Emma Hayes exclusive: 'National anthems are going to be weird but I’m so proud to lead the US team'

Emma Hayes closed the book on 12 trophy-laden years at Chelsea with her fifth consecutive Women’s Super League title in May.

She had taken the helm in 2012 and turned the Blues into a winning machine, lifting 16 pieces of silverware along the way.

At the season’s end Hayes left for the biggest role in the women’s game - agreeing to become head coach of the US national team.

Since May, English football has been deprived of a true groundbreaker and one of its most captivating figures.

This week, Hayes returns as her US team takes on the Lionesses in front of 82,000 at Wembley on Saturday.

It’s a clash of the teams ranked numbers one and two in the world - the European champions against her Olympic champions - as well as a collision between Hayes’s previous life and her new adventure.

Settling in Stateside

Asked how her life has changed in the six months since she swapped Cobham for Atlanta, Georgia - upping sticks with her six-year-old son Harry - Hayes does not miss a beat: “The weather is nicer! I’ve seen more sun in the last six months than I have done in a long time.”

The “sheer size” of the United States has taken some getting used to, as well.

“Travelling from Portland to New York to Florida, you feel like you’re crossing continents,” she says. “It has just felt refreshing and exciting.”

Back in Camden, where she grew up “an inner-city London kid” and which she describes as the “greatest place on earth”, Hayes spoke to journalists this week at the Underworld music venue underneath the World’s End pub, where she used to watch indie bands play.

She said she had got her “mojo, smile and joy back” in the United States and admitted that she “actually felt quite unwell at the end of my time at Chelsea”.

Away from the daily grind of club football, which meant being at the training ground six or seven days a week, she has been able to strike a healthier work-life balance, in which she can take Harry to school and get to the gym.

She says of Harry, “it’s been challenging for him, naturally. We take it day by day. He loves being around the team. He comes with me when we go on camp and really enjoys building a relationship with the team. He gets to see his mummy work. It’s taken a bit of time, but he’s starting to really understand what it is I do. It’s been a whirlwind. Only as it comes up to Christmas will I really reflect on how this whole period has flown by.”

Hayes lives a half-hour’s drive from the town of Trilith. It is here that the US Women’s 200-acre national training centre will be, when the £159 million project is completed in 2026. But not all is new.

Part of what makes Hayes such magnetic company is her eclectic reserve of experiences. Not long after reading for a master’s degree in intelligence and international affairs, with designs on becoming a spy, her formative years as a football manager began on Long Island in 2002.

“It’s been so familiar,” she says. “I already had my social security numbers; I knew how the banking system worked. I understand the country.”

‘Emergency surgery’

Never more than a sentence or two away from a homemade metaphor, when Hayes first took on her new role, she described the task as that of a “heart surgeon in the middle of emergency surgery”.

The US had crashed out in the round of 16 of the World Cup - far and away their worst-ever showing. She sought to rewire everything.

“When you go into an environment where [everyone] works in a certain way, often you have time to teach everyone - staff and players - what it is you’re trying to do, ie get on the wards and do teaching hospital,” Hayes recalls. “I had no time for that. I had to deliver things without explaining.”

Hayes had just 75 days to prepare her side for the Paris Olympics, where they were among the favourites.

Her message was simple: “Everything you’ve done up until this point, put it to one side.”

And it worked. The US won gold for the first time since London 2012. Hayes’s first silverware with the Stars and Stripes was one of the most coveted gongs in the women’s game.

She presides over the US national team at a time when its football federation is undergoing what she calls “seismic change”, and her team are in the midst of a transition period.

2019 Ballon d’Or winner Megan Rapinoe retired at 38 last year, and another giant, 35-year-old Alex Morgan, followed suit this September. A new generation is blooming.

“We’re building towards qualifying for the World Cup, so I have time to experiment,” says Hayes. “I’m developing players with less experience, so it will be up and down, but it’s part of the process. My job is to put us in a position where we compete, come the 2027 World Cup.”

So how does the heart surgeon feel she is faring? “I’m definitely on the wards, developing leadership and delivering a bigger and better understanding of what it is we do and why we do it.”

The Chelsea inheritance

Hayes’s Chelsea dynasty became synonymous with a never-say-die attitude; their culture bred winners.

Since she left, it’s also become clear that she had set the infrastructure for a seamless transition to her successor, Sonia Bompastor, the Champions League-winning ex-Lyon coach.

The foundations were solid. Chelsea sit five points clear atop the WSL table, having won every match this season - 12 across all competitions.

It’s been a dream start for the Frenchwoman, but equally a golden goodbye for Hayes.

“I have nothing but fond memories of my time there,” she says. “I wouldn’t change a second of it. It’s a club I’ll always look out for, and a lot of those players I recruited, so I know how amazing they are as people and as players.

“I look forward to many more years of Chelsea success; 12 years is a long time at any level. To win what we won and be able to leave the programme in a healthy place with an incredible squad and an incredible new manager, it’s dreamland to me.”

Hayes says she texts Bompastor after big games, adding: “I’m a fan. I’ll champion for Chelsea until I die. I hope they go on to bigger and better things, because that was always my goal.”

She reveals her son Harry misses the Chelsea players. “Maybe at Wembley he can get the chance to see Millie [Bright]. I know he misses her.”

But not all familiarity is lost. Last season, Hayes led Chelsea Women while Mauricio Pochettino managed Chelsea’s men. In September, the Argentine became the US men’s manager.

“We were in Portland a couple of weeks ago,” says Hayes. “I’ll probably see him after my camp. We speak often.”

Culture change

Hayes, who earned an OBE in 2022 for services to football, says she does not miss the English game.

“When you are really happy doing what you’re doing, you don’t miss other things,” she says, and explains she prefers the media environment on the other side of the Atlantic.

“I just feel that here in England everything is always short-termism. It’s always, ‘Is someone in the team?’ or ‘Is someone unhappy?’ In America, it’s more about the insights behind things. They might say, ‘What are the keys to winning?’ Without question, I’m able to talk about more interesting things without [reporters] trying to create a headline.”

There remain some issues on which England and the US are not so different, though.

Hayes says of the state of the game globally: “It will take many years for the women’s game to have the same equality of access that the men’s game has.

It is certainly in a better place than it was 15 years ago, but there has been underinvestment in women’s sport in general. With time and more investment, I’m sure the game will take that next step.”

Wembley homecoming

And so to Wembley, and a date with England, when Hayes says she will hum both national anthems before kick-off.

She rocks back in her chair and smiles. “I think it will probably be a bit weird, especially when the national anthem is being played. I’m English! I can’t deny that will be a weird feeling, but I’m so proud to be the coach of America. This is the team I coach, this is a stadium I love to be at. I’ll be proud to lead that team, and I’m also a proud Englishwoman.

“I’m delighted there will be, I hope, a sellout stadium watching women’s sport, where lots of people can feel inspired by so many great women on show.”

A stern test though England pose, the Lionesses have lost to the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany since reaching the 2023 World Cup Final. They, too, are regenerating.

“I’m not focused on England, I’ve got enough work to do with the US,” says Hayes.

Scalping her own country at the national stadium would be quite the coup, but Hayes insists that “is not something I think about”.

What ultimately drives her, then? “Development. Evolution. Being creative. If you fixate on results and silverware, you end up missing out on all the joy of building things. I enjoy putting things together more than anything.”