now, but also to inspire other Latinas. I had to hustle a lot, and to now be able to cover men’s and women’s sports, I think it’s only the beginning.”
“The Journey to the Cup” series is part of a partnership with Google Chrome. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.
(Photo: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)
