The 47-year-old is one of the best coaches in the world and what she learned in an unsuccessful stint in WPS played a huge role in her getting there
When Emma Hayes was announced as the soon-to-be new head coach of the United States women’s national team, her words were littered with mentions of the connection she has with the country that she wasn’t born in, but that she was made in. After all, this will actually be her seventh job in the U.S., the most significant of the six previous coming when she was manager of the Chicago Red Stars some 16 years ago.
Hayes had a team littered with stars when she was in the role. She managed no fewer than five players who would win the World Cup with the USWNT: Carli Lloyd, Jessica McDonald, Kate Markgraf, Whitney Engen and Megan Rapinoe, the latter of whom she actually drafted out of college. There were international stars on the roster, too, including Brazil icons Formiga and Cristiane, England playmaker Karen Carney, Sweden’s Kosovare Asllani and Australia goalkeeper Lydia Williams.
But this isn’t the story of a 31-year-old coaching prodigy shocking everyone with innovative tactics, storming to titles and announcing herself to the world as one to watch. No, this is a story that ends with the future USWNT head coach being sacked in a Starbucks.
However, it’s a story integral to Hayes’ rise, and a big reason why she has gone on to become the coach she is today, one with 14 major titles under her belt who is about to take on the biggest job in women’s soccer…
Getty ImagesMade in the USA
Hayes’ time across the pond starts with her father, Sid, who was in Atlanta when the 1999 Women’s World Cup was hosted by the United States. He attended some of the games and phoned his daughter, then an aspiring coach whose playing days had been ended prematurely by a freak injury on a ski trip, to tell her all about it.
“He said, 'Emma, you will not believe it. There are thousands of people going to a [women’s] football match and they idolise these players',” Hayes told . “I was like, 'Really, Dad?' He said, 'You have to be in America. This is where you have to be'.”
A couple of years later, Hayes did exactly that. Aged 25, she packed up her things, boarded a flight to New York and was soon in charge of the Long Island Lady Riders, making her the youngest coach in the USL W-League. An impressive stint there led to her managing the Iona Gaels, the women's soccer team of Iona College, and a short spell coaching at Columbia University.
Her time in the U.S. came to a brief conclusion in 2005 when she returned to England to be Arsenal’s assistant coach and academy director, helping the Gunners enjoy that iconic, quadruple-winning 2007 season. But she had made an impression overseas, and was soon on her way back to the States to be the manager of the Chicago Red Stars in the newly-launched Women's Professional Soccer league (WPS).
AdvertisementGettyComplicated job
Despite the success of the USWNT and the record-breaking attendances of that 1999 Women’s World Cup, a successful domestic league for women’s soccer in the U.S. was proving difficult to establish. WPS was the next attempt, and the Chicago Red Stars were one of seven teams to feature in its first season, in 2009. General manager Marcia McDermott remembered Hayes from when she had been in the U.S. previously and she was eventually chosen as the person to lead the side. Except, she wouldn’t just be coaching; there was a lot more to be done as the manager of a brand new team.
“I learnt building a franchise from scratch is one of the hardest things to do because it's not as simple as just putting a team together,” Hayes told in 2022. “You're putting offices together, you're finding training pitches, you're trying to navigate your way through a landscape that isn't established yet.
“I learnt that you don't get time. You don't have that time. You don't get the opportunity and the foundation to build something. You have to win now. That was a really big lesson, having come from Arsenal, an established club, to one that was… You're putting a whole group of 18, 19 players together and you expect it to work – and it didn't work, for whatever reason. It was another reminder that this isn't fantasy football.
"Everyone used to say to me, ‘The Chicago Red Stars is the best team on paper’. Correct, they were, on paper. It didn't work as a team, for a number of reasons, and it just didn't produce the performances.”
Getty ImagesSacked in a Starbucks
As well as Rapinoe, Lloyd, Cristiane, Carney and Williams, that first Chicago Red Stars roster included the likes of Lindsay Tarpley, the team captain who won two Olympic gold medals with the USWNT; Heather Garriock, one of Australia's greatest ever players; and Ella Masar, the one-time USWNT international who would represent teams like Paris Saint-Germain and Wolfsburg.
However, the Red Stars finished sixth in WPS in 2009, out of seven teams. Chicago won five of its 20 games and scored just 18 goals, a total only better than that of FC Gold Pride, the team bottom of the table. There was mass turnover in the off-season as just nine of the 22 players remained on the roster for 2010, but it didn't change results. Chicago again finished sixth in a league of seven teams, winning seven of its 24 games. But Hayes only oversaw one of those victories, as she was sacked just six matches into the season, the Red Stars having lost four of them.
“I remember getting sacked and I was in a Starbucks. I got sacked in a Starbucks,” Hayes told podcast. “I didn’t have my phone because I dropped it in the toilet that morning. I asked the person who sacked me to lend me their phone because I just needed to get a lift out of there.”
GettyFirst steps
So, why didn’t it work out? Danesha Adams was one of the players on the Red Stars' roster in 2009, having been drafted ahead of the season, and she remembers things being “a little bit all over the place” in Chicago. “In the beginning, I think there was a lot of just trying to understand the league and figure it out,” she told GOAL. “My impressions were that it was a little bit disjointed in how it all worked. What I mean by that is [Hayes’] role versus the assistant's role versus the athletic trainer role.”
It's certainly something that suggests inexperience, which was the status Hayes held as a 31-year-old who was taking on such a huge job for the first time. Nathan Kipp, part of her coaching staff with the Red Stars and also with the Iona Gaels a few years earlier, has pointed to this factor, too. “She wasn’t a deeply experienced head coach at that time and if anything, she was in the midst of growing into her ability to guide a team to success. I’d say, for example, if you have a mature, older coach and the ability to be flexible, it can help make the difference between overachieving and underachieving,” he told .
