Emma Hayes, the long goodbye and the legacy

It was, after about half an hour, feeling like an office party at a karaoke bar. Chelsea’s travelling support were rolling through all the hits and by the end, Emma Hayes was taking requests. “We want five!” they said. Duly it arrived. “We want Fran!” came the calls, and on went Fran Kirby for her final game in a Chelsea shirt. When she scored Chelsea’s last goal, on 85 minutes, it felt like Chelsea were bending the world to their will. “What’s the score?” the fans asked Hayes repeatedly, and gladly she held up her fingers in immediate reply. It took her a little longer for goal six, probably from the extra effort of taking both hands from her pockets.

The only omission from their setlist was a chorus of oles. Had it been against a bigger rival, they might have whipped those out after the second goal arrived inside nine minutes but, as it was, Chelsea were too focused to break off for that kind of interlude.

It helps when Manchester United barely showed up, let alone with the energy to gatecrash. Hayes’ leaving party was exactly that, and the force of it all was such that United’s decision to parade their FA Cup trophy at full time to fans unable to travel to last week’s Wembley final felt like witnessing a proposal at somebody else’s wedding. It had all the hallmarks of one: the Hayes kids flinging confetti at each other, Sam Kerr and Erin Cuthbert striking comedy poses in front of the trophy as if in a photo booth.

Even Hayes seemed a touch delirious, at one point turning to her bench and mouthing: “Who scored?” and shrugging towards her players during one particularly rampant patch. Certainly, she was taken aback by the ludicrous nature of it all, the ease with which, on its final day, it all fell into place. To emerge from this season with a fifth successive league title is, to put it one way, a bit of a leap in plot terms, given where we were a month ago, and rich with irony given it was her nemesis, Arsenal manager Jonas Eidevall, who opened the door for her to write her ending with a 2-1 win over runners-up Manchester City this month, a match that tilted the title race in Chelsea’s favour.

Still, a sunny stroll was a nice change for Hayes given the pace of the past few months, and how quickly it looked like her final season at Chelsea would fall apart. Hayes had been hoping for a quadruple until losing the Continental Cup to Arsenal in March — the game that ended with her shoving Eidevall at full time in response to the “male aggression” she said he had exhibited on the touchline — and her decision to recite a poem in lieu of an apology at her subsequent press conference seemed to precipitate a wider unravelling and betray a more muddled line of thinking.

Within a fortnight, the quadruple had halved to a double after a defeat to Manchester United in the FA Cup. To attend Hayes’ post-match press conference was to see a more guarded, circumspect figure, one visibly wary about saying the wrong thing. In the end, she did: her remarks that “nobody died” and that the goal for the end of the season was for everybody to get out alive did not play well with a fanbase anxious given recent events.

These were rare missteps for Hayes, a manager who, if anything, has given the impression over the years of being frustrated by too much good press rather than the reverse (the title of her audiobook, To Kill the Unicorn, is about curing the delusion of the manager as a mythical being who has all the answers). So came the backlash. This season has been the most bruising of Hayes’ career from a PR perspective and the stakes have been so much higher given the number of eyeballs on her since it was announced in November she would take over as manager of the U.S. women’s national team this summer.

“Sometimes I wish I was in the old, old days where maybe it was a small press pack,” Hayes said in her final press conference before playing United. “I actually did that early on. You could sit and have little off-the-record conversations, but also share good things. Now, it’s just an exercise of not tripping up. You say too much and get whacked for it. You don’t say enough then it’s just something dull, a repetitive function that we have to serve.”

She continued the theme after the match. “If I wasn’t a football manager or had to do a press conference every three days, I’m that person in the social group who sits in the corner. I’m not front and centre in my life. I don’t live like that. So I find some of this job really, really hard because I just want a quiet life. That’s what I’m most looking forward to — being out of the British media, having a different life and being in a situation where I only have to do this and games every six weeks.”

Hayes will know it has been a slog for the women’s game to reach this point in the public consciousness. The sport has exploded over the past two years in particular and with the publicity has come scrutiny that Hayes probably felt underprepared for.

As the face of the WSL and the sport’s loudest advocate, she has felt it more than most managers. Opposition fans grow weary at the focus on Hayes and Chelsea and the woman at the centre finds being used as a rent-a-quote burdensome, for all she understands the need to keep pushing for more. There is, though, no obvious heir to her role as a mouthpiece for the sport as a whole. Aston Villa’s Carla Ward is taking a career break for similar reasons to Hayes’ desire for a break. City’s Gareth Taylor feels too guarded, United’s Marc Skinner too emotional and Eidevall too explosive on the field. Someone shaping a club to the extent Hayes has feels less likely in the era where women’s teams continue to move in-house. Maybe they won’t make them like her anymore.

Not that Hayes could be persuaded to stay. “I categorically cannot carry on,” Hayes said on Saturday. “I don’t have another drop to give, whatever it is. When you deal with people, I have such high standards for myself that maintaining that has become impossible. I can’t keep up with the demands from players on a daily basis in terms of their emotional needs, in terms of everything. I found that to be gruelling this year.”

The moment Chelsea were confirmed as WSL champions (Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)

She detailed discussions with Chelsea’s sporting directors over improving player care and performance psychology. For those who want to find something deeper in Hayes’ departure, maybe there is a lesson here: after Chelsea’s 8-0 win over Bristol City on May 5, she had warned that female coaches would continue to leave the game if football did not appreciate their wellbeing. “If you’re a parent, forget about it,” she said. She would love to see a duo of two mothers or co-head coaches. “You have to give up a lot in this job,” she went on. “I don’t wish it on anyone.”

In time, maybe the game will reflect that it failed one of its greatest managers; maybe this is just the reality of management, at this point in the WSL’s life. Maybe it just has to be that consuming. Maybe it’s different for women. In any case, the next generation will benefit from Hayes’ wisdom, even if Hayes has been burned out by it all.

“Staying on top of emotion is something I’m really good at,” she said at her final press conference. “Sometimes, I really hate that. You have to do that a lot as a manager, which is probably one of the reasons I’m leaving this job. I miss Emma, and feeling like I don’t have to watch every word I say or worry about what my body language looks like in every situation because the camera’s on me.”

Her final few weeks at Chelsea engendered a kind of ‘grieving’ among her family members who had taken the club to heart. Often, Hayes declined to talk about it with any finality “because I don’t want to cry because I have to do my job”. She had learned to “kick the emotions in the back of my head” but imagined “sobbing my heart out” at some point on Sunday, once it was all over and after she had hosted a barbeque for her son Harry’s birthday.

That has been the odd dichotomy of Hayes’ tenure: a winning machine but always with the disclaimers — maybe even anchors — that she is human, too. After exiting the Champions League at the hands of Barcelona in April, Hayes’ eyes brimmed with tears; her press officer mouthed: “You OK?” before they plunged into a short press conference where Hayes took only six questions. At the Football Writers’ Association dinner to honour Hayes, she teared up while thanking her late father, Sid, the one who had told her to go out and make the English game into what had been built in the United States. An underappreciated facet of this season is that Hayes has trundled through it all while grieving for her father. The menopause, Hayes has said on more than one occasion, has also presented unique challenges.

“Don’t think I’m not, like, feeling it,” she said after her final game at Kingsmeadow. “Today was really, really hard for me to coach. Really, really hard. There was a lot going on.”

Still, Chelsea did the job that night: fans ordered goals and Chelsea served them like they were waiting tables. Even when Guro Reiten managed a hat-trick on 77 minutes, Hayes was urging Chelsea back to the centre circle to rack up the goals that would put them in control on the final day. As the PA system reminded the crowd when the teams came back from the break that this would be the final 45 minutes at Kingsmeadow for Hayes, Kirby and Maren Mjelde, the evening bubbled with a sense of purpose, the mood music changed entirely after City’s 2-1 defeat by Arsenal in the earlier game.

The win put Chelsea in control of their own destiny, albeit not always convincingly, and half the time it was tricky to work out what Hayes was thinking. She conceded the title live on Sky, flanked by upcoming striker Aggie Beever-Jones, after a 4-3 defeat by Liverpool.

She insisted later that the interview — which Sky pundit Karen Carney called “weird” — was not an attempt at a mind game. You half-believe Hayes, given the sincerity with which she later insisted she expected City to win, but initially, she conceded it was “the right tactic” for her to “take the pressure off” her own players before City played.

Over the past year, Hayes has pulled so many tricks that looking for the real meaning sometimes felt like untangling a cat’s cradle. At the least, she is adept at spinning situations to Chelsea’s advantage, and maybe all the strangeness served to take the spotlight from the players. She insisted it was her squad who spearheaded the title charge after City’s slip-up, but it’s hard to believe Hayes was truly willing to abandon all hope: “It all came from them. They never gave up that belief… I learned so much from them today. I really did. I learned a lot about the importance of belief.”

Hayes allowed herself some time to rest on Sunday, then will move to her new in-tray. She is exhausted, but the thought of going to an Olympics, she says, is “not tiring” and will re-energise her. She has USWNT player and staff calls on Monday, a call with U.S. leadership teams on Wednesday, a flight to New York and press obligations on Thursday in Denver, a meeting with staff on Friday, and a first meeting with the team on the following Monday.

It is a full-circle moment given the call from Sid that started it all: when out in Atlanta and bowled over by the 1996 and 1999 U.S. teams, he told Hayes to get out there. When she finally does, it will be with the hope of a simpler life, and maybe a team already used to celebrity and fighting culture wars, with players who will be masters of the things that have most jaded Hayes in her final few years in England. Still, Hayes will likely prove unignorable: it is difficult to imagine how she will ever be less box office as long as she is herself.

It’s been equally difficult, over the past few weeks, to try to understand Hayes’ legacy. When she announced her departure, it was easy: an immeasurable impact on a sport and a club. May onwards made for a strange time to quantify it all given the events post-Continental Cup final, and the view among opposition fans that what happened there irreparably damaged her reputation. Hayes is no longer a universally-liked figure. Furthermore, she has never won the Champions League as a head coach, let alone built a European dynasty a la Lyon or Barcelona. To what extent those will exist as asterisks on her roll of honour might only become clear if an English team wins the Champions League in the coming years. Deeming a return to club management “unlikely”, Hayes seemed to pass up on ever doing so.

You can’t believe it bothers her much. Knowing that she has nothing more to give is in itself closure. Hayes is simply too exhausted to summon regrets and what-ifs. Is she the greatest domestic manager the women’s game has known? Certainly in the WSL era; more broadly, her only rival is Vic Akers, Arsenal’s European Cup-winning manager for whom Hayes was assistant coach, and who pushed the game forward in a similarly visionary way. Hayes endured more scrutiny and greater competition at a more transformative time for the women’s game. It will take a while for anyone to catch up to seven league titles, five FA Cups and two League Cups.

Memory is a slippery thing. In five years, will anyone still read the footnotes at the bottom of title five? That they did it without Sam Kerr, that Arsenal and Stina Blackstenius half won the title for them, that the off-field sideshow threatened to consume it all?

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This has been a gruelling season for a club beset by injuries and it feels like they’ve made it over the line by constant reinvention and sheer force of will since losing Kerr and her replacement, Mia Fishel, to anterior cruciate ligament injuries at the start of the year. Had Chelsea won the FA Cup this year, it would have been their fourth in a row. That underlines the breadth of their dominance.

The Manchester United manager, Skinner, mused afterwards that the days of clubs winning five titles in a row are “gone”. He said: “I’ve seen the growth from no teams, not professional, all the way to teams that have had the advantage because they professionalised quicker. In the era when it has been professional, Chelsea still managed to deliver that situation. It leaves a space and hopefully, we can fill that space going forward.”

His point was probably that Hayes’ departure and the relentlessness of her dominance leave the door open for others as Chelsea transition but it seemed muddied by his concession that even in the professional era Chelsea stayed ahead of the pack and found a new edge. That constant reinvention gave the illusion that Hayes and Chelsea could go on forever. Hayes has pulled back the curtain on it all to show a coach and players barely limping over the line, and one not always given to enjoyment.

Still, a video of Hayes and son Harry, in a hotel room, singing about winning five titles in a row did the rounds on Saturday night. As with Hayes, there is always a point, a message. That one: I will enjoy this, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks.

(Top photo: Naomi Baker – The FA via Getty Images)