After more than 20 years of waiting, Emma Hayes’ dream to become the USWNT’s manager has come true

NEW YORK — If you’re relatively new to the U.S. women’s soccer team, you might not believe the tales told about the long time Emma Hayes spent coaching in the United States in the early 2000s.

You might look only at her last 12 years building Chelsea into her native England’s biggest women’s club and one of the world’s superpowers. You might think Hayes got the U.S. job with help from the three Americans she’s coached in London — Crystal Dunn, Catarina Macario, and Mia Fishel — or because U.S. Soccer Federation sporting director Matt Crocker is a fellow Brit.

No, Hayes got women’s soccer’s most famous job for a reason befitting her son Harry’s Star Wars-themed sixth birthday party over the weekend.

The story of those years in the U.S., what they still mean to her, and how many people here still know the 47-year-old today? It’s true, all of it. And this time, it’s not a movie.

This indeed is the job Hayes dreamed of back when she lived in New York for seven years, coaching boys’ youth teams, a women’s semipro team, and Iona University. And when she was Megan Rapinoe’s first professional coach with the Chicago Red Stars from 2008-10, in the league before the NWSL.

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“You can just imagine me getting off at Newark yesterday and thinking, ‘I remember those days,’” Hayes said at a news conference Thursday that marked the start of her administration.

“Fighting to stay in the country on different visas, [living in] one room, where — am I going to get enough to pay the rent in the upcoming block? — to what am I going to do next,” she recalled. “Trying to navigate through a soccer scene as a young person, whether I was coaching teams in Syosset, Port Washington, or even here, Downtown United [a local youth club] in Manhattan. I spent many a time underneath the Throgs Neck [Bridge].”

The connections remained so strong over the years that a friend Hayes made at youth player camps in Rhode Island, Lisa Cole — herself a future coach with multiple American teams — was in Hayes’ kitchen last fall when the word came she got the U.S. job.

“I have such an appreciation not just of the landscape, but my journey,” Hayes said. “I’ve worked hard to get to this point. And you can dream for something — we all have dreams — but it’s not often your dreams become a reality.”

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Hayes referenced “this whole American dream concept.” For her, it came true.

“That you can come to the country, work in a certain way,” she said, “and as a woman, coming from England — trust you me, I never felt more supported than I did in the U.S.”

Hayes dreamed of it once more last September, when her father Sid was on his deathbed. He was the first person to encourage her to chase her dreams abroad all those years ago. Now, he knew the U.S. job was open, asked if she’d go for it, and she didn’t have an answer.

“I have a 23-minute voice note on my phone, my last conversation with my father, and it was all about 2012,” she said, the year she left the U.S. to take over Chelsea. “And it was all about where I saw the game going. And at the end of it, he went, ‘You know, if you get the chance, girl, you’re going to go — you’ll take it, won’t you?”

He didn’t mean the Chelsea job, he meant the U.S. job. And she knew right then that while the timing didn’t feel right, she had to go for it.

» READ MORE: Why the USWNT's leadership believed Emma Hayes was worth the wait

It had been just a few weeks since Hayes was at the World Cup in Australia and dismissed a question about succeeding Vlatko Andonovski. She was solely focused on Chelsea, and there was a widespread belief that she wouldn’t leave until she’d won the Champions League. Most outsiders didn’t even put her on lists of potential hires at the time because of that.

But it turned out that the old fire was burning again.

“I almost talked to [Sid] like I’d had the job, even though I didn’t, because I wanted him to go with that thought,” Hayes said. “So by the time October rolled around and I interviewed for the job here in New York, I just thought, ‘This is never going to happen again.’”

In fact, the timing felt wrong not for professional reasons, but a personal one: Hayes didn’t want to leave her heartbroken mother behind.

“Even if it’s the wrong time on a personal level, because I’m really loyal and didn’t want to leave my mum and my siblings in a difficult place,” Hayes said, “I could just hear him in my head the whole time: ‘You’ve got to do it. Just make it work.’”

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The time will come to push Hayes on her tactics, her player selections — always the flashpoint for a U.S. manager — and all else that comes with the pressure of the job. And that moment will come soon.

When she opens her first U.S. camp on Monday in suburban Denver, she’ll have just a week of practice and two games in early June before the hardest task any U.S. manager faces: picking the notoriously small 18-player Olympic team (plus four traveling alternates).

Right now, though, is a moment for telling Hayes’ story to those who don’t know it.

“To work my way up through the system, to now be the head coach of the U.S. women’s national team,” she said, “as far as I’m concerned, I will give it everything I’ve got to make sure I uphold the traditions of this team.”

And if, as she works to return the fallen U.S. empire to the top of the sport, the rest of the world starts to hear a familiar tune? Perhaps she’ll invoke another famous phrase from her son’s favorite galaxy:

So be it.