Chelsea manager Emma Hayes has ignited a discussion about player-player relationships in the women’s game amid the sport’s wider reckoning with player-coach relationships.

“Player-coach relationships are inappropriate. Player-to-player relationships are inappropriate” the future USWNT head coach said at a press conference on Thursday.

“It’s about the challenges it poses. One player’s in the team, one’s not in the team. One might be in the last year of their contract, one might not be. One might be competing in a position with someone else. You don’t need me to spell that out. It presents challenges.

“Longer-term, in an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to deal with that. It is quite challenging for coaching teams to have to deal with it.”

Following Chelsea’s 3-1 victory over Arsenal on Friday, Hayes expressed regret over her comments. “I let myself down,” she said. “I didn’t think it was right for me to use the term ‘inappropriate’ for the players.

“I don’t take those things back but I have zero criticism of any player in my dressing room for anything — their professionalism, for what they’ve given to the club — regardless of their status, regardless of who they’re in a relationship with.”

Hayes was hit with social media criticism for mentioning player-player relationships in the same breath as player-manager relationships. Leicester City are investigating manager Willie Kirk over an allegation of a relationship with one of his players, and Sheffield United dismissed manager Jonathan Morgan over a three-year relationship with a teenage player at a previous club.

Chelsea defender Jess Carter, who is in a relationship with team-mate Ann Katrin-Berger, liked several posts on X criticising Hayes’ comments.

Here, Kate Richardson-Walsh, the former Team GB field hockey captain who made history in 2016 when she and her wife Helen became the first same-sex married couple to win an Olympic gold medal together, shares her view.

We live in a society dominated by clickbait. I’ve seen the clips from Emma Hayes’ press conference and what fans have said on social media. I welcome Hayes revisiting her comments, but this has raised some really interesting points that we should talk about. Instead of shooting people down, we should try to open the door: what does women’s football want to be? I want this conversation to be about more than criticising Hayes specifically or focusing on particular players within the game.

My wife Helen and I played together in the international setup long before we started our relationship. We were friends and then fell in love.

I don’t disagree that relationships between team-mates can raise challenges. They absolutely can. But that doesn’t mean that we should stop people from falling in love within a team, or that we should avoid those relationships. Trying to avoid all challenges in any team is impossible. You’ve got so many clashes because of different political viewpoints, sexualities, perspectives.

The job of a head coach or a manager is to make sure that everybody feels like they belong, that everybody has a role, and that everyone feels that they have value and worth.

Helen, centre, and Kate, right, won Olympic gold in Rio in 2016 (Alex Morton/Getty Images)

To our coach’s (Danny Kerry) credit, he opened up a conversation with Helen and me right at the beginning. Initially, it was really uncomfortable. In the honeymoon period of a relationship, who wants to be having that conversation with their manager or leader? It’s awkward — but looking back, it was really brave of him. It was powerful because he put it on the table: “I’m a bit nervous and I foresee potential challenges here. This is what I’m feeling. How do you see it? Let’s have a conversation about it.”

It wasn’t dismissive: “This is going to be a nightmare! It’s going to be chaos if you break up or have a row in training!” We talked about it and I was clear from the beginning that we wanted to be professional and be as we had always been: Kate and Helen, two separate people, often with really opposing views, who don’t suddenly become one brain now we’re in a couple.

We acknowledged that we had to be mindful of how we were at hockey, and how people might view us differently if we spent all our time together and removed ourselves from the team. That would have been challenging given we were two big characters and among the most experienced players in the team.

We had a conversation with the whole team, thankfully in an environment where we could have some pretty hard conversations with each other. Some players felt like it could be really hard and I’m proud that we were able to hear that from them. We could understand what some of their fears were and make sure that we could ease some of those fears. We could put things in place to make sure our relationship wasn’t problematic.

Because we talked about it and it was out in the open, everybody knew. Helen and I could then just be.

In training, if Helen skinned me and put me on my backside, we could all laugh about that. We weren’t just two ordinary players — it was funnier because we were two players in a long-term relationship.

The biggest thing here is about culture. It’s about creating environments where people feel like they can be exactly who they are and bring all of themselves with them.

I’m not sure we’re fully there still. The reaction to Hayes’ comments confirmed that social media is like a bin fire: the discussion very quickly turned very homophobic. It takes us back a long way. You feel like we’ve been already through this with women’s sport — then you realise we haven’t moved on at all.

Maybe that’s the talking point. Let’s talk about same-sex relationships. Let’s talk about some of the negative stereotypes and tropes that are raised in a sporting environment and unpick some of those. Comments like this can send people underground again. They can make sexuality an off-the-table conversation. It makes it secret, and it makes sexuality everything that we feel about secrets. They’re sordid. They’re wrong. It’s inappropriate. How can you create a sense of belonging in any team if a person is feeling like they can’t be their whole self?

Hayes’ initial comments did not go down well with Carter on social media (Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)

I’ve seen comments about how managers won’t sign a couple. Fine — but what happens if two of your players become a couple after you sign them? What are you going to do? It happens, and it’s about each and every situation: the context, the people and the team you’re talking about. It’s dealing with each of those situations and people as individual scenarios, rather than silencing them and driving them out of sport completely. That’s too simplistic and never going to happen. All you’re going to do is send these relationships underground. Then your team culture will suffer.

It’s irked me that all this has come from a much more important conversation about relationships between coaches and players at the top of the game. That’s not something we can rush. We need to talk about that. There needs to be rigorous safeguarding and a code of conduct at every level.

Player-coach relationships involve a power dynamic because all sporting decisions impact people. Even if there’s no money or contracts involved, the coach still has power over the player. That might just be team selection, but it is still power. The player is dreaming about making that team and winning. If someone is in control of that, that’s enough power regardless of everything else.

The #MeToo movement in Hollywood was about producers and directors deciding what they can make other people do. Unequal relationships might not be like that every time, but we have to acknowledge that the worst-case scenario could happen. There are often intersectional elements — the role of the patriarchy in male-dominated sports, for example — that warrant further discussion.

What’s the impact of a player-coach relationship on a team? What is the impact on that player in that relationship? Is she hearing things and having conversations that will challenge her relationship with the rest of her team-mates? Will the coach treat her differently?

It all comes back to the same thing: what are we doing — as fans, managers, sponsors — to create an environment where people are fully accepted for who they are? Those are the foundations of women’s sport. We must hold them dear.

The more professional women’s football gets, the more it starts to mirror the men’s game. We tend to mimic the men’s models of what professional sport looks like and what is and isn’t OK in those environments. That’s a shame, because women’s football is unique. It should stay true to what it wants to be — rather than what the rest of society wants it or stereotypes it to be.

(Top image: Helen, left, and Kate Richardson-Walsh. Photo: David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images)