‘I’ve got my mojo back’: Emma Hayes reborn in USA and building new legacy | OneFootball

Sitting in a makeshift press conference room on the dancefloor of Camden’s Underworld music venue, beneath the World’s End pub, Emma Hayes breaks into a big grin. “Thankfully it still smells of fart and feet,” she says. “It was a big indie place for me back in the day. I’ve definitely not seen this place in the daylight, so that’s refreshing.” Hayes is home in London and with another grin declares: “I’ve got my mojo back.”

The head coach of the USA women’s national team is back where it all began for her in preparation for the showpiece friendly on Saturday between her Olympic champions and the European champions, England, at Wembley. This week her cultures are colliding, as she brings her team from the US, where she spent a number of formative years coaching, to London, where she grew up, played, then became one of the world’s best. Thanksgiving will be celebrated at the training ground of the team she supported as a child, Tottenham. This will be a special week.

It is a year since Hayes announced she would be leaving Chelsea after 12 years to take the USA job and six months since she left Cobham for the last time. Since then, she has lifted the USA side back to the top, winning the Olympic final 72 days after her first training session. She needed a change, making no secret of the toll club management was taking on her by the end of her tenure, but didn’t know what to expect from international coaching.

“I was a little bit afraid of how this new rhythm was going to affect me,” she says. “I’m so used to getting in the car and driving to the training ground six or seven days a week. I worried about that for about four seconds. And then I said: ‘OK, what’s the benefits?’ I get to get up and breathe, not rush. I get to take Harry [her son] to school. I get to go to the gym. I get to create my schedule in and around those things. I don’t sacrifice the things that make me feel healthy. I definitely didn’t feel healthy at the end. I actually felt quite unwell at the end of my time at Chelsea.

“Doing all those things during menopause was even harder. So, to get on top of them all, I feel like I’ve got my mojo, my smile and joy back, I didn’t realise how much I’d lost all that. To do that means that I’m loving football more than ever and I’m clear about all the things that I want to do.”

There is a lot on Hayes’s to-do list. “I’m fresh out of a packet. What I’ve realised is that I’m a builder and when I think back to building anything, from my 10 years in the US previously to building Chelsea, I really enjoy putting an infrastructure together so that when I leave it still stays solid.”

There are a lot of projects targeted, including developing the 2027-28 national team strategy, the youth-team strategy, an under‑23 team and putting in a youth development programme with the help of a philanthropic $30m donation from Washington Spirit’s owner, Michele Kang. “I hope to develop, within the federation, a framework so that everything, from commercial, to marketing, to comms, to performance, to technical, to analysis, is seen through a female lens,” she says.

The potential in the US is huge. The grassroots opportunities and college system mean the talent is there; it just needs to be brought together. “I remember when Japan won the World Cup in 2011, there were more registered female soccer players in California than there were in the whole of Japan,” Hayes says. She refers to a thriving football ecosystem and says: “Unifying that under a women’s football development strategy is probably the one thing that’s absent, and that’s probably going to be the biggest piece of what I could leave behind.” How will she do that? “I say it to my son all the time: ‘How do you eat an elephant? One chunk at a time.’”

There are no airs and graces to Hayes. She is not sweeping in to change things but working to close gaps. “I’m from a home where you had to keep your feet on the ground and be humble and hardworking. I cherish those things. I grew up in a household where my dad put money on the table at the end of the week and there was enough or there wasn’t, and we’d have to figure it out. That was life as an inner-city London kid. That was the making of me.

“I think Camden’s the greatest place on earth. Not just for the multicultural, diverse, eclectic place that it is, but for the opportunities it gave me. It’s not like I just went and won an Olympic gold medal. No, I worked for Camden Sports Development, I worked for Camden Playcentres, for our kids in the community. I care about people and community. Without question that shaped me.”

On Saturday Hayes will hum both national anthems, resist the instinct to yell instructions at Millie Bright, who “feels like a sister to me”, and hope her team get past Hannah Hampton, who “had a bit of a tight bond” with her son.

“We’re coming to win at the weekend,” she says, “but that’s not my overarching goal. I want to qualify for the World Cup and I want to win the World Cup.”

Header image: [Photograph: Zac Goodwin/PA]