Like Jurgen Klopp, Emma Hayes’ final season has fallen flat – but it is not her fault

As Liverpool’s women jubilantly celebrated their barnstorming 4-3 victory over Chelsea on Wednesday night and a dejected Emma Hayes conceded – perhaps a little prematurely – the Women’s Super League title to Manchester City, it was easy to draw parallels with Hayes’ sadness and the disappointing end to the season that the Merseyside club’s men’s manager Jurgen Klopp is simultaneously experiencing.

Many people are asking whether there is correlation between both teams looking set to miss out on the WSL and Premier League trophies respectively given that both managers’ summer departures were announced months in advance, and whether these two cases are a repeat of the blip that followed Sir Alex Ferguson’s initial ‘retirement’ announcement in 2001-02.

But that comparison is lazy, and I don’t buy the argument that Chelsea are losing games because her players know Hayes is ending her 12-year reign as manager later in May.

For starters, these two great modern managers’ circumstances are quite different, and I don’t simply mean because Klopp is already well accustomed to narrowly missing out on titles while Hayes, who has won four league titles in a row, is not the reasons for their respective teams’ recent disappointing results are multifaceted.

Let’s firstly distinguish between the two contrasting exit scenarios. Klopp, on his own terms, had the freedom to choose the timing of his announcement that he was leaving Liverpool, doing so because he said, understandably, that he had run out of energy. Whether or not he could have announced news later in the season is a perfectly valid conversation.

Hayes, on the other hand, is leaving because she was offered another job, a bigger job, and therefore the announcement could not hypothetically have been held until May. US Soccer were hardly ever likely to wait six months to announce their next head coach.

Hayes’ personal choice last autumn, at a time when she was mourning the death of her father, was to decide between moving across the Atlantic immediately, which she feared would leave her Chelsea colleagues in the lurch at short-notice, or to wait until the end of the season and allow, what she hoped, would be a positive handover. Taking the latter path has given Chelsea ample time to recruit for Hayes’ replacement.

Then there’s another key difference: Chelsea’s WSL rivals have had the luxury of focusing on the league this season – Manchester City did not qualify for Europe at all, while Arsenal and Manchester United failed to reached the Women’s Champions League group stages – so Hayes’ team are the only side in the WSL who have been juggling the rigours of European football, and therefore Chelsea should never have been expected to simply stroll to the WSL title.

They were declared favourites at the start of the season but the truth is, Arsenal and Manchester City should have expected to finish above Chelsea this season in a year when the league was their primary target. Chelsea, perhaps victims of their own success, have had a target on their back, and other teams are catching up at last.

Where there are undeniably similarities between Klopp and Hayes’ situations, though, is around recent results, which are certainly disappointing to say the least. Both were, merely a matter of weeks ago, in contention for quadruples, but Klopp’s League Cup might now be the only silverware the pair of them see this term. In both team’s instances, though, it’s surely better to have fallen in the final furlongs than to have never been in the race at all.

Chelsea reached the League Cup final, the FA Cup semi-finals, the Champions League semi-finals, and sit second in the WSL behind Manchester City. By the high standards they have set, it’s a below-par season, but in the real world, it’s still a campaign that most teams can only dream of, and that’s before we even factor in the fine margins of their losses in the three cups; an extra time loss to Arsenal, losing 2-1 away to Manchester United and succumbing to defending champions Barcelona with only 10 players on the pitch.

That said, it’s also true that Chelsea haven’t performed at their best, and their defending in Wednesday’s 4-3 loss at Prenton Park was dreadful. Her team look mentally fatigued – perhaps entirely understandably, after the brutally-thorough examination that comes with going toe-to-toe with Barcelona for 180 minutes. They’ve had plenty of injuries too – Sam Kerr, Millie Bright, and now Lauren James, to name but a few – although in fairness that applies to plenty of other teams too and their squad would not want to make excuses. They underwhelmed in the League Cup final, too.

And then there are some of the strange things Hayes has said recently, which have rightly been scrutinised, whether it was her controversial comments about “male aggression” after the League Cup final, her criticism of player-player relationships – which she later acknowledged she should not have said – or bizarrely reading a Robert Frost poem in a press conference. Plus, there was the unusually defeatist nature with which she appeared to concede the title in her post-match press huddle on Wednesday night. These incidents have not reflected brilliantly on the 47-year-old.

But, as weird as some of those media incidents have been, Hayes deserves to be judged on the past 12 years rather than on the past 12 weeks.

Hayes has said some odd things that she will probably regret. But English football would do well to remember what she has done for this sport, how far she has helped to propel the women’s game, and what a debt the WSL owes to its most pioneering coach. She may not necessarily be going out in a blaze of glory, but her legacy will continue to burn bright.