So far, so all-American sports story, right? But there’s a twist in this tale. Despite living in Los Angeles for her entire life, being drafted by her home-town team and playing in tandem with her sister, in 2025 Thompson made the life-changing decision to leave Angel City and LA and move nearly 9,000 kilometres away from what she’d always known, starting over in London at Chelsea. “I knew for myself what I wanted to accomplish and coming to Chelsea was a great thing for me,” she says. “And when I heard the opportunity came, it was a no-brainer. I didn’t really think about anything else.”
It was a no-brainer for Chelsea too. In her two years at Angel City, Thompson’s blistering pace and ability to tie defenders up in knots had taken her from a raw teenage talent to a composed, mature winger with a highlights reel full of powerful long-range strikes, precision dribbling and players left in her dust before they’d even registered what had happened. She signed for Chelsea for a then club-record fee, packed her bags and moved from sunny California to the UK. When I ask her what she misses most about LA, the answer is unsurprising – “Besides my family, the weather. And the beach!” I venture she might also be missing Mexican food, a staple of the LA diet, which elicits a wistful response. “Oh my gosh. I can’t even!” she laughs. “There’s really no Mexican food in London. And if you get any, it’s not that good. But there’s so much Mexican in California, especially in LA. You can’t beat it.”
The distance between her and her sister will be felt even more keenly than the lack of good tacos. How tough was it to make the decision to leave her? “It was pretty difficult because I love playing with her and I love being around her,” Thompson says. “We started our careers together. But we don’t talk every day; I feel like me and Gisele are the same person, so it’s easy to just know what she’s up to. And then when we’re back together it’s the same, like nothing’s changed.”
While she didn’t have her sister by her side, Thompson did have some fellow American compatriots at Chelsea to make joining the club easier – Naomi Girma, who joined from San Diego Wave in January 2025, and Catarina Macario, who just after I speak to Thompson agrees to return to the NWSL for a world-record fee. “In the beginning, Nay and Cat gave me the lay of the land. It’s so different, so Nay and Cat could understand my experience and where I was coming from. Nay really helped me a lot on where to live. I live ten minutes from her, which is really nice.”
Despite the upheaval – and the scarcity of good guacamole – it didn’t take Thompson long to find her feet. Her first goal for Chelsea came in the Women’s Champions League, a close-range shot against Paris FC in the league phase. Thompson says she didn’t expect it so soon: “Coming to Chelsea, I really had a lot of grace with myself and I was like, ‘I probably won’t score for a while coming in here – I probably won’t start or play.’ I was just taking it all in. Being able to score my first goal pretty early on was really nice. And being able to be celebrated by my team-mates, I felt like a part of the team and accepted and it was amazing. I was just really happy.”
It’s been steady going for Thompson since then – she scored eight goals in her first 20 games and, a couple of days after we meet, she got her hands on her first piece of silverware at Chelsea, the League Cup. But she has her eyes on a bigger prize – the Women’s Champions League trophy. Chelsea have never won the competition, despite coming agonisingly close a number of times. “Being able to play at the highest level against different competition in Europe is just amazing, and being able to win would be so cool too,” she says.
Despite Chelsea eventually bowing out at the quarter-final stage to current holders Arsenal, the sense of adventure around this new stage of her career is palpable when speaking to Thompson. “A lot of Americans have dreamed of playing in Europe, childhood dreams of coming [here],” she says. “Being able to play for Chelsea was something that I’ve always wanted to do.” Thompson is one of more than a dozen US nationals in the Champions League this season, a number that keeps increasing as the years go by, with more American players drawn to Europe than ever before. She might be part of a growing trend, but a Californian girl growing up dreaming of west London isn’t the most ordinary of stories. Then again, given the route she’s taken to get here, Alyssa Thompson isn’t exactly the most ordinary of players.
