Matt Beard joined Liverpool from Chelsea in 2012 and led the Merseyside club to two league titles. It is hard to overstate this achievement. The back-to-back wins ended Arsenal’s nine-year dominance of the top division and even longer domination of women’s football generally. It marked the start of change. Since then the spoils have been shared by the new money of Chelsea and Manchester City and the competitiveness of the league across the board has rocketed.

Beard, who got on well with Brendan Rodgers during his stint at Anfield, may have ushered in the new era but he has been absent from the league since 2015, having moved to the US to turn round the fortunes of Boston Breakers in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). Now, after off-field issues led to the end of the Breakers, Beard is back and ready to lead West Ham in their first Women’s Super League season. The manager has a formidable CV and is hopeful that what he has learned stateside will be beneficial to the newly professionalised top tier.

“The two styles of play are completely different,” says Beard. “In America it’s very transitional, it’s very direct. Tactically the players maybe aren’t as astute as the European player is. But it was fascinating because it’s a different style of play and a different mentality of player that you’re working with. I learned a lot in those two years about how to adjust how I like to play.”

Beard was not able to lift Boston to the league’s summit à la Liverpool but his patient work was starting to see rewards. “It was different. I mean, in the first year it wasn’t my squad; it was inherited. The set-up is slightly different and you have to learn the trade [transfer] system. So the first year was tough but I learned a lot about myself.

“The second year we did a lot better. Statistically we had the club’s best season since 2013.”

That year, 2017, the team finished ninth in the 10-team league with 19 points. It was a seven-point improvement on their bottom-place finish the preceding year and Beard explains some of the difficulties the US game produces: “We had to recruit a lot of young players, because we didn’t have a lot of value in the players we had. So from the results and performance standpoint we were pleased.

“It’s always going to be a process. I knew that, the club knew that, everyone was being patient and could see the progress but unfortunately we never got the opportunity to see it through.”

After the club folded in January Beard relocated his family back to England. With an empty schedule the priority was getting his two kids settled and in school. Then “I took up golf because I needed to get out of the house,” he says with a chuckle. “Maybe I’ll keep that up.”

West Ham United WFC manager Matt Beard during their FA WSL Continental Tyres Cup game against Arsenal Women. Photograph: TGSPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

Many a top-tier side would have considered the 40-year-old a catch on his return. However, it was the ambitions of the Hammers, who hadclimbed from the third tier of women’s football into the Women’s Super League for the 2018-19 season, that won his signature.

“For me the big thing was the infrastructure,” says Beard. “I know better than anyone that you need to have the right infrastructure to attract players.

“The ambition of the club was obviously important and I feel, because it was a project familiar to me and we had decided to come back to the south, it was a no-brainer when there was interest.”

Wasting no time, Beard has recruited 15 players to build a team that can compete at the top. “I had a bit of an idea of how I want us to play. I just want to have pace and a little bit of quality to be able to keep the ball and dictate the tempo of the game and I feel we’ve got that balance. “We are playing against good, established teams but we’ll be setting up to upset and disrupt.”

The biggest difficulty his essentially new side face is trying to gel quickly but Beard is relaxed about that. “Every single one of the teams in the division are established teams. They’ve been together since the FA WSL was started,” he says.

“We’ve recruited a whole new team, bar two players. So the ambition for me is to let us grow in the short term, understand each other, understand what I want and what our fundamentals are. But that’s going to take competitive games. We’ve been pleased with how things have gone but I’m aware that it’s probably going to take us the whole first half of the season for everything to gel. On the flip that doesn’t really put us under pressure. So we can just go about our business and enjoy it.

“We’re under no illusions. It’s going to be a tough league but we’ve recruited well enough to stay in the division and be competitive and we’ll see where it takes us.”

West Ham have lost 3-1 to Arsenal and beat Lewes 4-1 in the Continental Cup and will play Millwall in that competition before their league season gets started on 19 September – 10 days after the rest of the teams in the 11-team division get under way.

If where West Ham finish is uncertain, one certain thing is that Beard’s children will be watching. “They loved it when I was at Boston. Especially my son, we call him ‘autograph ’arry’, because he would go and sign autographs,” he says. “I’ve got a great picture of Harry waving to all the fans.”

Talking points

• England will play Brazil on 6 October at Notts County’s Meadow Lane and Australia in a friendly on 9 October at Craven Cottage as part of their preparations for next summer’s World Cup. Brazil are ranked seventh in the world, one place ahead of an Australian team spearheaded by the Chicago Red Star striker Sam Kerr, who currently has 14 goals and three assists in 17 appearances for the NWSL team this season.

• The FA has submitted the only bid to host the 2021 European Championship finals. While strict requirements still have to be met England are in pole position to host the tournament.

• Wolfsburg’s double winner and Champions League runner-up Pernille Harder has been crowned Uefa women’s player of the year. Harder was absent from the list of finalists for Fifa’s Best Player of the Year, where Lyon’s Ada Hegerberg and Dzsenifer Marozsan and the Brazilian Marta made up the final three.

Lyon’s Reynald Pedros, Japan’s Asako Takakura and the Netherlands’ Sarina Wiegman form the Women’s Coach of the Year shortlist.

• The Women’s Championship season starts on Saturday with Sheffield United welcoming Durham, while the Women’s Super League kicks off with five games on Sunday. Title holders Chelsea host Manchester City, Liverpool travel to Arsenal and Brighton make their top-tier bow against Bristol City.