Emma Hayes won't let her USWNT coaching dream turn into a nightmare

For Emma Hayes, the chance to coach the U.S. women's soccer team is a dream come true.

It's the biggest job in the sport, one her father, Sid, pushed her to pursue for more than a decade — and one she finally landed two months after his death.

"I'm doing the job I love," she said last week. "I get to enjoy these amazing players."

Yet dreams, as Hayes also knows, can sometimes turn into nightmares. So she's under no illusion that reviving a national team that has fallen to its lowest point in decades will be easy.

"There's lots of work to do," she said after Saturday's 4-0 win over South Korea in her first game with her new team. "There's lots of holes in our play."

With precious little time to repair them. Hayes has less than four weeks to settle on an 18-player roster for next month's Paris Olympics, where the U.S. will face what looks to be the deepest field in women's soccer history, one that includes seven of the world's top 10 teams, including Canada, the defending Olympic champion, and Spain, the reigning world champion.

After winning its fourth World Cup in 2019, the U.S. stumbled to a bronze medal in the Tokyo Olympics, then exited last summer's World Cup in the round of 16, its earliest departure from a major international tournament.

Yet it wasn't just the results that raised eyebrows. In the last Olympics, the U.S. was tactically inept. At the World Cup, the Americans looked overmatched and underwhelmed, failing to score in their last 238 minutes and failing to reach the semifinals for the first time. As a result, the U.S., No. 1 in the world the last eight years, dropped to fourth in the latest FIFA rankings.

"The realities are the world game is where it is and the rest of the world do not fear the USA in the way that they once did," the London-born Hayes said. "And that's valid. There are different world champions, there are different Olympic champions. So it's our job to grasp quite quickly what we need to do to get close again to those levels."

Since Hayes is a coach and not a miracle worker, that will necessarily take time.

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