She does not formally start as head coach until summer next year, but Emma Hayes is already putting her imprint on the US women’s national team. She was consulted in the selection of players for back-to-back friendly games against China next month, and the roster signals a willingness to make a break from the past.
Her stand-in, Twila Kilgore, is to supervise the squad through the end of May while Hayes fulfills her contract with Chelsea. It will not be a case of running down the clock: Hayes has a shot at the one professional title that has eluded her, the UEFA Women’s Champions League.
Her trophy cabinet is already heaving with silverware. In the 11 years she has coached Chelsea, the club has dominated English soccer’s top professional competitions, winning the Women’s Super League six times and the FA Cup five times. She was named the league’s manager of the year five times and best football coach by FIFA in 2021.
US Soccer Federation sporting director Matt Crocker’s description of Hayes as a “serial winner” was something of an understatement, given her career win percentage of 70.87 percent. She has more than earned the right to be the world’s highest-paid women’s coach, with a salary in the range of the US$1.6 million that Gregg Berhalter, coach of the men’s team, makes.
Given her status as one of the top managers in the women’s game, sportswriters have hailed her recruitment as a coup for the federation, which governs the sport in the country. I would go further: Her appointment is a bigger deal for US soccer than Inter Miami’s signing of Lionel Messi.
For one thing, the women’s game is far more important than the men’s to soccer in the US. For all the progress made by Major League Soccer in recent years, women’s soccer remains streets ahead. Hayes knows this from personal experience: Her first few coaching gigs were in the US, and her first job as head coach was with the Chicago Red Stars from 2008 to 2010.
For another, Hayes would be coming to these shores at the very peak of her powers, whereas the Argentine superstar, like a certain Brazilian legend two generations before him, was already past his prime when he made landfall in Florida. Unlike Messi, who can win nothing with Inter Miami that would enhance his trophy cabinet, Hayes has the opportunity — and therefore the motivation — to crown her career with the ultimate honor: the World Cup.
Although Messi and other foreign men’s soccer stars would, in time and by the processes of exposure and osmosis, help raise the standard of the US men’s team, Hayes can make an immediate impact. Within a couple of months of her arrival, the women’s team is to be at the Olympics in Paris. There they would try to return to the gold-medal podium after what, by their own lofty standards, was a disappointing bronze in Tokyo and a humiliating fifth-place finish in Rio de Janeiro.
She would have a longer lead-up to the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup, allowing a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the team that underperformed this summer, crashing out in the Round of 16 — the the team’s earliest exit ever. Among her challenges is to find replacements for stalwarts like Megan Rapinoe and Julie Ertz, who have retired.
In a Q&A published on the US Soccer Federation Web site, Hayes said “the challenge of competing for World Cups, for Olympics,” was a major reason she accepted the job.
Judging by the roster for next month’s games, rebuilding is very much on Hayes’s mind. There are two newbies and nine others have played fewer than 10 games for the the team. To make room, a number of veterans have been left out, star forward Alex Morgan the most prominent among them.
“It’s a healthy competition,” Hayes says. “Nobody has a right to play on the team.”
That bodes well for her chances of turning the team into a serial winner, too.
Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering culture. Previously, he covered foreign affairs. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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