The 10th SheBelieves Cup could hardly have gone better for Emma Hayes and the U.S. women’s national team. Yeah, sure, beating Japan in the de facto final would have been cool — “We want to win,” Hayes says (duh!) — but beside the point. Context is everything, all the time, and now is the season for victories of other sorts.

Hayes is on a mission, with the next Women’s World Cup not quite two and half years away, to build a future. One leading to Brazil 2027, sure, but beyond that, perpetually, one in which the U.S. continues to prosper — a task not so simple — amid the rising powers of Europe, Asia and Latin America and within an increasingly sophisticated landscape.

She’s modernizing the U.S. program, whether by design or impact, at a critical juncture in the international women’s game’s evolution. The challenges presented by Spain and England, longtime rival Brazil and so forth, are many. Tomorrow means more than today. And it’s all about context.

The past week or so has been about something more than the score and is seen internally, regardless of what the national team ultimately reaps from the exercise, as a big step forward in U.S. Soccer’s increasing involvement in developing the talent that’s central to all of it. If not win-win, SheBelieves was lose-win.

“I’m focused on the process, and right now in our journey it’s important that we provide the opportunities to less-experienced players and do it in a tournament setting,” said Hayes, a charismatic, 48-year-old Londoner whose early coaching experiences in the U.S. mesh with English and European sensibilities. “As long as we’re progressing, then that’s what our aims are, and our focus is to stay focused on that and not just solely look at the results column. That’s not our only indicator of success.”

The twin January senior and “futures” camps in Florida and work surrounding the three SheBelieves games — wins over Colombia in Houston and Australia in suburban Phoenix before Wednesday night’s 2-1 loss to Japan at San Diego’s Snapdragon Stadium — kick off a year in which the emphasis is assessing talent, slotting it into its best, most appropriate developmental platforms, and then providing experience as merited against top-flight opposition.

SheBelieves showcased at least two tantalizing prospects — Utah Royals striker Ally Sentnor and 17-year-old Ajax midfield phenom Lily Yohannes — while providing first senior caps to four players and, Sentnor and Yohannes among them, first starts to five. The lessons came fast, and not always pretty, as Japan made certain. That’s a good thing.

“We need to be bold and we need to take the necessary steps, knowing that I might be putting players in situations that might not have the necessary experience just yet,” Hayes said. “Sometimes you might have to go through that hard pain first before we come out the other side.”

‘Doing things ass-backwards’

Hayes was hired in November 2023, watched from afar while completing her final season as Chelsea manager, then arrived last May for the lead-up to gold at the Paris Olympics. Starting at the top is nice. The real work began immediately afterward.

“I always refer to it as doing things ass-backwards,” said Hayes, a former Arsenal midfielder (yet a Tottenham fan) who won seven league titles and 14 major domestic trophies in a dozen years at Chelsea. “You know, we have 75 days together and then we had an Olympics, and then I had to do the job of developing a strategy and building a playing pool beyond sort of a select group of players.”

Hayes possessed a strong “select group” to start: 14 Olympians played in SheBelieves; five of the most essential were missing through injury. She’s had plenty to sift through: rising talents uncovered during preparation for Paris, known quantities within the youth teams, emerging standouts in the National Women’s Soccer League and abroad. She estimates she’s been “exposed to somewhere upward of 60-70 players,” what she calls “a fair look on every player within the ecosystem that I think is immediately eligible for the WNT.”

She was struck by what she saw.

“There’s a clear realization that there’s a lot of players that are underdeveloped at the senior international level,” she said before the tournament began. “Either the programming hasn’t been there at the under-23 level, so there’s been some missing years, or a lot of those players might not have had the level of exposures or experiences that previous generations had or counterparts from other nations [have].

“We might have many players that [are] top prospects but not getting a lot of minutes in NWSL. We’ve really, really got to close those gaps in the next 12 months. And that gap-closing will be done in a combination of ways. Some we dripped-fed into the senior national team. But I want to be really clear that anyone playing for the seniors, you’ve got to be performing consistently at the highest level.”