Emma Hayes’ goals for the USWNT’s next few years go far beyond winning games

Emma Hayes has conquered a lot of challenges over the years as a soccer coach, a mother, and as a human. But there is one she hasn’t solved yet, and it has lingered for much of her career.

Why is it that so much of how women play soccer is based on how men play it?

Why, for example, are cleats for girls and women designed pretty much the same as cleats for boys and men, even though female feet can be shaped differently? Why do people in the sport assume that a female athlete should rehab from an injury like a male athlete?

More importantly, why is it assumed that female athletes should be coached the same way as male athletes when sports science shows differences in their psychologies?

These questions matter across the sport, from the pros to the Philadelphia region’s youth teams. They play out at NWSL stadiums, college fields, and sprawling complexes from Downingtown to Swedesboro.

Hayes has a few hunches, and now that she has the highest-profile job in women’s soccer, she wants to take a deeper dive — because to her, it’s always been this way isn’t enough.

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“We always do this constant comparing to the men’s game,” Hayes said. “I don’t really care what they’re doing. What works for us? It’s about creating that, more than anything else. And I think becoming more armed with the knowledge and having the right research makes that easier.”

Hayes has always been unafraid to step on eggshells, a trait her father instilled in her. This time, she knows it may mean not just impacting eggs, but sacred cows: coaches who’ve been at their job a long time but still might not know how to coach girls in a way that actually gets the best out of them.

“We all know that we have a humongous dropout rate in the teenage years for a myriad of reasons, some of it puberty and the start of the menstrual cycle,” she said, alluding to a Women’s Sports Foundation report that by age 14, girls quit playing sports at twice the rate that boys do. “We can’t talk about creating the best environments for our girls [and] women all over the country until we prioritize the systems that are there to support us.”

It’s too big a job for any one person to tackle the flaws of what could be called a youth soccer industrial complex, and Hayes knows that. So she is starting where she can: with her employer.

“The social, emotional, and neuroscience in and around all of this is completely different, yet we do everything the same way we do in the men’s game or through a male lens,” Hayes said. “And so I’ve challenged everybody across the [U.S. Soccer] Federation internally to look at how they’ve been viewing the women’s game through that male lens.”

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The timing isn’t right just because of Hayes’ arrival. U.S. Soccer is in the midst of building a new national training center in suburban Atlanta, and Washington Spirit owner Michele Kang — who also owns French power Lyon and England’s London City Lionesses — donated $30 million to the women’s program last year.

“We should start to raise the bar in terms of people that are working across the women’s game, especially for us at U.S. Soccer,” Hayes said. “If you don’t have that direct knowledge, well, you’re going to undertake some of that knowledge before you can be a practitioner, at least on a one-to-one level with anyone, so that I wholeheartedly understand that you understand those differences, whatever they might be.”

Hayes does not mind breaking eggs with her own employer, so she has spoken with fellow coaches, the marketing, commercial, and human resources departments, and even the PR staff about photos posted to social media.

“I have to deal with a number of different issues for female athletes, from eating disorders to body image, to all of those challenges,” Hayes said. “So, if you’re taking that photograph in exactly the same way you do a male player and you share that at the wrong angle, let me tell you as a coach, I could be spending weeks and months on that.”

She knows saying that might come across as overbearing, but she also knows a gut instinct felt by women in all walks of life.

“I might need to get clinical support [for a player] over a photograph?” she said. “That might not mean much to everybody outside, but trust you me, we all know as women how that feels when it’s the wrong photo in the wrong moment.”

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The slogan she uses is “The WNT Way,” the abbreviation short for “women’s national team.” And she knows it can seem a little too broad, even to soccer veterans.

“Creating great learning environments in a way that works best for girls and women is something we should be more intentional about, and I can certainly control that,” said Hayes, who, along with her coaching experience, has a master’s degree in intelligence and international affairs. “I’m in a position to be able to go beyond that and weave in the very best neuroscience there is to substantiate that our way of learning is different.”

The area where this comes together the most is coaching education. Who teaches people who want to become coaches how to do that work? What goes into the curricula for U.S. Soccer’s coaching licenses, which span every level from 6-year-olds to the pros?

“Everything from the course content of the pro license to the B license [two steps lower] is intrinsically linked and related,” Hayes said, “whether it’s physiologically, anatomically, technically, tactically, psychologically, socially, emotionally, all those things.”

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A sports fan might wonder where this project fits in the schedule for a coach whose first job is to win games. Hayes was, after all, hired in the wake of the U.S. women’s team’s historically bad crash out of the 2023 World Cup and given the highest salary in women’s soccer coaching history to restore the team to the top.

The answer is twofold. First, no, Hayes is not going to do all this work herself. Much of it will be done by existing colleagues, new ones U.S. Soccer is hiring, professional leagues, and others in the sport.

Second, as happens after every Olympics, the next World Cup isn’t for another 2½ years. So there’s time to think big-picture. And if the full impact of her work isn’t felt until after her tenure, she’s fine with that.

“I’ve decided, for however long that I have on this planet, that I’ve worked my entire career to get to a place where I’ve got the ability to influence, and the power to influence, something much broader and much bigger for me,” she said, adding: “I don’t think it will be quick, but I definitely think someone has to undertake this work somewhere. And I am poking the bear to do that.”

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