Emma Hayes first met Megan Rapinoe before she became Megan Rapinoe. Or rather, just as she was becoming Megan Rapinoe. She was not yet a winner of two World Cups, not yet an Olympic champion, not yet captain of her country, not yet a powerful and urgent voice off the field. Rapinoe wasn’t even a professional football player then, not quite.
It was Hayes’ job to change that. In 2008, she was named head coach and director of soccer operations for the Chicago Red Stars, one of the first franchises in the start-up league Women’s Professional Soccer. Hayes had a blank slate to fill, a team he had to build from scratch. Rapinoe was her first call.
That may be the best measure of how brightly Rapinoe’s talent shone. When coach and player first met, Rapinoe was only 23 years old and straight out of the University of Portland, but the power dynamic was already in her favor. She didn’t have to convince Hayes. Instead, Hayes had to sell her to the team, to the project, to the city.
And so she showed Rapinoe, born and raised in California, around Chicago, hoping to convince her that the move to the shores of Lake Michigan would suit her. It worked. The Red Stars had Rapinoe finish second overall ahead of the league’s inaugural season.
The WPS did not last. It only survived three seasons. By the time it closed, Hayes had long left the Red Stars. Rapinoe, however, was just getting started.
As much as Hayes was convinced of Rapinoe’s promise, even she wouldn’t pretend she knew how far she would go. This weekend, Rapinoe – now 38 – will finally spend time on her career. Her plan is for her departure to be framed by ticker tape and fireworks: with one final victory, helping OL Reign to victory against Gotham FC in the NWSL finals, a suitably glorious coda to a glittering career.
It is no exaggeration to say that Rapinoe has been the defining player in women’s football for more than a decade. It’s not just that she played a key role in the United States’ victory at the 2015 World Cup, and the driving force behind its repeat victory four years later. It’s that her activism, her unwillingness to shut up and play, has made the U.S. women’s team something that transcends sport. As a result, she helped set the tone for women’s football as a whole.
It’s fitting that Rapinoe’s curtain call comes at a time when Hayes, the woman who did so much to launch her career, returns to the United States. Not officially of course; at this stage, the fact that Hayes will be the next coach of the US women’s national team is merely an open secret, a fait accompli that must remain – for now – shrouded in a warm blanket of euphemism.
Anonymous sources only go so far as to say Hayes and US Soccer have been “in discussions.” Chelsea, the club that Hayes has coached with considerable success over the past decade, will only say that the 47-year-old coach will leave at the end of the current season to “pursue a new opportunity” outside the English Women’s Super League. and the club game. What exactly that opportunity might be is not revealed. Sure, maybe she’ll coach the US. Or maybe she wants to be a firefighter. It’s anyone’s guess.
There is only one established fact, even though it is by far the most striking. Hayes, winner of six WSL titles and five FA Cups and by far the most prominent manager in women’s football in England, has quit her job. She told Chelsea she’s going. This mainly reveals how far these mysterious conversations have progressed.
It’s not hard to see why the prospect of coaching the United States appeals to Hayes. The team’s history is so rich that it remains the most prestigious job in women’s football. Considering she will have salary parity with U.S. men’s national team coach Gregg Berhalter, that will also be the most lucrative.
Hayes will have to earn that money, though. The last time she took a job in the United States, her job was to help start an era. A decade and a half later, that is again in the job description. However, the context is completely different. This time, Hayes must ensure an ending before it begins.
It might be vaguely possible to view Hayes’ appointment as a return; her early career resume also includes spells with the Long Island Lady Riders (which we can all agree isn’t a great name for a team), the Washington Freedom and the Western New York. Flash – but she wasn’t hired because of her familiarity with the modern landscape of American soccer. She was appointed precisely because she is an outsider in this.
It is not just that Hayes represents a significant break with tradition. Nearly all of her predecessors as national coach came from positions on the side of the Atlantic that were slow to embrace contactless technology. The US job was in some ways the reward for success American football.
That made perfect sense. For decades, the United States was the driving force behind the women’s game. Professional competition, in whatever guise, was the gold standard of the sport. Players from all over the world, where domestic leagues were often professional in name only, flocked there. The national team was the highlight of that program and therefore the highlight of the competition.
This summer, however, made it abundantly clear that things had changed. The United States exited the World Cup in the round of 16. The impact on the tournament was minimal. What happened in Australia and New Zealand illustrated a power shift that had been underway for some time. Two European teams contested the final. Five of the eight quarter-finalists were European.
The countries, including the US, that drew large portions of their squadrons from the NWSL tended to fall early. It was something that Hayes himself noticed. “There is still a tremendous amount of talent on this American team,” she wrote in a column for The Daily Telegraph during the World Cup. “But with so many members of the squad playing exclusively in the NWSL, it doesn’t provide enough diversity to their squad when it comes to playing against different styles.”
She would, she wrote, be “shocked” if young players continued to migrate to the U.S. to play in the college system while professional teams recruited — and paid so well — in Europe. She predicted that in the future it would be “very, very difficult” for the US to regain its primacy without “the right conversations around their model.”
That it will be Hayes who will lead these conversations is, of course, a tacit admission that her claim was correct. By appointing someone who built his career and reputation in Europe to overturn the reality the country has fallen behind with, US Soccer is essentially accepting its truth. One era has ended and it is time for another era to begin.
Perhaps then, this weekend’s NWSL final is best seen as the moment of transition. Rapinoe has never won an NWSL title. This is her last chance to end her wait, complete her set, place a golden bow on her career and all she has achieved and represented.
That she would be playing for OL Reign at that point – a team ultimately controlled by owners in France – would also feel fitting, a nod not only to where the game has been, but to where it’s going.
Correspondence
We were all too busy this past week learning about Spain’s demographic transformation in the 20th century Ben Coles to shorten the correspondence, but I wanted to return to his note this week, especially since the topic he brought up is one I’ve been thinking about for a while. In a way. From the opposite perspective actually.
‘Does every Everton team at the top of the current Premier League have any room for complacency this season?’ Ben asked, in direct conflict with the mantra that everything is necessarily the best in the best of all possible competitions. ‘Not because they’ve cracked the survival code, but because Sheffield United, Burnley, Luton and Bournemouth are so poor? It almost feels like a non-competition.”
I think it’s fair to suggest that the dimensions of this season’s relegation battle appear to have been drawn unusually early in the Premier League. Sheffield United had to be rebuilt in no time. Burnley and Bournemouth have both placed very – some would say overly – heavily on young and unproven talent. Luton made no attempt to disguise the fact that it had no intention of wasting all the money it earned from promotion to the Premier League on the Sisyphean task of staying there.
That’s not to say relegation is a foregone conclusion for any of them. Things change, and change quickly, early in the season. It is hardly inconceivable that Fulham, Everton or Crystal Palace have suffered a slump in the space of a few weeks, or that any of those teams that currently seem doomed to a season of struggle have found some form. Luton in particular seems to be rapidly getting to grips with the problems of Premier League football, as last week’s (more than justified) draw against Liverpool illustrated.
But there is one element working against these four clubs and that is the quality at the other end of the Premier League this season. Even taking into account the fact that Manchester City will in all likelihood reach the Championship for the fourth time in a row, the pool of teams directly below them is unusually large.
There are eight clubs – Tottenham, Arsenal, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Newcastle, Brighton, Manchester United and Chelsea – who will harbor legitimate ambitions to qualify not only for Europe but also for the Champions League, with England likely to send five have in the Premier League. the renewed competition next season.
The overall quality of the competition could be higher than ever before. That claim will of course be dismissed as a recency bias, or as a deliberate exaggeration, or simply as deeply ahistorical; that is the power of nostalgia that governs our relationship with sports.
There is a strong tendency to assume that what came before was somehow better: after all, we tend to simultaneously remember the good parts of the past (look at that Thierry Henry goal!) and only the shortcomings on display (Manchester City 6). , Bournemouth 1) of the present.
But it increasingly feels as if the Premier League is starting to not only live up to the bombast of its own marketing material, but also start to fulfill its fundamental premise: for the first time, a majority of its clubs have found a way to use the big piles of cash to have at their disposal to become really good at football. That’s good for the clubs, and good for the fans, and good for the league. It’s less good for the teams thrown into it with very little preparation.