Appropriate or not, player relationship stories in sport are popular crossover content

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Emma Hayes is the coach of the Chelsea women’s soccer team, one of the four or five best pro sides in the world. When Chelsea’s season ends in two months, she’ll be the new coach of the U.S. women’s national team.

That’s made Hayes the new queen of the hill in women’s soccer, which in turn has brought out her philosophical side. Always dangerous.

The other day Hayes was asked about the case of a colleague who’s been suspended for dating one of his players.

“Player-coach relationships, they’re inappropriate,” Hayes said.

Had she left it there, the right-thinking brigade would still be praising Hayes’s bold truth-telling style. But she kept going.

“Player-to-player relationships are inappropriate,” Hayes said.

That got people in and around women’s sport very exercised. Two of Hayes’s players are in a relationship. Half of that couple went on a social-media liking streak, including one that called Hayes’s opinion “beyond bonkers.”

Driving while blindfolded is beyond bonkers. Thinking your employees ought to keep it strictly professional is debatable. There’s a difference.

A day later, Hayes did one of those Uno Reverso apologies that is actually a retrenching of your original opinion.

“I don’t think it was right for me to use the word ‘inappropriate’ for the players,” Hayes said. That got everyone off her neck.

But if you read a little deeper into her comments, there’s also this: “I don’t take those things back, but I have zero criticism of any player in my dressing room for anything.”

In other words, it is inappropriate, it’s just not inappropriate for these two specific people, who I know personally, and have to deal with every day, and don’t want angry at me.

It’s no great secret that players in elite women’s sport often date each other. Increasingly, they are getting married. These stories are some of sport’s most popular crossover content, heavily promoted by leagues and national teams, told with an air of fairytale romance.

This stuff is catnip for customers who aren’t interested in the hyper-machismo of men’s sport. It’s also a potential HR nightmare.

You get Hayes’s perspective. She’s been married for ages. She’s already got kids at home. She does not need to deal with 25 more of them and their high-school drama at work.

High school doesn’t begin to touch it, really. Most pros are very young, and most of those act younger. They’re expected to be business associates, best friends and competitors, all at the same time.

They spend every waking hour together, travel together, eat together and sleep in the same place. It’s boarding school for emancipated children.

You add sex into that mix and one can imagine all the ways it can go wrong.

On the other hand, where’d you meet your partner?

If you are old enough to have missed the hellscape of dating apps, it was probably at work. The statistics are all over the place, but a recent Forbes survey claimed 60 per cent of us have dated someone on the job. Forty per cent married someone they met that way.

We are none of us very creative, and even fewer have the guts to talk to someone at a bar. At work, you meet people who share important common interests with you – work, or how much you hate work, or that guy in Finance, or maybe all of those things.

There has been dating in sports for as long as there have been sports. You just didn’t hear about most of it. In the heterosexual context of men’s sport, the players date every single job category in their professional orbit except for their teammates.

Watch the dozen or so rows behind the home bench at an NBA game. Watch the people who are sitting there. There’s a whole game inside the game that’s happening in plain sight.

Those romances cause their share of intrasquad drama, you just don’t hear about it very often.

On the odd occasion when a men’s team is roiled by some dating, marriage or mistress mishap, the mainstream media stays well away. It’s not really any of our business, is it?

This same rule has always been applied to women’s teams. Hands off the squishy stuff that happens in private on teams.

A problem arises when you want to widely advertise the happy relationship stories, but don’t want anyone to talk about the ones that go bad. And many of them do go bad. That’s just the way things are.

Figuring out which stories are tellable and which aren’t is new territory that women’s sport is currently exploring. It’s not going to go as they’re hoping.

The bigger women’s sport becomes, the more people will want to hear about all the juice, including that time the goalie and the defender refused to be on the same bus together because of the forward.

Men’s sport was progressive in this sense at least – they never wanted to talk about any of it. You want to upset a men’s pro during an interview? Mention his dating life.

Credit to Hayes for having a reasonable opinion and refusing to back off it under pressure. That said, she may well have preferred to use a different word.

‘Inappropriate’ suggests there’s something wrong with dating your colleagues. If so, they’re going to have to close offices and shops around the world, for fear of all the inappropriateness yet to come.

A better word might have been ‘suboptimal.’ In a perfect workplace, there would be no sex. Nor would there be any gossip, or bullying, or stupidity, or brown-nosing. There would only be work.

Because there is no perfect workplace, we have to deal with what we’ve got. No memo from personnel is going to stamp out affairs of the heart. All you can do is hope the pair involved behave like adults. Then you have to accept that everyone else is going to talk about it, especially if it goes wrong.