Two MVPs. Two Golden Boots. A league-record 20 goals in a single season. And yet Temwa Chawinga will tell you, without hesitation, that her NWSL career is still unfinished business.
"It's not enough just to reach the final. We want to win it," the Kansas City Current forward told ESPN. That's not a motivational poster. Coming from a player who has dominated this league like nobody before her, it's a genuine grievance.
The frustration is legitimate. Kansas City finished the 2025 regular season 21-3-2, won their first NWSL Shield with a league-record 65 points — 21 clear of second-placed Washington Spirit — and looked like the runaway favorites for the title. Then Chawinga tore her adductor in October, missed the playoffs, and eighth-seeded Gotham FC knocked out the top seed 2-1 in the quarterfinals. The whole season, gone in one game.
A pattern Kansas City need to break
This isn't a one-off. The Current lost the 2022 championship final 2-0 to Portland Thorns. They fell 3-2 to eventual champions Orlando Pride in the 2024 semifinals. Now this. Three years, three different exits, zero titles. At some point the regular-season dominance stops being a comfort and starts being a reminder of what hasn't been converted.
Chawinga's individual numbers only underline the gap. Her 15 goals in 2025 earned her a second straight Golden Boot — following those record-breaking 20 in 2024, which surpassed Sam Kerr's previous single-season best of 18. She became the first player in NWSL history to win back-to-back MVPs, and the first since Kerr to score 15 or more in consecutive seasons. She's also the first African-born player to win either award.
She arrived from Wuhan Jianghan University in China before the 2024 season with modest expectations. "I just wanted to see if I could do it," she said. "I only came here to try it for one year." Two years later, the Current have extended her through 2029 using the league's new High Impact Player mechanism — a significant financial commitment that signals exactly how central she is to their project.
The 2026 reality check
The early-season form in 2026 has been a jolt. Kansas City sit seventh at 9-8-4 after a 1-1 draw with Seattle Reign — a far cry from last year's steamroller. New head coach Chris Armas replaced Vlatko Andonovski in January, though Andonovski stayed on as sporting director, a setup Chawinga credits for the continuity in their system and culture.
"There isn't a big difference because we're still playing the same system," she said. That might explain why the transition has been relatively smooth — but seventh place in 2026 means the Shield defense is already gone, and making a deep playoff run from mid-table is a different kind of challenge than cruising in as the Shield winners.
For anyone tracking Kansas City's championship odds, the injury risk around Chawinga remains the single biggest variable. A team built so heavily around one player — even one this good — is always one bad tackle from falling apart, as 2025 painfully proved.
She's also carrying the weight of a near-miss with Malawi, who lost the Women's Africa Cup of Nations final 3-0 to Cameroon in July. Two finals, two losses, different competitions, same result. Chawinga says those defeats have only sharpened her hunger. The evidence of that, one way or another, will come in October.
