Twelve years ago, Emma Hayes sat next to her father Sid at Wembley and watched the US women’s national team win its fourth Olympic gold medal. Hayes, who was effectively unemployed after being fired from the Chicago Red Stars, leaned over to Sid and said, as he recalled, “Dad, do you see those 50 people out there? I coached 40 of them.”
It was a poignant moment for Sid, who recalled in an interview with the Guardian in 2021 that it was at that moment that he truly realised what a good coach she was.
It was therefore not surprising that Hayes’ late father, who died last September, figured prominently in interviews with the coach surrounding Saturday’s 2024 Olympic final. Hayes was not sitting in the stands watching this time. As the final whistle blew, she clenched her fists at the edge of the technical area, tilted her head back and yelled into the air.
Just 81 days after naming her first squad as USWNT coach, and 76 days since her first training session with the team, a 1-0 win over Brazil in the final meant Hayes had an Olympic gold medal—at least figuratively, because head coaches don’t get those for free.
Hayes’ appointment as USA head coach was announced in November, just two months after the death of her father, who she said gave her his blessing when they discussed whether she should take on the role. The months that followed, as she finished the season with Chelsea, confirmed that she would not have been able to continue at the club without Sid anyway.
“He wasn’t in his seat. It was almost impossible for me. I could barely see the stands,” she told former US national team player Sam Mewis at a live event for the Women’s Game podcast before the Olympics.
Amidst all the celebrations, there will also be a touch of sadness. English striker Fran Kirby, who played for nine years under Hayes at Chelsea and lost her mother at 14, expressed well the magnitude of a loss during one of the club’s most successful periods.
“I struggle the most when things are going well and not everyone understands that,” she said in an interview with the Times shortly after the Lionesses’ historic European Championship victory. “It’s not because I’m sad, it’s because I want her to be there celebrating.”
In Paris, Hayes seized her moment, turned to the crowd and kissed her father’s American eagle necklace that she wore around her neck.
Hayes knows how to party hard, despite the pain. She’s the manager who joked after Chelsea won the 2023 Women’s Super League that she’d be found “in north London on a park bench with a bottle of gin” the next day. After winning the 2024 WSL title, she left her final Chelsea press conference with a beer in her hand and said: “I’ll see you sometime, maybe in the Olympic gold medal final. I’ve got to bloody beat the Spanish at some point.”
They would not be able to beat Spain on their way to gold, and after several Champions League defeats to Barcelona they will have to wait a while before they can cross that item off their to-do list. But defeats to Japan, Germany and Brazil in the knockout rounds and wins against Zambia, Germany and Australia in the group stage showed a remarkable turnaround.
This time last year, the USA had already been knocked out of the World Cup in the round of 16. After a series of miserable performances, they lost 5-4 on penalties to Sweden. It was the worst result ever for the four-time world champions.
So how did Hayes manage to transform a confused and changing team, struggling to cope with the investment in European women’s football and its increasing competitiveness, into a coherent team in just a couple of months, once the pretense of invincibility had finally faded?
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The appearance of invincibility has not returned and probably never will. Global soccer is growing too fast for any one team to dominate it like the USA, but with Hayes at the helm, none of that matters because she is arguably the best coach in the world.
Speaking to NBC after the final, Hayes said the key to winning was restoring the joy of the game. “I want the players to have fun.”
It’s that simple, and yet it’s not. Although her contract at Chelsea has expired, the new head coach has undoubtedly started working much sooner and unofficially making a name for herself. The retirements of Megan Rapinoe and Julie Ertz helped usher in a new chapter, and the replacement of 35-year-old Alex Morgan, 39-year-old Becky Sauerbrunn and 36-year-old Kelley O’Hara last year, legends of the team, showed that Hayes was not afraid to put her feelings aside and act with the team’s long-term future in mind – something she did at Chelsea year after year.
The focus is on individual development, team building and fun – something she first introduced at Chelsea – and is now being instilled in the impressive array of talent on the US Women’s National Team. “Positive discomfort”: The idea of constantly being tested and challenged to grow as a player and as a person is one of them.
Meanwhile, Hayes has continued her practice of delivering messages to her teams outside of football. This time, it was a video of ultramarathoner Courtney Dauwalter talking about what it means to dig deep and how she claws at the walls of her “pain cave” during 100-mile races. She had seen the team deliver twice in overtime to reach the finals, but if Dauwalter can complete parts of her ultramarathon runs blindfolded, then the U.S. can withstand the heat in France in August, the exhaustion that comes with the small size of Olympic teams and the mental obstacles that arise when things don’t go the way you think they will.
Given her pedigree, Hayes has always been a huge vote of confidence, but this gold medal has given her even more. Now she can focus on the technical and tactical aspects of leading the USA back to the top at the 2027 World Championships in Brazil.
