The word coming out of Chelsea this summer has been “intensity”. As the Women’s Super League champions adjust to life without Emma Hayes, everyone wants to impress the new coach.
Hayes left at the end of last season, ending her 12-year reign with seven league titles and seven other domestic trophies. Her instant gold-medal success with the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) at the Olympic Games in Paris was a reminder of her talent.
Sonia Bompastor is the woman hired to fill Hayes’ shoes — the David Moyes to Hayes’ Sir Alex Ferguson. Relatively new to management, this will be Bompastor’s fourth full season as a senior coach but she did win the Champions League in her first season at Lyon in 2021-22. She also won the French league in all three seasons she spent at the club.
This pre-season has been about putting her stamp on this Chelsea team. There have been five new signings, most notably Lucy Bronze joining from Barcelona, along with eight exits. Young players have been particularly prioritised with an average signing age of 22.6, making 32-year-old Bronze an anomaly.
The Athletic spent time with Chelsea on their U.S. tour, met Bompastor and watched them hammer Feyenoord 9-0 in their other public pre-season game.
This is how she is reshaping Chelsea.
“I’m not really that different from Emma,” Bompastor said at the WSL media day earlier this month.
“Maybe I have a different vision, a different philosophy, but when you coach at a big club like Lyon or Chelsea, your management has to be the same. The expectations you have from your players, the expectations the players have from you, that’s the same.”
The implication coming out of Chelsea is that over the years, the expectations had diminished.
“For the players who were under Emma for a few seasons, (the change) is good because when you stay for a long time with someone, you get into your comfort zone. That’s natural and human.
“If you have the same boss for many years, at one point you will feel, ‘Yeah, I’ve been doing the same thing for such a long time’. When you get someone new, you do more. You want to surprise the manager or boss. You want to do something special.
“That’s the same for me and the players who were under Emma. That’s normal and natural.”
Midfielder Erin Cuthbert concurs with Bompastor’s assessment. The Scotland international captained Chelsea for large portions of last season but said even back in March that “a fresh pair of eyes might be a good thing”.
Speaking to club media during pre-season, the 26-year-old said: “As a player, to take yourself to the next level, you need something different, a new challenge.
“It came at a perfect time for many of us — and for Sonia. It’s exciting because your comfort zone is being challenged. It’s the challenge of having to be at your best every day.”
Bompastor has a reputation for intensity that stretches back to her playing days.
The 44-year-old made 156 appearances for France during a career in which she played in France and America — playing under assistant manager Hayes at the Washington Freedom. The former midfielder, who could also play in defence, won eight league titles at Montpellier and Lyon as well as the Champions League twice with Lyon.
“The first thing I knew about Sonia was when people were telling me stories about her being a player,” Bronze said at the WSL media day in Birmingham.
Bronze was at Lyon when Bompastor was head of the academy and played with Bompastor’s assistant Camille Abily. In three years, she won the league and Champions League in every season, a feat she repeated in her two years at Barcelona. This will be Bronze’s first time back playing in England since she left Manchester City in 2022.
“Her team-mates were telling me she was the scariest player to play with. Her standards are so high, and not only for herself, but for others.
“I did a pass the other day and it went to the player but (Bompastor) held onto it. Ten minutes later, she said, ‘You could have done that pass better’, and I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re not wrong’.
“She’s lived that as a player so she knows what people are capable of.”
“I was a really hard player,” Bompastor said at the media day. “I was never giving up, no matter what the game was. I was always fighting very hard and leading by example. I’m the same as a manager.”
A pre-season trip to the United States was the first opportunity for Chelsea fans to get an idea of how Bompastor wants the team to play, but the tour was about more than just football.
For the first time, there was a commercial focus to the trip. The team visited the New York Stock Exchange where they rang the opening bell, as well as going to a New York Liberty game. The WNBA side are one of the best-established brands in women’s sport, and American tennis star Frances Tiafoe was also in attendance. The club presented him with a shirt.
There has also been a need for staff and players to get to know each other. Five of Hayes’ backroom team left with her to go to the U.S. with Bompastor bringing over two of her assistants from Lyon, Abily and Theo Rivrin. Chelsea recruited internally for a new goalkeeping coach, promoting Seb Brown, who had previously assisted the outgoing Stuart Searle, while Jack Stephens joined from the Ireland women’s team as an analyst.
“If one of (Abily or Rivrin) wasn’t coming (to Chelsea), I wouldn’t have come,” says Bompastor. “We have so much chemistry on and off the pitch. The three of us have the same values, we understand the game the same way, but they are also able to tell me the truth.
“If I’m doing something wrong, they won’t be like, ‘Oh Sonia, we need to talk to you’. They will tell me in a direct and honest way: ‘You’re wrong’.”
From a footballing perspective, the tour was a success, with a 3-1 win over Gotham and 1-0 win over Arsenal. In terms of style, Chelsea pressed hard in both matches, a key difference between the former regime and the new one. Passes per defensive action (PPDA) is the average number of passes a team allows the opposition make before trying to win the ball back with a tackle, interception or clearance. A lower number suggests a more intense press. Under Hayes last season, Chelsea’s PPDA in the WSL was 10.6, ranking them fourth, whereas Lyon’s under Bompastor was 6.9.
“We want to be a dominant team,” says Bompastor. “When we don’t have the ball, I want all the players to make sure we recover the ball as fast as we can.
“Then, when we have the ball, we like to have possession to control the game.”
Bronze has identified possession as a key difference from how Chelsea played under Hayes.
“Sonia is adding her ways to the things that Emma instilled in the team,” Bronze said at the media day. “We still have that attacking fast speed of play but there’s a little bit more ball possession. Chelsea have been known for bullying teams until the very end. Now we’ve got that and we can try and control games as well.”
Kadeisha Buchanan, who won a Champions League under Bompastor at Lyon, agrees. The Canada defender, who was signed by Hayes in 2022, told club media: “(Bompastor is) all about possession and it’s fun to be playing a good style of football, but she is not only about playing a good style. She wants us to be clinical in attack and score lots of goals. We’re not just looking to play pretty, we want to be clinical in the final third.”
That was on show in Chelsea’s only public pre-season game on home soil as they beat Feyenoord 9-0 at Kingsmeadow. Despite making nine substitutions, Bompastor had her first experience at Chelsea of having to keep her squad happy. With 25 players, it will be something Bompastor has to negotiate all season.
“You never keep everyone happy,” she says. “When you are a competitive person and player, you won’t be happy if you are not starting.
“I talked to one player who asked, ‘Can I understand why I didn’t start the game against Feyenoord?’ I said, ‘Not starting the game against Feyenoord doesn’t mean you are not a good player.’ When you are the manager, you need to make choices. When I pick players, I try to find the best players for that game. It doesn’t mean for the next game it will be the same ones.
“The most difficult thing is for the players to stay mentally strong. With all the games we have to play this season, everyone will have a role to play.”
Chelsea begin their title defence at home to Aston Villa, who have their own new manager in Dutch coach Robert de Pauw, before visiting newly promoted Crystal Palace.
“We’ve talked with the staff about teaching them a new way to put high pressure on if we play against a team with a back three, but is it the time for us to work on that? And we said, ‘No, we don’t think so because we need to make sure the base is strong enough before we move on to something new.’
“The difficulty in this job is you have no time. Your job is about having the performance, getting the results. If not, you are fired. This is the way it works.”
Bompastor said at her first press conference at Stamford Bridge that she did not feel “any pressure” from the ownership in terms of getting immediate results.
“I’ve signed for four years. It is a good amount of time to put in my own philosophy and vision. It’s on me. I am crossing my fingers that we will be successful together.”
(Top photo: Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images)
