Megan Rapinoe's brother has died.

Michael passed away last year following a "long battle with alcoholism".

The former US Women's National Soccer Team star opened up about his death for the first time publicly on the latest episode of her A Touch More: The Beautiful Game podcast.

Megan, 40, told her guest, 46-year-old former professional soccer player Abby Wambach: "I went home last year after my older brother Michael died. It was a long battle with alcoholism, and it was sad."

Mourning Michael - one of her five siblings, Brian, fraternal twin sister Rachael, half-sister Jenny, and another sister - made Megan realise how similar they were, and the importance of taking a career break.

The Seattle Reign FC star - who retired in 2023 - said: "I see the obsession and compulsion and addiction in myself and him too.

"And it's like you're searching for something. And I just was thinking so much while I was home, like, 'Wow, I can't even remember the last time I was home for this long, not for a holiday or, you know, a wedding or something.'"

Abby told the Olympic gold medallist that her brother, Peter G. Wambach Jr., died unexpectedly from complications of a heart attack in 2023, aged 51.

Megan previously opened up about her sibling Brian's struggle with drugs and incarceration from the age of 15, which "all of her family has felt" guilty about.

Brian was arrested for possession of meth at the age of 15, and spent years "in and out of prison" before he focused on his sobriety.

In a 2019 joint interview with Megan for ESPN, Brian said he was completing a 12-month rehabilitative reentry programme to finish his prison sentence.

A year later, in November 2020, Megan told People: "I don't take on that blame anymore, but it's given me an incredible amount of empathy for people caught up in the opioid crisis."

She added: "For whatever reason, the drugs sunk their teeth into Brian. He didn't need federal prison; he needed drug rehab."

In her memoir, One Life, Megan penned: "This is the truth about having a drug user in the family: the feeling of devastation never goes away."