Soccer fever has taken hold across the United States during a home World Cup, but the women’s game has been huge in America for years.
USWNT head coach Emma Hayes is one of the most decorated coaches in the sport. The England native won seven Super League titles in 12 years with the Chelsea women’s team — incuding five in a row from 2020 to 2024 — before taking the national team job across the pond.
She was asked why women’s soccer holds more cultural weight than the men’s version in the US, and her answer was two-fold.
Hayes credited a run of major trophies in the 1990s, and a federal statute most English fans have never heard of.
Morocco get the better of ANOTHER European nation in a tense penalty shootout 😲At what point do we stop calling Morocco dark horses?
They are currently sixth in the FIFA rankings
Emma Hayes points to USWNT history and Title IX
The US team has been at the forefront of women’s soccer for over 30 years. They lifted the inaugural World Cup in 1991, took Olympic gold in 1996, and won again on home soil at the 1999 World Cup.
That history is exactly where Hayes locates the difference.
Speaking on The Rest Is Football, she traced the shift to those early triumphs: “For the women’s team, in the early ’90s, ’96, ’99, winning major Olympics and World Cups — I think it changed the trajectory.”
She did not stop at silverware. Hayes pointed to a single piece of legislation that reshaped the playing field.
She said: “It’s not just that. This is a country that has something called Title IX, so you get equal opportunity — and in college sports, you have to provide equal access.
“Because it’s in the culture and in the consciousness, nobody even thinks about it the way we would in England.”
Title IX opened doors that simply did not exist elsewhere beforehand, feeding a college pipeline that has supplied the national team for decades.
There is another factor she didn’t mention, though. In the US, many of the best young male athletes are funneled toward American football, basketball, and baseball long before soccer gets a serious look.
The men’s team has never had the same uncontested claim on the country’s talent — a point Rob Gronkowski made bluntly earlier this year.
For now, the scales are at least starting to even. Mauricio Pochettino’s side topped their group and face Bosnia and Herzegovina in the round of 32, and a deep run would pull even more new fans toward the sport.
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