Star Chat: Jill Ellis

English-born Jill Ellis followed her parents to the United States as a child and went on to have a stellar career in football. Not for nothing is she recognised as an outstanding coach: she won a staggering 87.5% of her matches in charge of the US Women's National Team, and became only the second manager (after Italian legend Vittorio Pozzo) to defend the World Cup. In this conversation, recorded before the World Cup, she revealed the secrets of her success, considered the way the women's game has grown in recent years, and looked ahead to Qatar 2022.

01:11
Developing as a coach 
In the first part of the interview, Ellis described how she developed a winning mentality and fostered it in her teams. She also opened up about the disappointment of the US failure at the Olympic Games in 2016, when the reigning world champions were eliminated in the quarter-finals, and explained how the lessons from that campaign helped her shape the team that went on to retain the World Cup in 2019.

09:07
Building a great team
One of Ellis' biggest achievements in five years as coach of the United States Women's National Team was the way she rebuilt the squad, gradually bringing in the next generation of stars while maintaining a formidable team spirt. In this section, she described how she kept the squad together, how she prepared players mentally for big games, and how she integrated talented youngsters into the national side.

18:57
The development of the women's game
After she retired from coaching, Ellis became President of San Diego Wave FC. This experience gives her a unique perspective on how women's football has developed, both on and off the pitch, over the last few decades. In part three of the conversation, she covered issues ranging from the advent of social media and the risks it poses to players' mental health to the rise of agents, the relationship between clubs and national sides, and the burgeoning commercial appeal of the women's game.

28:60
FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ 
Finally, Ellis turned her attention to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, which kicked off 47 days after this interview was filmed. As well as highlighting some of the key challenges she felt a winter World Cup would pose, from preparing your squad for a mid-season tournament to the difficulty of creating a team "bubble" in a small country like Qatar, she also tipped the potential winners. Did she get her predictions right?