Hayes' Chelsea era is almost over - but her Instagram era has only just begun
There are 115 days left of the Emma Hayes-Chelsea era.
Just over a century of 24-hour blocks in which to revel in chants of EMMA HAYES' BLUE AND WHITE ARMY and unprecedented domestic dominion before that zeitgeist gets star-spangled red, white and blue.
How to possibly spend this time wisely? Do all-black game-day ensembles tip into the wrong side of emotional? Might we humbly point you in the direction of @emmahayes1?
Since announcing her departure, the long-time Blues boss has taken her final furlong of Chelsea life to fully invigorate her Instagram presence. Hayes might be reaching the end of her Chelsea era but she’s reaching into the rising action of her Instagram era. And football is a better place for it.
The genesis of this chapter of Hayes’ life ostensibly stretches back to last August when she announced (through the vizard of a toy dinosaur head presumably belonging to her son) that she’d accepted a challenge to make her Instagram ‘more interesting’.
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Scroll through Hayes’ myriad posts and what you find is better: irreverent, witty, goofy fun with the perfect punch of poignant humanity. There’s Hayes smiling all silly-and-twinkle like in the Chelsea dugout, being an adorable nuisance to the camera operator.
There she is wearing the most outrageously splendid deep-red fluffy coat on the perfect Christmas couch guffawing away at an unheard joke. There she is sorority-squatting with Buddy the Elf, and fangirling over Madonna, and arranging Legos in a sunset. Hear her and her son, transformed into a big-lipped cartoon yellow lemon, singing.
But then, read her eulogy to her late father, the post she never wanted to write. See the photos she brought of him on holiday with her so Christmas remembered him.
Ahead of Chelsea’s penultimate group stage Champions League clash against Real Madrid, Hayes presumably ate scrambled eggs. We know this because her assistant coach Denise Reddy was seen in Hayes’ Instagram story stirring the filmy yellowy mix in a pan as Hayes voiced her incredulity that Reddy had never made her scrambled eggs before, a scenario that boasted the same vibes as when your best friend tells you they’re really good at knitting and you wonder why they’ve never bothered to knit you a scarf for your birthday.
In summary: Hayes (and this is the important part) is you and me.
That last sentiment is an important distinction. Social media is the go-to place for people to be More. To become themselves 2.0, the version that is cleaner, slicker, filtered, never not equipped with a sparkling caption. It’s about augmentation of the self. The -er .
Hayes is just Hayes.
The football managers on Instagram crossover is not new. Former Chelsea boss Jose Mourihno became the unofficial poster boy for the platform when he began honing an exquisite brand of grumpy fulminating man in his 50s and dad jokes, while committing himself to the art of the bad angle. The result? Bedlam. And lots of headlines and sponsorships.
Th ex-Roma manager – whose former club dedicated an entire page on their official website in 2021 about his Instagram presence – is far from the only one to find joy in the exhibition of his life’s banal, unseen moments. At one point, so many managers were gramming that consulting firm Comunicar Es Ganar conducted a study to review how much money was in it for Instagram’s football managers (according to the firm, Zinedine Zidane’s 27.8million followers in 2021 could see him make upwards of £200,000 per post).
Why the world was so eager to lap up this off-duty-manager content is mooted. Post-Covid, our lives drifted ever-more into the metaverse. Also, we were bored. But maybe this is also what happens when managers are hyper-trained to the zillionth degree for pre- and post-match debriefs. They find new spaces to funnel their personhood and audiences gather around to slurp it all up.
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Which is to go down the road that everything on social media is sincere. What we’re seeing is the real behind the scenes, an intimate peek inside, however tame. That this could possibly be a ruse, a cleverly masqueraded method of salesmanship, would be nonsense. Because, like, who Instagrams their shoes getting buffed?!
Hayes’ Instagram hits different.
The Chelsea boss is, as one user pointed out, simultaneously good and bad at it. Simultaneously your mum and yourself navigating the ever-evolving Rubix cube that is the platform. Like the best of us, Hayes trolls her friends’ accounts with one-liners and knows how to use polls. (After Hayes’ side defeated Paris FC 4-0, Hayes issued a poll on her story over a post-match asking: Hair up or down? On the surface, a trivial question. Muse harder. It’s an acknowledgement of the power dynamic a ponytail evokes from the very woman synonymous with conviction. It’s also the question half the population asks themselves in the mirror every morning.)
But like the worst of us, Hayes gets disoriented with the app’s latest update and doesn’t know whether she’s posting to her story or her main page. Only, unlike us, she posts it anyway, and makes her caption an admission that she has no idea how to work this dang thing.
And isn’t that what this whole social media thing was meant to be about anyway? An honest, stripped-back raw reflection of one’s imperfect perfect life?
Which is to say nothing about this era contrived. This is precisely the Hayes whom the world sees sitting behind the Chelsea-adorned press conference desk fielding questions about the state of the game, the state of the world and the state of her squad. When Hayes is funny online it’s because she’s funny in real life.
When she’s heartfelt and emotional online, it’s because she’s a heartfelt and emotional person. When she posts a photo of herself grinning madly in a graffitied Parisian Rolls Royce and makes a joke about bringing the wheels home? It’s because she’s a parent and this is the exact WhatsApp you’d expect to get from your parent if they were out gallivanting in the French capital for a mid-week work trip.
That Hayes is also the head coach and architect of one of women’s football's greatest ever dynasties almost becomes a forgettable, peripheral detail. That is until Hayes posts a photo of her squad’s latest triumph or her latest awards bash, a subtle and deserved reminder to the world that being a Boss is in fact her day job.
The Hayes Instagram era is simply the purest embodiment of Hayes. And what we’re all voraciously consuming is just Hayes in a transient 1080px by 1920px nutshell delivered directly to our smartphones. It's why Hayes is arguably the most influential women’s manager in the world: for her authenticity.
And it’s a reminder that, in 115 days, this is how the UK will have to consume her.
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