Emma Hayes can lead USWNT to Olympic gold despite delayed start

The only hesitation anyone at US Soccer could’ve had over the hiring of Emma Hayes to coach the women’s national team would be the timing. Hayes will remain at Chelsea through the end of the club season. Then she’ll have only four games in charge before the 2024 Olympics.

The consensus in the US soccer world, expressed most directly by longtime US player Tobin Heath, is that the US are essentially sacrificing a shot at Olympic gold for the greater good.

Don’t be too sure. Four games, four days – it hardly matters. Hayes can absolutely lead the US team to gold in Paris next year. For a rough precedent, consider 2008.

Ten months before the Olympics, the US program was in severe disarray. Coach Greg Ryan lost only one of his 55 games in charge (45 wins, nine draws), but that one defeat was less of a loss than an implosion. Going into the 2007 World Cup semi-finals, Ryan decided to bench goalkeeper Hope Solo for reasons that have evolved over time from arcane on-field assessments to vague off-field incidents. No goalkeeper could’ve prevented the 4-0 rout that followed, given Brazil’s overwhelming superiority at the time, but Solo went out of her way to complain about the decision and imply that the result would’ve been different if she had played in place of Briana Scurry. Solo was ostracized from the team for committing the cardinal sin of throwing a teammate – a beloved teammate at that – under the bus.

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Enter coach Pia Sundhage, a guitar-strumming Swede who somehow managed to smooth over the chasms that had erupted within the US camp. Solo returned to the fold and quickly became the dominant goalkeeper she would be for the next several years. Any dissatisfaction was kept inside the team’s ranks.

Yes, Sundhage had more time than Hayes. But she also had to deal with a late twist – Abby Wambach, the USA’s powerhouse offensive force, broke her leg in the last match before the Games.

Sundhage retooled the attack around Angela Hucles, a backup midfielder for much of her US career, and the emergent Carli Lloyd scored the game-winner in the final against the same Brazilian team that had danced around the US less than a year earlier.

Coaches can only control so much, and Sundhage benefited from a few bits of good fortune. While she lost Wambach, she had a healthy defense, and oft-injured right-back Heather Mitts was in stellar form.

But Sundhage also had a few obstacles that Hayes won’t face. The 2008 player pool had several limitations. Players were locked into contracts, and benching or omitting a popular player meant risking the wrath of teammates, fans and the media. Thanks to the lack of professional soccer in the US and a dearth of opportunities overseas, players who didn’t make it into the contracted pool by the end of their college careers often drifted out of the game.

Hayes will have no shortage of players she can call or drop as she sees fit. Other than center back Naomi Girma and captain Lindsey Horan, any names in the 2024 starting lineup can be written in pencil, and even Horan’s place could be in jeopardy if Sam Mewis can ever regain her fitness and form. The older players in the World Cup have either retired or shown that they’re no longer irreplaceable. The younger players – again, other than Girma – haven’t done enough to stake a solid claim to international playing time.

The NWSL Best XI alone has several players who can compete for places. The league has plenty more who are on their way up. A few national team-worthy players are based in Europe.

No matter where she’s based over the next six months, Hayes will be familiar with all of them. Scouting the US player pool is a task that neatly overlaps between her current and future jobs. In all her years of building Chelsea into a juggernaut, she would have paid close attention to all the top US players and prospects. She already has two, Mia Fishel and Catarina Macário, on her roster at Chelsea.

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In the long term, Hayes has a long to-do list. She’ll have to stomp out the complacent attitudes in the US women’s soccer community that made excuses for seemingly unlucky losses in 2023 while ignoring the team’s good luck in prior years. She’ll need to be an advocate for changing the youth soccer landscape in the US, incentivizing clubs to put aside their pyrrhic quests for national rankings and glittering trophies long enough to develop players who can cope with their more sophisticated peers in Europe. After the Olympics, win or lose, she’ll have to figure out which players are sticking around as cornerstones for future World Cup success.

In the short term, the task is simpler. Watch her future team play, with an eye toward selecting the perfect group for the Olympics. She can do it away from the scrutiny of fans and media who have their own favorite players and aren’t shy about saying so.

For once in the US women’s history, the coach isn’t the one who needs to prove herself. Hayes is a winner with unsurpassed knowledge of the sport. The players, on the other hand, are about to embark on the most grueling tryouts of their lives over the next six months. Whoever emerges will be more than ready to cope with an Olympic field that will exclude many dangerous European teams, and Hayes will be more than ready to lead them to the podium, quite possibly to the top step.