The making of Emma Hayes: Inside her Chicago Red Stars nightmare

13 March 2024

When Emma Hayes was announced as the soon-to-be new head coach of the United States women’s national team, her words were littered with mentions of the connection she has with the country that she wasn’t born in, but that she was made in. After all, this will actually be her seventh job in the U.S., the most significant of the six previous coming when she was manager of the Chicago Red Stars some 16 years ago.

Hayes had a team littered with stars when she was in the role. She managed no fewer than five players who would win the World Cup with the USWNT: Carli Lloyd, Jessica McDonald, Kate Markgraf, Whitney Engen and Megan Rapinoe, the latter of whom she actually drafted out of college. There were international stars on the roster, too, including Brazil icons Formiga and Cristiane, England playmaker Karen Carney, Sweden’s Kosovare Asllani and Australia goalkeeper Lydia Williams.

But this isn’t the story of a 31-year-old coaching prodigy shocking everyone with innovative tactics, storming to titles and announcing herself to the world as one to watch. No, this is a story that ends with the future USWNT head coach being sacked in a Starbucks.

However, it’s a story integral to Hayes’ rise, and a big reason why she has gone on to become the coach she is today, one with 14 major titles under her belt who is about to take on the biggest job in women’s soccer…

Made in the USA

Hayes’ time across the pond starts with her father, Sid, who was in Atlanta when the 1999 Women’s World Cup was hosted by the United States. He attended some of the games and phoned his daughter, then an aspiring coach whose playing days had been ended prematurely by a freak injury on a ski trip, to tell her all about it.

“He said, 'Emma, you will not believe it. There are thousands of people going to a [women’s] football match and they idolise these players',” Hayes told Men In Blazers. “I was like, 'Really, Dad?' He said, 'You have to be in America. This is where you have to be'.”

A couple of years later, Hayes did exactly that. Aged 25, she packed up her things, boarded a flight to New York and was soon in charge of the Long Island Lady Riders, making her the youngest coach in the USL W-League. An impressive stint there led to her managing the Iona Gaels, the women's soccer team of Iona College, and a short spell coaching at Columbia University.

Her time in the U.S. came to a brief conclusion in 2005 when she returned to England to be Arsenal’s assistant coach and academy director, helping the Gunners enjoy that iconic, quadruple-winning 2007 season. But she had made an impression overseas, and was soon on her way back to the States to be the manager of the Chicago Red Stars in the newly-launched Women's Professional Soccer league (WPS).

Complicated job

Despite the success of the USWNT and the record-breaking attendances of that 1999 Women’s World Cup, a successful domestic league for women’s soccer in the U.S. was proving difficult to establish. WPS was the next attempt, and the Chicago Red Stars were one of seven teams to feature in its first season, in 2009. General manager Marcia McDermott remembered Hayes from when she had been in the U.S. previously and she was eventually chosen as the person to lead the side. Except, she wouldn’t just be coaching; there was a lot more to be done as the manager of a brand new team.

“I learnt building a franchise from scratch is one of the hardest things to do because it's not as simple as just putting a team together,” Hayes told Men In Blazers in 2022. “You're putting offices together, you're finding training pitches, you're trying to navigate your way through a landscape that isn't established yet.

“I learnt that you don't get time. You don't have that time. You don't get the opportunity and the foundation to build something. You have to win now. That was a really big lesson, having come from Arsenal, an established club, to one that was... You're putting a whole group of 18, 19 players together and you expect it to work - and it didn't work, for whatever reason. It was another reminder that this isn't fantasy football.

"Everyone used to say to me, ‘The Chicago Red Stars is the best team on paper’. Correct, they were, on paper. It didn't work as a team, for a number of reasons, and it just didn't produce the performances.”

Sacked in a Starbucks

As well as Rapinoe, Lloyd, Cristiane, Carney and Williams, that first Chicago Red Stars roster included the likes of Lindsay Tarpley, the team captain who won two Olympic gold medals with the USWNT; Heather Garriock, one of Australia's greatest ever players; and Ella Masar, the one-time USWNT international who would represent teams like Paris Saint-Germain and Wolfsburg.

However, the Red Stars finished sixth in WPS in 2009, out of seven teams. Chicago won five of its 20 games and scored just 18 goals, a total only better than that of FC Gold Pride, the team bottom of the table. There was mass turnover in the off-season as just nine of the 22 players remained on the roster for 2010, but it didn't change results. Chicago again finished sixth in a league of seven teams, winning seven of its 24 games. But Hayes only oversaw one of those victories, as she was sacked just six matches into the season, the Red Stars having lost four of them.

“I remember getting sacked and I was in a Starbucks. I got sacked in a Starbucks,” Hayes told the Game Changers podcast. “I didn’t have my phone because I dropped it in the toilet that morning. I asked the person who sacked me to lend me their phone because I just needed to get a lift out of there.”

First steps

So, why didn’t it work out? Danesha Adams was one of the players on the Red Stars' roster in 2009, having been drafted ahead of the season, and she remembers things being “a little bit all over the place” in Chicago. “In the beginning, I think there was a lot of just trying to understand the league and figure it out,” she told GOAL. “My impressions were that it was a little bit disjointed in how it all worked. What I mean by that is [Hayes’] role versus the assistant's role versus the athletic trainer role.”

It's certainly something that suggests inexperience, which was the status Hayes held as a 31-year-old who was taking on such a huge job for the first time. Nathan Kipp, part of her coaching staff with the Red Stars and also with the Iona Gaels a few years earlier, has pointed to this factor, too. “She wasn’t a deeply experienced head coach at that time and if anything, she was in the midst of growing into her ability to guide a team to success. I’d say, for example, if you have a mature, older coach and the ability to be flexible, it can help make the difference between overachieving and underachieving,” he told Women's Football Chronicles.

Superstar power

A little more experience would’ve no doubt gone a long way when it came to managing some of the superstars on that Chicago roster, too. A look at how well Hayes has done that in her time at Chelsea shows that it is not something she was incapable of doing, just perhaps not ready for.

“There were players older than her, experienced national team players who had very strong opinions on how they wanted to play, and I think that was tough for her,” Kipp said. “She definitely evolved, but this was completely different to college soccer. We had players who were sacrificing a future in any other job, making $10,000, and national team players who were superstars. It was imbalanced, the spectrum of that challenge. Many saw the league as something to support the national team and that’s tough at club level. If we wanted to play Carli or Lindsey in a different position to the national team, how do you manage that?”

“I think a lot of it when she was at Chicago, she sometimes over-coached and wanted to coach, coach, coach, coach,” Adams added. “Sometimes you have got to manage some of these egos so people don't just think they can do whatever they want. I think now, she does that. It’s really cool to see.”

Learning experience

You only need to look at what Hayes has achieved since leaving Chicago to understand how much she learned from that experience. But look closer and you can literally see the areas of growth, and that management of big players is absolutely a key one. Adams is just one of several of Hayes’ former players who have heard about that journey and development straight from the horse’s mouth, such is the time the Chelsea boss has given in delivering talks and answering questions from those who are taking the first steps in their own coaching careers.

“Literally in America, she was around a bunch of superstars for two years, national big-time players,” Adams, now co-head coach of the women’s soccer team at the University of the Pacific, said. “I'm always trying to pick coach's brains on how I can be better, and so to hear from her, and to hear her growth from the beginning to now, was amazing. Just to hear the things that she had to do differently and how she had to really focus on managing players and maybe not so much the coaching aspect.

“For me, it was difficult and my relationship with Emma was very difficult because I didn't understand and I couldn't get an explanation as to why I wasn't playing. I played minutes here and there, but to be a top-10 draft pick, their first pick, I felt like I could have had a better impact. I think a little bit of that was Emma, but I also think a little bit of it was just her trying to appease the national team players, which is interesting because I can tell you now I think she's the complete opposite of that, which I think is cool to see the growth in her.

“Her and I have had that conversation, back during [the Covid-19 pandemic]. What was cool was she kind of came back and said to me, 'I'm not the same coach I was in Chicago'. She didn't necessarily apologise but it was like, 'I'm better now. I'm a way better coach'. I think that was really cool to hear from her, to know she knew there were some mistakes that were made at that time of her life, but knowing now that she's developed and grown and become a phenomenal coach at Chelsea.

“Honestly, it was fantastic [to talk to her]. It was even more cool because of how humble she is about it. I think some coaches could have been like, 'Oh, no, I was a really good coach back then'. But she was just honest and open and was like, 'I've learned a lot. That experience, those two years of me being in Chicago, completely changed my way of coaching and understanding of the game and how I manage players'.”

Taking responsibility

That ability to accept responsibility for the failures in Chicago has resonated with other members of Hayes’ Red Stars team, too. Julianne Sitch is another who has been able to pick her former coach’s brain over the last few years, and she has huge respect for her admissions about that spell in Illinois that ended some 14 years ago.

“That’s what I respect about her a lot, that she is not afraid to own up to those moments and not afraid to be like, 'Yeah, I tried that. It didn't work out', or, 'Hey, I did this and it didn't quite go the way I wanted. Now, I change, I grow, I learn, I'm coachable',” Sitch told GOAL. “That's what I admire about her because you just watch the different journeys and the paths that she's done and she's taken areas of growth from all of them to push herself. Look at her - she's extremely successful.

“I think [why it didn’t work in Chicago] was just the growth of managing and developing a team. She's openly talked about that in some interviews. I think it was just a big growth moment of that environment and working with professional athletes in that environment. That's where I personally have seen her grow the most, from being around her as a coach then to where she is now and how she manages that environment, how she manages her locker room. She has found a great way to demand the most of her players while also caring for them and valuing them on such a personal level.”

Plenty of potential

But none of this is to say that Hayes didn’t show glimpses of her potential during her time in Chicago. Things didn’t work out and she has shouldered her share of the responsibility for that, but there were a lot of factors working against her, too, and there were definitely signs that she could develop into a top coach.

Sitch was recruited by Hayes ahead of the 2010 season, having spent her first year in WPS with Sky Blue in New Jersey. She had talked to the Red Stars before the draft in 2009 and was hopeful of being able to play in her hometown, but Sky Blue got there first, though Hayes didn’t forget about her and traded for Sitch in the off-season.

Despite the Red Stars’ results the previous year, the former defender remembers being “really excited to play for a coach that genuinely cared for their athletes but pushed us to be better”. “In the training sessions leading up to the draft, I always felt like I was getting better,” Sitch told GOAL. “I was working on small details, asking, 'How can I push my game to be better?' Again, for a coach to believe in you as the player that you are, slash the player that they believe that you can continue to grow to be, I think that was the other piece of that as well.

“I really liked [Hayes and assistant Denise Reddy’s] energy, I really liked how they laid out sessions, in a positive way but a demanding way. That is something that really stuck out to me as well. I wanted to show up every day, I wanted to get better, I wanted to grind, I wanted to be my best, I didn't want to disappoint. I just remember that energy coming from them in a positive way so that my demand and standards had to be high.”

A caring coach

There were also those caring elements that Hayes still possesses in abundance today. The way she protects her players is one of her most recognisable and lauded traits, and how she has looked after Fran Kirby through all of her setbacks over the years at Chelsea is case and point. Former England star Carney even has an incredible story about Hayes offering to send Chelsea’s physio in to see to her when the midfielder was an opposing player one afternoon and her team didn’t have the same medical resources. Sitch has another story that can be filed under the same category.

“Honestly, I owe a lot to Emma Hayes because, unfortunately, in that 2010 season, when Emma had been let go, I was still playing with Chicago and at the end of the season, I suffered an ACL meniscus injury,” she explained. “It happened towards the end of the season but that year, the Chicago Red Stars also folded. So here I was, contract-less, team-less and trying to rehab back from an ACL.

“I really owe a lot to Emma Hayes because she really helped me out in finding a place at Western New York. She had reached out to teams for me, inquiring for them to be able to pick me up when I was coming off an injury, and Western New York did just that. It kept my career alive. I don't know if she really knows that,” Sitch said, with a laugh. “But she definitely helped and is a huge reason why I was continuing to play after my injury. So, I owe a huge thank you to Emma for just believing in me.”

“She was approachable,” Adams added. “You never felt disconnected from her, whether you liked what she said or not, but she was always there. She was always available. She wasn't angry or mean. If we didn't win a game, she was upset but it wasn't, 'I'm not going to talk to you and I'm stone cold'. She still was respectful to us as players and continued to help guide us.”

Sharing pearls of wisdom

That Adams and Sitch have both spoken to Hayes recently enough further underlines this point. Adams was writing some courses during the pandemic and reached out to former coaches who she thought would be good to speak to young women aspiring to come through that career path. Hayes duly obliged and it was a huge learning experience for Adams as well as the rest of the attendees.

“Getting advice from her on [recruitment] was massive because I was able to take some of those pieces,” she explained. “One of the big things she said is, 'You create a culture that people want to be a part of. If you can do that, then you don't have a problem. You create a culture that's wishy-washy and it's not consistent, then that's when people venture off and go the wrong way. But if you create something that is consistent, then your team will be consistent'.

“You've seen that, with Chelsea, right? Her culture is consistent, she has a high standard and so they don't have a choice but to play at that high standard because if not, the next person will. I think that's kind of been my approach with my college team, 'We need everybody, but you all have a responsibility to be good. When you're not, the next person gets a chance'. And I think that's what Emma does a really good job of.”

Sitch, too, spoke to Hayes over a video call during the pandemic. “The lessons and the mentorship that she was giving us, it was quite impressive,” she said. Asked what it was like to hear a little from Hayes on that call about her time coaching in Chicago, Sitch added: “It's helped me. It's helped me be vulnerable in my environments as a coach or to say, 'Hey, that's on me'. It's just shown that growth and authenticity to coach with. I admire her for that and that's something I try to resemble in my own coaching.”

Becoming the best

Fourteen years on from being sacked in a Starbucks, Hayes will be back in the U.S. in just a few months’ time. Except on this occasion she won’t be some inexperienced newbie yet to make a name for herself. The 47-year-old will return as one of the best coaches on the planet, ready to help the USWNT become the team to beat again.

Many moments have been important to getting her here, but her time in Chicago is something that Hayes herself has described as being “crucial” to her journey. “I needed all of that setback, all of that disappointment, all of that effort that went into trying to put a team together there,” she told the Game Changers podcast.

“What's really cool is it shows opportunities. It shows that you can maybe not be the best at the beginning, and keep working and have the right people around you and you can become the best,” Adams pondered. “Me, as a former national team player and as a pro, I'm excited. I'm excited for our country right now with someone like her.”

Adams is not alone, either. The reputation Hayes has built over the last 20 years or so is one of a winner, one of a coach who cultivates a world-class culture and a manager who looks after the well-being of her players as much as anything else. It’s no wonder this appointment has provoked such excitement.

But for all of her successes and all of her highs, so much of the development that has led to Hayes being held in that regard can be traced back to those two years in Chicago. It just goes to show that every cloud really does have a silver lining.