Six in a row: How Sonia Bompastor ensured Chelsea avoided an Emma Hayes hangover and dominated the Women's Super League once again

Perhaps one of the most important traits Chelsea had to find in Hayes’ successor was an ability to deal with being Hayes’ successor. Bompastor ticked that box emphatically.

“I don’t really think about it,” she said at the start of the season. “I know Emma. She was my assistant coach [at Washington Freedom] when I was a player. We had a really good relationship. She’s been supportive with me. I know she will stay a Chelsea fan forever. But it’s now my time and I am just thinking about the present and future, not about the past.”

It wasn’t a surprise that Bompastor had that attitude, though. After all, this is someone who has dealt with pressure moments as a player and a manager, winning the Champions League in both roles. Coming from Lyon, the dominant force in France, she was well-accustomed to the expectations that she’d also experience at Chelsea in terms of the demand of winning trophies.

“The ambitions are the same,” she said, asked about the two jobs. “I don’t like to compare but Chelsea is one of the most famous clubs in Europe, as Lyon was. There is a responsibility and pressure on the result, as it was from my last experience.”

Responsibility and pressure are some of the cons of taking a job like that at Chelsea – but there are overwhelming pros, too. One of the most notable is that when Hayes left, she ensured that there was a fantastic foundation in place for her successor, and Bompastor has been able to reap the rewards of that.

In the words of Lucy Bronze, that relates to “the intensity of training” and “the winning mentality that Chelsea has”, which has not changed just because the manager has. It also relates to the world-class squad still in the building.

Many of the stand-out pieces from this title triumph are from the Hayes era. Millie Bright, Erin Cuthbert, Hannah Hampton and Lauren James are among those signed as rising young stars by Hayes and developed into seasoned match-winners, while the likes of Nathalie Bjorn and Mayra Ramirez are more recent additions who have sprinkled a little extra stardust on the squad. Then there are the extra pieces Bompastor has added already, like Bronze, whose consistency at right-back this season has been wonderfully admirable, and Sandy Baltimore, who has adapted to a new left-back role in outstanding fashion.

In the words of young forward Aggie Beever-Jones: “Emma's legacy she left behind was incredible and I think it almost made the switch to Sonia a little bit easier. We have such a great calibre of players and I think Sonia has added her own little bit of unique flair to the squad.”

The depth all those players provide, too, is vital. “This league is really, really competitive and I think if you don’t have depth in your squad, it’s almost impossible to achieve your goals,” Bompastor said recently. “Because, as you can see, the players are playing a lot of games with the national team, with the club, and this level of intensity is really high. I think even when you have the opportunity to bring fresh legs into these big games, it can make a big impact. For me, it’s really important.”

Chelsea have not been without fitness issues this season. Sam Kerr, Mia Fishel, Sophie Ingle and Kadeisha Buchanan have all missed either the entire campaign or most of it due to ACL injuries, while Naomi Girma, Niamh Charles, Maelys Mpome, Guro Reiten, Cuthbert, James and Baltimore have all had significant periods on the sidelines.

But the club’s continued investment, through the Hayes era and into Bompastor’s tenure, means the team has been able to absorb the impact of these absentees well. That quality of squad-building should not be overlooked, and it is something the new manager is already starting to contribute to.

Perhaps one of Bompastor’s most underrated qualities during the campaign, though, has been her continuation of the development of young overseas players which became a real focus for Chelsea in the latter stages of Hayes’ tenure.

The club has long been good at identifying rising talents and helping them progress into world-beaters. Bright, signed from Doncaster Rovers Belles as a 21-year-old, is a great example, as is someone like Fran Kirby, who moved on to Brighton last summer but is one of Chelsea’s greatest-ever players. The Blues have had some success in doing this with foreign talents, too, with Ji So-yun case in point.

However, now the club is trying to get even further ahead of the game, securing the signatures of teenage prospects from overseas with the aim of developing them into bonafide first-team stars. Maika Hamano was the first big success story of this method. Signed from Cerezo Osaka Sakai during the 2023-24 season, she spent time on loan in Sweden before returning to make some big contributions to Hayes’ final WSL triumph.

Under Bompastor, that progress has continued, with the Japan international a regular starter this term. Wieke Kaptein, in her first season at Chelsea after spending time on loan with previous club Twente in the last campaign, is following that same path. These are young players that Bompastor has consistently trusted to deliver in big moments – and they have done exactly that.

Previously the academy manager at Lyon, it’s no surprise she fits in nicely with the club vision, with homegrown talent Beever-Jones full of praise for Bompastor’s contributions to her continued development, too. But that doesn’t mean it should be overlooked, as her faith in these talents has seen them contribute some top performances in the run to this title.

However, amid all the analysis of the bigger picture, there is also the simple fact that Bompastor is a great manager. That has been evident throughout a campaign in which Chelsea have yet to lose a WSL game. She is proactive with her substitutions, giving the talent on her bench plenty of time to impact a match that might not be going the way she wants it, and she rotates her team well to keep players as fresh as possible while they’re competing on four fronts.

She isn’t short-sighted, either. When Chelsea surprisingly threw away a 2-0 lead at West Ham back in March to draw 2-2, it came after Bompastor had opted to take Bright and Cuthbert off at half-time, giving them a bit of a rest at the end of a very congested run of fixtures. But as she explained after, she still didn’t have “any regrets” about doing so, even given the result.

“My job is to make sure we just try to win every game, but in the back of my mind, also after this really intense block, I tried to protect some players because it's important also to think about their health,” Bompastor said. “If you look at Millie, she played every single minute in every single game in this block. I think probably today was also a danger for her to stay on the pitch. She was just exhausted. I just felt it was the right thing to protect a little bit my players because we still have a lot of games to be played until the end of the season.”

That approach has helped contribute to yet another WSL triumph for Chelsea, their sixth in succession. It also kept them going across four fronts until late April, when they exited the Champions League at the semi-final stage. The wait for that much-craved European triumph will go on, but March’s League Cup win immediately made this Chelsea season a better one than the last – and the upcoming FA Cup final against Manchester United could see it become just the second treble-winning campaign in the history of this incredibly successful women’s team.

Bompastor was right, then. She couldn’t go further up the WSL table, but she could improve in other areas, and she has by collecting two trophies already, with another potentially on the horizon. She’s led her team to the earliest WSL triumph in history, could end the season undefeated and there are plenty of other records in reach as well, including most points and most wins.

That’s not a bad way to deal with the pressure that comes with succeeding Hayes and managing a club with the prestige and history of Chelsea.