Sitting in her office in San Diego, Jill Ellis casts her mind back to more than a decade ago. Back before she masterminded two Women’s World Cup wins as the head coach of the U.S. women’s national team, before the likes of players Trinity Rodman and Ellie Carpenter were even teenagers. It was the months leading up to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, where the United States would be looking to make it back-to-back gold medals in women’s football.
After serving as an assistant to Pia Sundhage in Beijing in 2008, Ellis had since been named U.S. Soccer’s development director, and a Swede by the name of Tony Gustavsson was serving as part of the USWNT coaching team in the lead-in to London.
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“Passionate, tactical, and dogged,” Ellis tells ESPN with a smile. “Those are the three words that come to mind. Tony is very passionate. As coaches, you all are. You have emotions. I think that’s part of it.
“Many of us way back in the day, we didn’t get into women’s football to make a lot of money. We got in because we loved it and love the sport.
“He and I used to sit up late at night talking about the game, tactics, and players. He loves, eats, sleeps and breathes the game.”
Success would follow at that tournament: another gold for the U.S., with Sundhage subsequently stepping down to lead her native Sweden and Gustavsson heading home to take charge of Tyreso FF, guiding them the 2012 league title and the 2014 UEFA Women’s Champions League final. Gustavsson, a former schoolteacher, however, would return to the USWNT setup in 2014, lured back by Ellis to serve as her assistant as the Americans lifted both the 2015 and 2019 Women’s World Cups in one of most prolonged periods of success that international football had ever seen.
“He used to say me: ‘Forward if we can, back if we need,'” Ellis recalls. “Neither one of us will want to batten down the hatches and play in our own half. [But] there are moments when you have to do that. And that was one of the things that, Tony and I, he helped me learn you have to manage moments of the game.”
When Ellis left her USWNT post back in 2020, reports originally linked her to the vacant role of head coach of Australia‘s national women’s team. The job instead ended up going to her assistant in Gustavsson, giving him the monumental task of leading a golden generation of Matildas into the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: hosting a World Cup.
