“When did I recognise that she was any good in her enterprise?” says Sid Hayes, the 80-year-old father of Chelsea’s supervisor, Emma Hayes. “I’m going to inform you a story about the London Olympics.”
As Hayes sat subsequent to her dad at Wembley for the Olympic ladies’s soccer ultimate, she was to all intents and functions unemployed. “There was the ceremony on the pitch the place the three groups [USA, Japan and third-placed Canada] collected their medals,” Sid remembers. “Emma stated: ‘Dad, you see these 50 folks on the market? I’ve coached 40 of them.’ I assumed: ‘Wow, however you’re sitting right here unemployed?’ It was time to come back again.” That month, August 2012, she took the job at Chelsea.
The 44-year-old created historical past this month, main Chelsea Women to a first Champions League ultimate, however in 2010 she had been fired by Chicago Red Stars. “She was heartbroken, completely devastated,” says her sister Rebecca. “It was a bit harsh – I believe she was solely 5 video games in. That was the largest studying curve of her life. That’s when she stepped again from soccer.”
After a stint as a guide for a Washington Freedom crew that included US internationals reminiscent of Abby Wambach, Hayes returned to London and labored for the household enterprise, Covent Garden FX, a forex change.
“She wanted one thing mundane, to come back away from it, see if [coaching] is actually what she needed to do,” Rebecca says. “People had been phoning her, wanting her to be concerned in several golf equipment, however she wanted that point out to evaluate, assessment and simply take pleasure in rising one thing for the household. She constructed software program methods, she constructed web sites, she took it to a different degree. She put cash on-line, which my dad may by no means perceive.” For anybody who has adopted Hayes’s Chelsea construct, the sample is acquainted.
Hayes saved her toe in the soccer waters, working from London as technical director for Western New York Flash, whom she suggested on transfers, serving to to create a crew that gained the 2011 Women’s Professional Soccer championship. But the journey from the place she was then to the place she is now, getting ready to face Barcelona in the Champions League ultimate in Gothenburg, is exceptional – and to grasp it totally it helps to return to the starting.
Emma Hayes celebrates after Chelsea attain the Champions League ultimate by beating Bayern Munich. Photograph: Harriet Lander/Chelsea FC/Getty Images
On the Curnock Street property in Camden, north London, Hayes’s childhood was full of soccer. An admirer of Diego Maradona, Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker – “Gary Lineker’s legs, she used to like these! In his little shorts!” her older sister Victoria says with a giggle – she performed with the boys and was referred by a trainer at main faculty, the place she was the solely woman to play, to a membership referred to as Mary Ward. “We used to beat everybody and Emma was at all times the star of the present,” says Rebecca. “She was a artistic, difficult participant, the goalscorer.”
It was, in keeping with Victoria, a formative expertise: “I believe that’s the place she acquired her successful mentality from. She had a crew that performed for each other. She realized the true spirit of groups working collectively.”
Hayes joined Arsenal’s academy however injured an ankle on a ski journey aged 17 and was informed she would by no means play once more. “She was simply inconsolable,” Victoria says. “She was informed she’s not presupposed to kick a ball. That harm modified her.”
With soccer dominated out, Hayes did European research, Spanish and sociology at Liverpool Hope. Her intention was to turn into a spy, and a grasp’s in intelligence and worldwide affairs adopted. “She can inform if you’re mendacity,” says Sid. “She realized all these methods. When they began instructing methods to assassinate folks and that, it was time to depart.”
During college holidays Hayes assisted in varied companies during which her dad was concerned, and displayed the work ethic that’s half of her success. “She would stand up at 5 o’clock in the morning, go there on her personal and cook dinner 2,000 baguettes,” says Sid.
In Liverpool, she had additionally began to choose up teaching badges, not solely in soccer however in the whole lot from swimming to desk tennis. She labored in sports activities improvement for Camden council however there was an itch that wanted scratching.
“I keep in mind her mendacity in the tub; that’s how shut we’re, one can be on the rest room and one in the tub,” says Rebecca with a giggle. “She was like: ‘This is my time to vary. I must go the place the elite is on this sport, the place it’s the {most professional}, the place I’m going to be taught, the place I’m going to develop and it’s going to be America.’ And as a lot as that was devastating for me, she was so decided. She simply hated the tradition, the hurdles, the politics on this nation.”
Emma Hayes with Chelsea’s gamers final yr. She left England for the US in search of teaching success. Photograph: Bradley Collyer/PA
Victoria and Rebecca drove her to the airport, the trio stopping en route for a good cry. Hayes had a one-way ticket, $1,000, a backpack of garments and a job at MLS camps on Long Island. She didn’t want lengthy to make her mark.
In 2001 Hayes grew to become the youngest head coach in W-League historical past, with the Long Island Lady Riders; the following yr she was named nationwide coach of the yr aged 25; and in 2004 she gained a totally different coach-of-the yr award with Iona College in New York, regardless of meagre assets. Eleri Earnshaw was her captain there. “We weren’t Chelsea, we weren’t the finest crew, however she demanded the highest requirements,” the former Wales worldwide says. “Because of that, we went into each sport, rightly or wrongly, pondering that we may win, as a result of of how laborious we labored and the way tenacious we had been.”
Emma gave pink roses and a poem to her crew on the bus to the 2015 FA Cup ultimate and nowadays has her crew watching motivational movies. In Earnshaw’s first yr Mark Twain’s “It’s not the measurement of the canine in the struggle, it’s the measurement of the struggle in the canine” was on the again of coaching shirts.
Anson Dorrance, head coach at the University of North Carolina and mastermind of the USA ladies’s first World Cup win in 1991, met Hayes at a United Soccer Coaches course in Brazil and was “impressed instantly” by her soccer data. “Here I’m instructing the course and this little snot had higher references for the sport at the highest degree than I did, so I clearly instantly took to her.”
But it was greater than data that caught his consideration. “She is brazenly formidable,” he says. “The bother with the manner we elevate our women and younger ladies is we train them to mainly genuflect. She was assured again then however now she’s commanding. We reward males for having this high quality [ambition] and but we appear to excoriate ladies for it.”
For Dorrance, Hayes’s largest takeaway from the US was not techniques or methodology. “I believe she benefited from mainly the standing as an American coach in ladies’s soccer as a result of in our nation the ladies’s sport is revered … The tooth of the patriarchy in sport in our nation aren’t as sharp.”
Learning extra about recruitment in the US was additionally key for Hayes, in keeping with Amanda Vandervort, who was then head coach of NYU and would permit the Iona College coach to crash in her room on recruiting journeys to economize. “In the faculty recruiting system you’re coping with intense competitors,” Vandervort says. “You should attempt to persuade gamers to come back to your faculty when you don’t have any finances, no scholarship.”
Katie Chapman holds the FA Cup after Chelsea’s 2015 win. Hayes, she says, searches for ‘a good one who you can belief and goes to struggle for you’. Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images
Katie Chapman, who performed below Hayes at Arsenal, in Chicago and at Chelsea, says her former supervisor places emphasis on character in addition to expertise, trying to find “a good one who you can belief and goes to struggle for you”.
Hayes returned to England in 2006 – however not for lengthy. After a profitable spell at Arsenal Ladies as academy director and assistant to the legendary first‑crew supervisor Vic Akers, together with for the 2007 quadruple, the launch of a new skilled league lured her again to the US. Chicago Red Stars and Saint Louis Athletica needed her and earlier than she travelled she visited a psychic – for the first and solely time.
Hayes was informed by the psychic that her selection didn’t matter, as a result of she would have her most important success at Chelsea. “We had a correct stomach giggle,” says Vandervort. Chelsea had been novice then, not even on the radar.
Having plumped for Chicago, Hayes demonstrated her expertise for recruitment. She signed Karen Carney and chosen as her second general decide in the 2009 draft a younger University of Portland ahead: a sure Megan Rapinoe. The following yr’s additions included Chapman.
Megan Rapinoe after scoring the USA’s opening purpose of their 2019 World Cup ultimate win over the Netherlands. Hayes signed her in 2009. Photograph: Francisco Seco/AP
Then she was fired. “We by no means have a look at failure as failing,” says Victoria. “Failure is the first try at studying, and that was her first try at studying to construct a crew. Second try at Chelsea of constructing a crew was remarkably totally different.”
Chapman says Hayes has “constructed the whole lot at Chelsea – from having the equipment washed to having meals, to having our personal constructing, to having our personal coaching and pitches. Now, it’s an absolute skilled setup however the whole lot’s been a struggle over the years to do this. She’s at all times how she may also help everyone else.”
She “performs that function in the household”, says Rebecca, however household has additionally been essential to her success, a help community by good and dangerous. She leaned on it closely when she misplaced Albie, one of the twins she was carrying, at 28 weeks pregnant in 2018. Her household had been determined for her to take a step again, “however there was no stopping her”, says Rebecca.
“The final sport of the season, she actually needed to get pinned down: ‘You can’t go, you’re due any day.’ My mum very a lot supported her in all of it. She travelled to Wolfsburg, went on 10 million trains together with her, after which we needed to get our cousin who was a midwife to take her on one other journey when it acquired actually shut. The medical doctors had been advising her to not do it, however she did it. Nothing would cease her, not even her personal well being. It’s all about the crew – she’d do something for successful.”
Becoming a mum to Harry, although, is what Hayes counts as her largest achievement. Again, her household are there to assist. They will head to her home in shifts whereas she is away for this ultimate, taking care of Harry in his personal atmosphere. “He watches her on the telly however he simply needs to get in the telly,” says Rebecca. “You ask Harry: ‘What is Mummy?’, and he says, ‘A winner!’”
To watch her transfer one trophy nearer to matching Arsenal historic quadruple can be a proud second for her mentor Akers, who messages her earlier than each sport. “If I ever needed anyone to take that kind of accolade, successful the Champions League, it might be her,” he says.
Rebecca cried for an hour after Chelsea reached the ultimate. “And my father did too – you would by no means see a weak spot in him or any type of emotion however he did precisely the similar.” Victoria says she spent the final minutes of the semi-final on the flooring with a pillow over her head and her watch warning her coronary heart price was too excessive.
Sign as much as The Recap, our weekly e-mail of editors’ picks.
What retains Hayes wanting extra? Sid, says Chapman. “He’s her hardest critic. He doesn’t let her get away with something. That’s what drives her.”
Rebecca says: “He at all times needs extra. You’re by no means ever rewarded with a ‘nicely achieved’. It’s simply: ‘You’ve achieved that, what’s subsequent?’”
He does say he’s proud although, unprompted, when he remembers seeing Hayes’s influence at a United Soccer Coaches conference in the US. “This little woman from Camden instructing all these worldwide coaches at the largest coaches conference in the world: wow,” he says. “She has a presence, Emma, at these locations. I’m nicely proud of her clearly. She’s acquired a skill, a skill you can’t purchase.”
