The buildup to England women’s friendly against the USA on Saturday has lived up to its title. Whatever animosity there was between the teams in the past, the current managers have packed their media appearances with mutual compliments, and radiated enough warmth to defrost the Wembley pitch. Emma Hayes, who swapped Chelsea for the USA a year ago, is looking forward to a hug from Sarina Wiegman. The Dutchwoman, in turn, was thrilled for Hayes’s instant gold in Paris this summer, only 72 days after she began training the side.
If the Netherlands, Wiegman’s previous team, hadn’t scuppered Team GB’s Olympic qualification, the first meeting between Wiegman and Hayes might not have been quite this friendly. But the first time that the English game’s two most successful female football coaches met on the pitch was always going to be a fascinating prospect, whenever it happened.
Their only previous clashes have been over player availability, during the years they shared custody of some of the same star names – Millie Bright, Lucy Bronze, Lauren James. Chelsea were one of the clubs who got angriest at Wiegman’s demand to release them a full month before last year’s World Cup. That must have been an interesting tussle, given that both women have a reputation for being “direct”. And yet their personalities don’t appear, at first sight, particularly similar. You can’t imagine Wiegman going off script to deliver an on-camera takedown of Joey Barton’s misogyny. It’s just as hard to picture Hayes turning up on the sidelines in an M&S suit and oversize glasses.
So how similar are the two? This summer Hayes published A Completely Different Game: My Leadership Playbook. Wiegman’s own book, What It Takes, is subtitled “My Playbook on Life and Leadership”. The two tomes reflect their subjects: Wiegman’s, for instance, delivers the story of her career in a manner as understated as her press conferences. Take her almost parodically matter-of-fact description of the moment England win the Euros: “I cheered and what followed was a group hug.”
If Wiegman has a hinterland, you won’t find it in these pages. Hayes’s book, on the other hand, is as revealing as it is forthright. She’s a woman with myriad interests, from the writing of Hunter S Thompson to the documentaries of David Attenborough. She gives her players copies of Hermann Hesse’s classic German novel Siddhartha, and presents them with purple gladioli, explaining how Roman gladiators wore them round their necks to protect them from death.
Wiegman has often spoken of how, even when she was at primary school, she wanted to be a PE teacher. Hayes? She wanted to be a spy, and got as far as applying to MI5 at college. She’s still obsessed with espionage today – “I’m fascinated by what it takes to persuade someone to turn against their state and conspire against everything they have ever known or believed in,” she writes. Who knows, perhaps she even allowed herself a grudging nod of admiration for Canada’s Olympic drone operation.
What the two women have in common, however, is more significant than their differences. The US played a big significant role in both of their careers. Both travelled there when it offered opportunities they couldn’t find at home – playing, for Wiegman, coaching, for Hayes – and both found themselves in life-changing conversations with the same man, Anson Dorrance, the former lawyer turned head coach of the UNC Tar Heels, who added a World Cup to his 22 national titles when he coached the US women in 1991.
In each case, that encounter was an inflexion point. “He argues that too many people work within their own comfort zone,” says Hayes, before adding: “I have never had a weekend off in my working life.” As their roles (not to mention their sport) grew, Wiegman and Hayes had to transition from pitchside trainers to chief executives, making their organisational and strategic skills every bit as valuable as their tactical ones.
They also lead from the same fundamental principle – know your people. It’s because of this, rather than in spite of it, that they can employ the directness they’re famed for. When dealing with a female dressing room, says Hayes, she would rather provoke conflict than allow passive-aggressive undertones to take hold. Similarly Wiegman, on first arriving in England, had to learn – then confront – the coded ways of English “politeness”.
Intriguingly, both turned to a similar methodology to break through some of those layers of conditioning, to create more honest communication and build resilience within their teams. Staging intra-squad games, they skewed the refereeing so that all the decisions went against the starting XI players. “The players were so preoccupied with a sense of injustice that they lost focus on their individual tasks,” said Wiegman. It was the very lesson she had determined to teach them.
Examples like that are part of what Hayes terms the emotional intelligence revolution in football, of which managers such as Jürgen Klopp and Mikel Arteta have been clear proponents. “If I have a strength,” says Hayes, “it is in recognising and repurposing weakness.” Wiegman’s well-documented empathy combines with her candour to bring a similar touch of Brené Brown-ification to the game, about embracing vulnerability.
In an industry where young talent is less responsive to old-school authority, and conditioned by the social media bubble, such intelligence becomes more vital than ever. “People seem to find it harder to take instructions nowadays,” notes Hayes. “Instead [they] retreat online, where outlets promote the seductive myth that they know it all.”
Whatever tactical battles they bring to Wembley, their shared understanding of the modern female player will probably be their longest lasting legacies in the game. And if they make the game a little friendlier along the way – is that such a bad thing?
