The U.S. womens national team capped a triumphant, resurgent 2024 with a 2-1 win over the Netherlands on Tuesday.
They completed an unbeaten first half-year under head coach Emma Hayes, even without their prolific front three of Sophia Smith, Trinity Rodman and Mallory Swanson.
On a bitterly cold night in The Hague, at the end of a long, wearying season, with stars resting, they took the field for a friendly full of built-in caveats and excuses and refused to use them. Instead, they came back from a goal down to beat the Dutch, and solidify themselves back atop womens soccer.
Their performance, though, was also a timely reminder that their 2024 Olympic gold medals didnt cure all of their collective ills.
They were outshot 23-5. They were outplayed and at times overwhelmed by Dutch passing and positional play. They looked like a team that must improve and innovate to remain at the top and their coach seems to get this.
The Olympics, Hayes said in October, form a great basis, and a great foundation for us. But its not a future-predictor for success.
Hayes arrived in late May, as the highest-paid coach in womens soccer history, and almost instantly revived the USWNT. She restored self-belief. She instilled mental fortitude and grit. She helped players rediscover joy.
The poise, the calmness, the confidence that we have had and still have is directly related to how our manager is, U.S. captain Lindsey Horan said last week.
All of that shone through at the Paris Olympics. It propelled the Americans to six straight wins and gold. But it didnt completely erase the reasons that the USWNT had floundered at a World Cup just 12 months earlier. Smith, Swanson and Rodman, the dynamic Triple Espresso, papered over technical and tactical deficiencies that were evident throughout the knockout rounds and again, even more so, on Tuesday in the Netherlands.
And Hayes understands this.
She has spent the past few months reviewing the Olympics, then developing a comprehensive strategy for the 2027 World Cup/2028 Olympic cycle.
She has surely devoured film, and analyzed data. Shes hopped from Zoom to Zoom, discussing her takeaways with staff at all levels of U.S. Soccer. In January, at a conference alongside a first-of-its-kind Futures Camp for young players, shell present her plan for the next three years and beyond, so that we can embark on the next steps of our journey, she said.
In October, speaking to reporters, she previewed her plan.
Tactically, Hayes said, we will evolve.
The evolution, of course, will be multi-faceted. The plan must be multi-pronged. Hayes broader, federation-wide vision is to build a strategy that’s centered around a female lens, off the field and on it. Last week, she also hinted at dipping her powerful hands into the even-wider American soccer ecosystem. It is thriving, she said, at the grassroots, college and pro levels; but it is fractured and faulty. Unifying that under a women’s football development strategy is probably the one thing that’s absent, Hayes said
That, it seems, is her long-term goal. In the short term, shell focus on a coherent strategy that’s achievable for us, starting with what we do at the national team level.
She will, presumably, try to align the USWNTs needs with the way teens are coached and taught by youth national teams.
She will call new waves of players into her senior team, in an effort to broaden the player pool.
She began doing that this fall. On Saturday, she trotted out unproven players in front of 78,000 fans at Wembley Stadium in London; they earned a 0-0 draw. Three days later, one of the newcomers, Yazmeen Ryan, supplied Gotham FC teammate Lynn Williams with the USWNTs winner.
Hayes surely knows, though, that they have a long way to go.
If not for a fluky own goal and six colossal saves from retiring goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher, their World Cup savior, they would have lost Tuesday to the Netherlands.
They have been revived, but they have not yet been transformed. That is Hayes next task at the helm of the USWNT.