US women's team is perfect for Hayes - but UK football will miss moral compass
One of the first times I sat in Emma Hayes' presence, I nearly blew it.
Chelsea had just casually eviscerated Tottenham Hotspur 3-0 at Stamford Bridge. The scoreline should have been more disparate, but the reigning champions were going through their licensed ‘slow start’ period, meaning they were only modestly destroying teams.
Sam Kerr’s name was on the score sheet, and I’d decided that the first question I’d put to Hayes would be some inane variation of ‘So, how great is Sam?’, which is the sort of banal, uninteresting journalism that makes Louis Theroux want to vomit.
Hayes, who was relishing a first return to the touchline since undergoing an emergency hysterectomy, should have withered me on the spot. Or at the very least not indulge my undeservingly boring query with a three-plus minute response detailing why Kerr habitually ‘cut the mustard’ and highlighting the not-so-heralded qualities that distinguished the Australian as more than just a prolific goal-scorer.
There was also an additional minute assessment of the unfair expectations thrust on players like Kerr and the challenges of navigating those in the hyper-inflated modern world of social media.
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This was Hayes all over: reliably and unsolicitedly considering the wider context of the game and her players, while masterly working a room. There was no craft or guile. Rather, in the same way fish swim and dogs bark, Hayes is obsessed with football, and that obsession distils into an understanding that the game’s essence, and its players, is more complex than laconic stock answers allow.
The natural consequence of this is a full-body experience: a desire to be and do way, way better. It’s not so much an urge to run through walls so much as a willingness to build stronger walls, and then run through those too.
If the reports are to be believed, this is what the United States Women's National Team (USWNT) can expect at the end of this season as Hayes fills the currently vacant managerial helm. After 12 years of transforming Chelsea on and off the pitch into one of the game’s most notorious and impressive winning machines, Hayes has decided to call an end to an inimitable era “to pursue a new opportunity outside of the WSL and club football”, according to a club statement.
Hayes takes with her six WSL titles, five Women’s FA Cups, two Continental Cups, the Spring Series, a Community Shield victory and a Champions League final.
Emma Hayes is leaving Chelsea to take on arguably the top job in women's football. (Harriet Lander - Chelsea FC/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)This ridiculous list of laurels is more than qualified to be adjusted come the end of this season as Hayes looks to defend her league and FA Cup credentials and finally find glory in Europe, increasingly plausible prospects given the sense of finality now underpinning everything. For Chelsea, it means their interminable pursuit of silverware has never had more jeopardy to it.
For the USWNT, the recruitment of Hayes as the women’s national team manager is a coup of the highest order, a testament to the pull and allure that still thrums from within the four-time world champions but also the precipitous challenge it now poses.
A hefty challenge was always going to be required to budge Hayes out of west London. When linked with AFC Wimbledon in the EFL, her response was defiant: "I'm the manager of Chelsea, I manage and represent elite, world-class players and this, for me, is an amazing job that I've spent nine years cultivating all my energy into.”
Chelsea manager Emma Hayes (PA)Even so, as blue and white ticker tape fell around her at Madejski Stadium on the final day of last season, Hayes didn’t hold back in voicing her exhaustion after yet another triumphant season, the toll wrought on her life as a mother and as a basic human being in such a taxing, non-stop role.
Get nothing wrong: the USWNT job is a heady challenge, if not the biggest challenge currently available in the women's game. Not only will Hayes be tasked with steering women’s football historic behemoth from a humiliating and disastrous precipice immediately. But she will need to do so by overseeing the transition of one of the game’s most well-known women’s teams and restoring them to the top of a pile growing increasingly more competitive by the day.
The expectations will be staggeringly high (the USWNT currently sit third in FIFA’s rankings, the team’s lowest-ever ranking and the football equivalent to wearing a dunce cap after a historically woeful World Cup showing; the team is teeming with high-profile talent); the glare under which Hayes will be assessed will be harsh and, at times, unforgiving.
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Such a framework is, of course, where Hayes thrives (see: Chelsea’s last 12 years). Tack on to that the facts that Hayes was the head coach and director of football operations for the Chicago Red Stars from 2008 to 2010, and US Soccer's ideal candidate is someone with a latent understanding of the American football landscape, and the move makes perfect sense.
Arguably more important, though, is the USWNT’s need for a manager willing to ruthlessly recalibrate the women’s national team. In Hayes, the former world champions are not only getting a skilful tactician and serial winner but someone capable of giving direction and shape to football's unrivalled juggernaut at risk of drifting aimlessly into white space.
Part of Hayes’ success is that she has never knowingly been inhibited.
She speaks frankly and expects a reciprocal level of openness from her players and staff. The result is an environment built on trust, one in which Hayes can then foster a searing competitive milieu while raising standards across the board.
In that sense, this is where English football, not just Chelsea, will miss Hayes most. No one has done more to raise the standards of English women’s football than Hayes. Forever armed with a wise response to whatever weekly anxiety is threatening to grip the game, Hayes has acted as the sports’ fearless moral compass across every conceivable category, from on-and off-pitch expectations to the detailed welfare of players, including the hiring of pelvic floor coaches at Chelsea to research into the impact of menstrual cycles on players’ performance output.
The impact has been nothing short of revolutionary. Unsurprisingly, then, that Chelsea are keenly exploring how she can help grow the club upon her move across the Atlantic Ocean.
The hole left behind by Hayes’ departure from the English game will be huge, albeit paltry compared to the legacy she has built as one of Chelsea’s and the nation's greatest-ever managers, women’s or men’s.
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