Harry Kane Jude Bellingham will have a challenger as this country’s biggest footballing exports when Emma Hayes leaves Chelsea to take charge of the USA women’s team in May.
Coaching the four-time world champions is the pinnacle of management in the women’s game and, across the pond, the sport is bigger than men’s football.
Hayes will be mandated with no less than returning the USWNT to the top of the world in 2027 after their underwhelming World Cup quarter-final exit in Australia in August — their worst performance at a finals — and before then she will also be expected to make a quick enough impression to lead the squad to gold at next summer’s Paris Olympics.
For Hayes, who began her coaching career in the States, the move is a homecoming. She said although she was born in the UK “she was made in America” and the Londoner is expected to decamp her family to Atlanta where US Soccer are building a base.
It is a massive job, although it comes with a degree of pressure which is likely to be surprising even to an operator as experienced as the 47-year-old. Hayes will be afforded a huge platform and she should quickly go from being a trailblazer for women’s football in this country to an international figurehead for the sport. There is already no team which has done more for women’s football or equality than the USWNT — reflected by the fact that Hayes will be paid the same as her men’s team equivalent, Gregg Berhalter (a reported £1.3 million a year), while her players have also achieved parity with the US men.
Hayes has won the lot with Chelsea, six League titles, five FA Cups and two League Cups. The only trophy to elude her is the Champions League, though she came close in 2020-21, reaching the final only to lose 4-0 to Barcelona. She will leave behind a remarkable legacy, as well as an enormous hole in the sport and at Chelsea. Hayes’s innovations in coaching and management, such as tracking her squad’s menstrual cycles, have revolutionised the sport and pushed women’s football towards a more equal footing.
She will be a major loss to the WSL as the top flight enters another crucial stage of its growth, although there is a case that her departure might, at least, loosen Chelsea’s grip on domestic dominance. Hayes’s chances of managing the Lionesses also appear remoter than ever, although the job has never featured prominently on her radar.
England head coach Sarina Wiegman is out of contract in summer 2025, but by then Hayes will be settled in her new role. Things change quickly in football but, as it stands, Hayes may be destined to become the Lionesses’s own Brian Clough, the outstanding and charismatic English coach of her generation who never managed her country.
As for her long-held interest in being the first woman to coach a high-profile men’s side, the USA job would be the perfect platform from which to make the leap but Hayes has always looked for advancement and it would be difficult to find a job in the men’s game to top her next position. In the meantime, she still has a League title to defend and a Champions League to win in a long goodbye at Chelsea.
Then she can begin plotting how to conquer the world.
