Now U.S. women's soccer gets to listen to everything and anything Emma Hayes says
After her team's Dominant Gold Medal Run Two Months into the Job
Keeping Alex Morgan at home? If you say so. Minimal substitutions in consequential Olympic matches? I mean, I guess. Sophia Smith, Mallory Swanson, and Trinity Rodman up front as the main (and sometimes only) attacking force? Sure. How about reserve Korbin Albert in the starting lineup instead of U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) mainstay and fan favorite, Rose Lavelle? These are quite the decisions for a person who coached her first game for the U.S. team in June of this year. It all worked, though, and the USWNT are world champions again after a disappointing World Cup just a year ago.
What a difference that year made. The USWNT didn’t just win; they mowed down the competition. In consecutive wins against Zambia, Germany, Australia, Germany, and Brazil, the Americans outscored their competition 12-2. They never trailed. All the goals were scored by Smith, Swanson, or Roman, except for two: Albert got one from 25 yards out against Australia and reserve forward Lynn Williams scored one in garbage time against Germany.
Oh, and two-time World Cup winner and broadcasting contrarian Carli Lloyd is happy again. “She’s gotten the team focused again on what really matters, and that’s winning,” Front Page Sports quotes her as saying about Hayes.
In a world where more resource investments are surely being made in other places, it is a reasonable-enough question as to how dominant the USWNT ought to be expected to be. Maybe parity is just inevitable.
As evidenced by World Cup titles, the Americans were dominant in the 1990s and again in the 2010s, though they also won the olympic gold twice in the 2000s. Perhaps that is why the 2023 result—barely getting out of the group stage and failing to advance past the first knockout round—was so shocking.
As a 47-year-old Brit, Emma Hayes is an interesting choice as the American manager, though she has had previous coaching stints in the U.S. at both collegiate and professional levels. “America means more to me than people realize,” she said after the Olympic final victory.
And yet, her longest coaching stint to date has been with the Chelsea women, where her teams climbed all the way to a Champions League final (loss) in 2021. Hayes has also attracted a bit of controversy along the way, including a shove of an opposing coach in a handshake line after a loss and criticizing Women’s Champions’ League scheduling a few years before that.
She seems, anyway, like a woman of conviction, someone who trusts herself, even when it’s against the grain. When Hayes was asked in the press conference after the Olympic final when she began to believe that winning the whole thing was possible, she was definitive: “When I got the job.”
That’s exactly who Hayes has been so far for the U.S., being willing to risk her own reputation, for example, in not only taking the young Korbin Albert with her instead of, say, Alex Morgan, but also in inserting her into the starting lineup twice (including the final in which she assisted the loan goal) just a few months after Albert got in a bit of trouble for her actions on TikTok and Instagram.1 Megan Rapino is someone the social media activity took aim at (Albert has since apologized publicly) but was in the stands anyway for the team’s Olympic matches. In a June profile in Vanity Fair, Rodman supported her current teammate after Hayes led the way in that regard.
Winning isn’t the only thing that matters, but in sports it is one of the most important metrics, and for now—until further notice, really—Hayes has shown most who are in and around U.S. women’s soccer that they are going to need to defer to her judgement for the time being. She has earned that in a very short period of time.
I have not seen either of the posts in question, but from what I understand the TikTok video was a repost by Albert of a sermon that was critical of transgenderism and the Instagram issue was a “like” of a mocking post that suggested that God may have been responsible for the injury that Rapinoe experienced in her final game.