Modern Soccer Coach Podcast

Building & Improving Club Culture at Youth Level with Nick Levett

Gary is joined by Nick Levett to discuss building, improving and even measuring club culture and youth environment. With 14 years at the English FA and professional academy experience, Nick has outstanding insight into the complex landscape of youth and coach development.

Nick is currently a director at Rivers of Thinking: riversofthinking.com

Duration:: 58m
Broadcast on:: 16 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

We are in Champions League, man. That was my name. Dilly-dilly-dong, come on! [LAUGHTER] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [CHEERING] [CHEERING] I will move it if we beat that move it. This is the Modern Soccer Coach podcast with Gary Kurnee. [CHEERING] [INAUDIBLE] [CHEERING] [CHEERING] [INAUDIBLE] [CHEERING] Hello, coaches. Welcome back to another Modern Soccer Coach interview. Big one today. Nick Levitt. Worked at the FA for 12 years. Also worked with Brighton. Currently Director of Rivers of Thinking. Specialist in high performance culture. Organizational structure. All these great things that, of course, we need to have today in our environments. We're going to talk about that there. We're also going to talk about his work with the FA, his experiences. With the FA and Gary Southgate and the work that was done there with the England DNA many, many years ago. You're going to love this. Hope you enjoy it. Please give it a like. Please subscribe. Thank you so much for the support. Here is Nick and Joy. Nick, thank you so much for joining me today on the Modern Soccer Coach podcast. Finally, excited to have you on. No, thank you for the invitation. It feels like it's a good and interesting platform. It's a good stuff. I'm not looking forward to the conversation. We're going to get into a few things today that I think are really interesting culture. How long has culture been a buzzword? But it's still there. It's still something that is almost the promised land that teams want to create this culture, this special environment for players. We're talking specifically youth level as well. How do you create that? We'll get into that there. The first question I wanted to throw at you would be, how would you guess? How would you define culture at a youth organization? Yeah, it's a big question. I think people will have their own metrics possibly about how they would kind of describe it. I often think it's the tangible feel that you get when you go into somewhere. It's the behaviours that people are exhibiting because that's the stuff that you see on the surface. It's the conversations that you have. Ultimately, you want a culture that people are desperate to be part of and don't want to leave. And if you're having the opposite problem is that they don't want to be there and they do leave, then I think there's something quite challenging and you need to kind of get into about what's right and what's wrong. But people will define culture in terms of how they want it to be. But for me and certainly that kind of youth space, we're talking about the development of young people and using football as the vehicle, sorry, as using soccer as the vehicle to do. I won't be able to stop saying football, Gary. It's the English in me, I'm afraid. So the listeners are going to have to deal with it, I'm afraid. But we have this wonderful tool to use to help to develop young people and the culture for me of a grassroots soccer club, certainly not professional club, but it also extends to there is we should be thinking about developing better people and better players. And it is about developing better people as well as better players. They're not separate. They go hand in hand because we're there to do some soccer stuff with them. But yeah, the culture is definitely what you kind of see here feel when you're in and around the place. You're an expert in this space, but you're also, you know, you've also a really, really good depth and understanding of all the role of data and metrics and measuring everything as well. And I wonder if the fact that these intangibles can't be measured and the fact that I can say, "Yeah, I am doing that, but I'm not really. How do we overcome that challenge of awareness maybe?" Yeah, I think you can measure a culture with employee engagement surveys and satisfaction questionnaires and those kind of things. And they will give you some kind of quantitative measure about how things are doing. And you can do one at the start season and one at the end of the season, you can start to track and look at the player engagement or the parent engagement. And you can start to come and look at things in different ways. I think people have just got to be really clear about what great practice looks like. And if you're really clear about what great practice looks like, are we doing it? And then the conversations lead to accountability, then, look, we said we were going to do this, but you've done this and that's miles away. Therefore, that's not good practice in terms of what we're going after. So I think it's just being really clear for people and saying that this is what success looks like for us. This is what good practice is. Now we're going to deliver it and we have to be accountable and trust people to go and do that. And then if they don't, then we have a conversation about what was tricky about it. Why couldn't you do it? What was the difficult part? But I think if you have a misalignment between what you say you're going to do and what you do, that's where the issues are. And if those two things don't align, then I think you've got a challenging conversation to have. But if you're really clear on saying this is what we were about, and not everyone's going to agree with the culture in every club, right? But if you go into it knowing this is what we stand for and you deliver it, cool, you've got a choice. And it's a bit like, you know, we're coming off the back of an England football defeat in the Euro's final last night and it breaks my heart to say that right now. But you can play the game or gal Southgate can play the game at international level in different ways. You don't have to agree with the way that he chooses or the way that another country chooses, but you have a choice. But if we say we're going to do it and then we do it, great. Yeah, we're definitely going to get into some of the England landscape over the last 10 years and your involvement in that. We'll get into that a little bit later on. I want to stay on the topic of that culture, that sense of the intangibles that you talked about. When you go in, let's just say I bring you over to, let's just say, club X in the US tomorrow. And I say, Nick, give me a week here. Look at our culture and be honest with me, tell me what's going on. And is your first point of, I guess, walk through whether you're going, all right, give me all your documentation to see game model standards or that. Or are you kind of walking around with coffees? How would you gauge that there? I think it's probably a little bit of both. I would certainly have lots of tea drinking moments with different, maybe that's English in me as well, drinking tea. I would have lots of conversations with people. And look, I'm, you know, I'm open and excited to have those conversations. If people want to say, come and give us a week to really get under the skin of it. Really starting to go right. What do we stand for? How do we do it? Do we live what we say we're going to live? And a lot of that comes through conversation. But if you've got a club ethos, document, vision, mission, behaviors, whatever it might be, cultural anchors, whatever language people use, you need to be able to see that alignment between those two things. And often the kind of the metrics of measuring it. Don't really tell you the full story. But really starting to get to grips with those conversations with people to say, look, where do you see these values play out? What does it look like for you? How do you deliver against these? What are you focusing on? What are your targets? What are your key priorities? How do you know you're achieving those? What are the key results that you're going after? What does success look like? And all of that should feed back an alliance, that central core strategy of what the club's about. And if we're doing something that doesn't align back to the vision of what the club's about, my next question is why you're doing it. And that's when you start to get into like hidden personal agendas and individual silos. And I certainly see, and I've always described it as multiple teams playing under one banner. And I wouldn't necessarily say that they were at the club because there's no consistency between anything. You know, the under 11 coaches don't speak to the under 13 coaches. Let alone the under 12 coaches who are the year above them that have gone through some stuff that's happened before and some of the little rule changes. And how did they deal with that? And what did you do when you went from seven aside to nine aside? And how many players did you have? And what strategies and tactics did you use from a football kind of discussion? People don't often have those conversations. So I would argue that you're basically a bunch of individual teams playing under the same men. But it's when you get into that and you can start to really drill down into the conversations is when you start to, the real meat of the conversation then. It's interesting. I think it's quite similar to the tactical side that the information overload has helped us in one sense where it's educated and given us a little bit more awareness. But in the other sense, it's led to more groupthink because documents have been passed around and logos have been changed. And a little bit of, hey, we're doing this, but we're not really testing what we're doing. And then that silo almost becomes a club silo where everyone is taking a box. And I wonder if I think of this myself. I want to get a thoughts on it about diversity, about balancing. Maybe like I think thinking differently and having different personalities in a club in a youth structure would be quite positive because you're exposing people to different conversations, et cetera. But then what you're saying there is that, yeah, but if you've, everyone going in silos, I mean, how would you manage that where you're not having 25 robots as coaches, but then you're not having 25 people going all different directions? Yeah, I think there has to be a bandwidth and a bit of a tolerance around that because I don't think the organizations grow and flourish if you just do it the one way that the person at the top decides that's not how things grow because most of the time the best idea is come from people further down. I remember years ago when I started coaching at a Premier League academy and I don't know if too far from London, so I had the choice of going to coach a couple of academies. One academy gave you the session plan that you had to deliver. Another academy said, here's the theme that we want to work on for the next few weeks, you go and do it and depending on where you are with your kind of original stage of coaching experience might drive what you want or the club badge or the ethos or whatever it might be. I chose the latter of the two because I didn't want my creativity as a coach to be stifled by here's the session plan, go and deliver this. I wanted to still challenge myself about thinking about the art and the craft of coaching and I can certainly see why an organisation might do the first one and certainly in terms of time of coaches if they're getting their lay and we still had some kind of core practices but the ethos was aligned to me and it still kind of gave me that bandwidth of tolerance to put my own kind of approach to things but I think it just comes down to preference then about what that might look like but I go back to that kind of question is what you're doing for a clear alignment to the club philosophy about coaching, training, match day and if you can draw a line between what you do and the philosophy that we're going after, awesome, we definitely don't want 25 robots, we definitely need to bring that diversity of thinking, diversity of background ideas, cognition, how they view the world, how they view the game but it can be really tricky and I certainly worked at a Premier League club where one coach was very different and he saw the world very differently and people saw him as a threat to their thinking and their beliefs and he was quite challenging and direct with it and as opposed to kind of embracing it and going right what can we learn and add and tweak and involve our coaching and match day philosophy because that's what I think good systems do is that they evolve it, they don't just have a big revolution every five years, they naturally kind of test week repeat along the way but you have to be within that bandwidth, that's the challenge. God is complex, like I see that you know someone that can that challenges it and say alright well because there's so many cliches and I almost think we fall into that trap where it's a little bit John Gordon type the boss you know if you're not on the bus then you know we're going but then how do you end up people that are going to say yeah but there's a different way maybe we can tweak this here and that's a real skill as a leader because football I think is a unique industry as well especially in England where there's a lot of threats, there's threats every day in these environments for job security and you can see why walls go up but then having flexibility I guess bravery as a leader to say yeah critique let's hear you, it brings us along nicely you had a post about allowing people to rewrite the rules with that in mind and how would you as a leader allow people to chip away and maybe be creative but still having that vision consistent? Yeah I think it goes back to recognising that the leader, the person at the top of organisation they don't have the best ideas and often they're quite a long way removed from what's going on in reality. I'll often work in the core set to speak into lots of clients now and I'll ask them what's their appetite for risk and new ideas and failure and often as we know right the best ideas will come from failure and tweaking stuff and trying again and tweaking stuff but if you've got no idea for failure or no kind of appetite for failure you're probably going to stagnate and people will go past you and evolve quicker and that's a risk and a threat to organisations. I think we have to start to do a little bit of the same within this and certainly when we start to look at the young people coming through the world now you know that generation alpha the young people coming in. They often want more of an input and a decision and a discussion about things that matter to them and it goes all the way down to the kind of the micro level of a coaching session and it's how do you as a coach co-create environment with young people to say what do you think we should do next or what do you want to focus on or how should we make this practice harder? What should we do now? And it's not just a coach's king or queen and they decide everything that happens because I've written it down on my session plan and this is what I'm going to do. How do we bring people along with us into the environment and that's where the kind of the rewrite of the rule stuff starts to come together because they may have better ideas than we do and often often they really do right because you know if you've got people running a club organization that might be 40, 50, 60 years old right they might be 20, 30, 40 years older than kids today and kids today are slightly different they're growing up in a different time they're the most hyper connected generation we've ever had that live in a digital world where everything is I don't like that swipe it change it swipe it change it I expect everything instantly but we also know that there's a huge increase in loneliness there's a shift in communication skills because most of their conversations often through digital tech we know that there's an increase in social isolation that makes them a different beast to what the person running the club 50 years old is so unless we start to understand the world that they live in we have to work with them to rewrite and evolve and you can get playful with it right you know you can get really you know so I was working with with a club where we did a dragon's den which that's not going to translate to the US market I think what's the what's the program is it called Shark Tank where they have a load of mark yeah yep same thing well they have a load of investors and people picture ideas to him right okay cool my translation of TV programs it's only because I've seen it on TikTok is so so you can have a Shark Tank right so you can say to each team you're gonna pitch an idea to the board about what you think I'm should look like stand for represent and you can pitch for I don't know $5,000 for your team or whatever it might be and I'll tell you what the best ideas will come from them and you know the conversations between parents on the side of the pitch where they're chatting away and they're probably moaning about a few things and I should be doing it like they're doing that like get the parents to have a picture because they'll see stuff differently and it's those ideas that we have to start to bring a mold and change and go right you know that you've probably got some people stood on the side of the pictures parents that have got incredible skills from their day job and they just stood on the side of a pictures parent but they're seeing things because nobody has a monopoly of view of the world and they might be going well why don't we change that well why don't we look at doing this or we could do that to make the team better or the culture better or the environment better but if people don't ask women to speak to them and give them a forum you kind of don't go anywhere when you get stuck in that silo thinking yeah brilliant I love that I love that because the skill then as a leader is that forum piece is to bring it out because you know what all the things you're talking about there is that yeah like a close that a coach that's in the trenches is going to be more in tune with what kids need and maybe that little bit of innovation or creativity but again like we're now we're now fast approaching you know more than I do and this we're probably there where the coach coaches today are coming from a tech young leaders are coming from this space where they're maybe uncomfortable with those pieces so just saying having a beating and saying tell me your thoughts isn't going to be good enough probably anymore as a leader right you're going to need to take a bit deeper than that absolutely but don't forget you don't have to take on board everything that they say because the skill for the leadership team the board the directors whoever it is is to then go right how many of that aligns with our culture how many of that aligns with our strategy you go back to the vision piece about what you're trying to achieve and what is it that we can take but even if you take a few bits and not all of it people like to feel that they've been heard and listened to and they then feel part of it and they get a sense of autonomy and ownership and they feel connected and that's all human drivers that are really important and it creates that fostering of a community even if their ideas aren't boom you we are going to go and do that 100% but it brings people with you on the journey right? moving along nicely reflection as coaches so again something you've written about I love your videos by the way your LinkedIn stuff short and sweet I love them every day gets me thinking the reflection piece is something that again I subscribe to I think it's hugely as vital people can do it in different ways but it's it's a fast-moving industry there's noise it's inconvenient to reflect blah blah blah I guess how okay so you're a leader you're you're kind of out of the age range of these young coaches in your club and you think listen you need to think a bit more about how you're doing that is it I guess how do you teach reflection or how do you impact that as a collective at your club? yeah I think it's one of those questions I think go back to is we always say people need to reflect but we never teach them how to or we never give them any tools or structures about about what to do and the reality is also of of coaching is you're either moving very quickly or you might be a volunteer coaching you've got to go back to looking after the kids and you're at home and work and you know it's quite full on so just some real simple strategies just like just work through in your head what went well or even better if just go right well what was good from tonight's session what do I need to think about ah yeah okay that was cool that's good what would have been even better or you might just do a stop-start continue you know what are the bits that I need to stop doing that didn't work very well what can I add to it what did I what do I need to keep I often use a framework of different tools to to reflect and I probably mix it up a little bit as well just to kind of catch my own thinking there's there's a various kind of different reflection cycles I think Coles reflection cycle is one um I'll often kind of go keep ads and men's chuck because it's kind of it plays to a lot of different biases that I can try and avoid and then it goes down to right what's the time available that you have in order to do it so if you're and many of us do if you coach with other people and many of us kind of coaching pairs or with other other moms or dads or other coaches how do you firstly plan your coaching delivery with that coach so your planning is then deliberate that right I'll do this bit Gary when I'm doing this bit I want you to keep track of my interventions and I only want to do three interventions in this practice so if I try and stop it four times you stop me within this 15 20 minute session I know that you're working on the length of your stoppages in practices so when you go and coach Gary I'll keep a clock and I'll try and keep your questions and interventions down to 60 seconds oh that's clever and when you start to get to within 10 seconds I'll give you a little signal and you can start to wrap it up so the kids can go and play so that it's not a monologue from the coach but we can work together on our coaching craft and our coaching practice right then our reflection for you and I as a coach is you can give me some feedback on my interventions I can give you the times and the feedback on your the length of your interventions or the quality of your questions or whatever it is that you want to work upon right but the reflection is then specific to something that we want to get better at as a coach so it's intentional reflection that's directed towards some learning that we want to do we also know from research I think it was Smith and Small Research in the 80s that it was something like we forget 80% of our coaching session delivery right so if we do forget 80% invariably the 20% that we hang on to is still probably got a little bit of flaws to it as well so how do we collect feedback to influence our thinking from the players you know how do we ask the players what they like what they don't like what would they like more of what do they like less of how do we kind of make sure that we kind of gave some of that and it's reflection in lots of different ways because reflection really is just gaining insight to help make your stuff better that's what you're trying to do right and some of it could be in the car on the way home it could be simple as that you know you've got a 10 minute drive so rather than sticking on a podcast or listening to music just record a voice note and just keep it in your phone and just think out loud about what you're doing about some of the things that happened but what your tactics and strategies about reflection after that so who am I and I often talk about who's my board of directors my personal board of directors so who's the person that I go to to talk about coaching who's the person I go to to talk about sport psychology who's the person I go to to talk about physical preparation and conditioning all right and I might have a coaching body and I might just send them my two minute three minute voice note from from that and it could be as simple as session tonight like I really struggled with coaching my own son like I found myself telling him off more than other kids and I didn't want to be favorite in him but I ended up doing the opposite and I found it really difficult what advice like give me some advice about how to help with that right so you start to share and you kind of have networks of coaches to support you around you but it all aids reflection for what you're doing and ultimately it's just having lots of different tools and strategies to do it your presentation very good Ontario soccer I watched it a few great points maybe maybe think again the you had a couple of pieces one was the supporting of others and I wanted to to get your thoughts on whether you feel that this is a bit of a blind spot for coaches perhaps again maybe walls go up and maybe we we perceive a weakness if we do what you said like okay well if my mentor is coaching at a high level I don't mind doing that and sending that person there but God forbid I go to the coach next to me and kind of share a little bit of honourability and open up but do you do you feel out there do you think that's something that we could get better up it's a huge opportunity I think it's that it's a big gap having somebody to talk to about coaching is really important and they could be someone that is a peer a buddy similar to you it could be somebody more experienced to you it could be somebody a totally different sport right and I think having a having a combination of different people that we can talk to about things is really really important and I'm part of what's called the Sussex coaches network which is about 40 coaches across all sorts of different sports and a couple of times a year we come together somebody opens up a clubhouse somewhere and brings some tea bags and some chocolate digestive biscuits and we just we talk about coaching for a couple of hours right there's there's rarely an agenda but we comfortably fill two hours like you know you could be there for six hours and I'm taking ideas from athletics coaches and I'm listening to cricket coaches and I'm listening to all sorts of different people in different golf coaches and so you've got individual sports and team sports you've got different ages and stages and I always come away with my head bursting with things of what does that mean to me how do they do that can I go and watch them work but the support for other coaches is really important and that network was set up by a golf coach and the disability football coach who just wanted to come together to talk about coaching and it just takes a couple of volunteers to come together and go let's just invite people on once a quarter just to chat about coaching it's not formal it's not a set there's no qualification it's just because you know humans humans generally are quite social beings and coaching is quite social craft and we live in towns and cities because we like to be around other humans so there's a real value in just kind of talking and sharing about these things and it's it's a really nice platform where people can be vulnerable and and people enter it knowing I don't have all the answers that's why I'm here you know to learn more and sometimes I might share more than I learn and sometimes I learn more than I share and but it's just being part of those networks that it helps you feel like you're not alone I think and that's important the mental health piece is a coach I think it's hugely important where again information criticism over working in terms of a lot of coaches or especially the US you know they they're well-paid yes but they're doing 50 things and they're getting criticism from from different angles and that can also lead down a path of burnout and things like that you you do that video either you're walking or you're running every morning but coaches I don't even think there's a there's an illness on coaches on living healthy and being active and getting away and being a bit more deliberate about lifestyle what do you think about that I used to manage a team of very clever people I was definitely the less smartest in the room and and one of the one of the guys is Coach Vellifer excellent pick athlete and we were having a conversation about stuff and through the conversation I kind of came to the conclusion that nobody has their best ideas sat behind a laptop right and very that doesn't happen and a lot of the time when I say to people where do your best ideas they'll often go ah in the shower but nobody says to you right we'll go and have more showers I like that doesn't that's that kind of not how that works but this guy used to do it I have my best ideas when I'm out on the bike I mean big spaces and I can think and I've got freedom of just kind of being out on my own and I can spend a bit of time thinking about stuff and so I said to him like just you're working day go out on the bike but go out because I know that he's getting some good quality thinking time where he comes back having rationalised all his thoughts and can put down something meaningful but he's also getting the the physical and mental well-being benefits from doing it so why wouldn't you like I don't I don't really see a really strong argument he doesn't work in a call center where he has to be on the phone a hundred times a day right that's not his job so why wouldn't you and I think we're at a time now where people's mental health and well-being is is probably more open and being discussed and being valued more and if people are burning out there's something wrong with the system which is either you don't have enough people or you're trying to do too much or you're not prioritising your work well enough we shouldn't get to the stage where people are burning out we should get to the stage where we're saying here's what we think is the program of hours per week for you to work and if you cannot do your job in that amount of time we have to prioritise and stop doing some things that are of less importance invariably what happens in every organisation is someone leaves and someone says oh right that workload can come to you now and the first question should actually be well what do you want me to stop doing if you want me to start doing that but we don't we expect the same people to do more work and we wonder why we break them like that like logically that doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me so just be really specific if you're if you're at that stage where you're not able to prioritise your own mental health and well-being have the conversation and so look I'm working you know 45 50 hours a week and I'm okay doing that but when my weeks are 70 hours a week then we might have to start to think about what that doing that looks differently years ago when I started working at County FA like 20 years ago and I I'll come into the office at midday and all the office staff would look at me going like what what you're doing why are you in so late like because I'm working till 8 o'clock tonight so my working day is midday till 8 p.m. it's not 9 in the morning till 8 p.m. that's not going to work it's just not going to happen so just being really kind of conscious about that being a bit more deliberate is I think it's okay to have those conversations guilt element as well that I think people feel it because they're working in football that kind of acknowledging that you are struggling with some of those challenges shouldn't be but in reality it's it is a it's it's energy it's the same energy that it would be you know doing any leadership role of dealing solving problems I mean most people's coaching jobs 90% of it is non soccer or non coaching activities which that's where the where the breakdown is but it gets to go back your your your previous and I like an informal social setting where you can get a little bit of empathy and sound it out with people is a is a really good solution yeah absolutely I think you just got to be open and share within the networks that you've got to make sure that you can kind of find the best solutions but but also really start to understand energy and we did this at the England under 21s at the European Championships we started to plot out like red amber green when people were full on red or when they could kind of like dial it back a little bit and like match their - 1 or - 2 so that's kind of my language or a football language for a couple of days before the game coaches were pretty full on their reds they're working hard to make sure that tactical set up on the coaching blah blah blah physios doctors are in the green they're not doing a huge amount you know they're okay things are moving on game day coaches are red they're full on physio doctor I probably am but now because if something happens they need to then like step in and make sure things are working game day plus one game day plus two day after coaches are probably back to amber or green and things can kind of dial back a little bit for them but now the physio and the doctor are probably now in the reds because they're busy fixing people to make sure that everything's back on track and ready to go but understanding people's different kind of energy is really important all right let's let's go there then let's go to the England piece where I mean well frame it as a change of culture initially I'm going back I read that article on the Guardian about you know about Southgate and the change and obviously I was aware or or remember the the issues that the English FA were having or England as a football culture were having over the last 10 15 years coming out of 2010 2012 euros World Cup and what I guess to be specific or to try and ask a specific question would be Southgate's role as a leader in the FA and you talked in that article about taking an interest at the at the youth levels can you talk a little bit about was that formal was that informal like what was the skill behind that there yeah so I'll probably go back to 2010 was when we had a really big meeting which was like it was a route and branch full review of the game with former England managers with former players across the grassroots game Premier League for all league so it's 40 years ago to kind of get to this point and when Gareth came in I can't think his title was head of elite development or something like that and Sir Trevor Brooking was leading the development and there's a bit of a view that kind of Gareth would be the next Trevor and he kind of came in and whilst he was then looking and I was trying to oversee some of the new teams work with Dan Ashworth he had a really interest in some of the grassroots things that were going on and that was when I was doing a lot of projects I'm looking at how we change the formats of the game approach competition coaching environments all of that kind of stuff but he had a genuine interest in what was going on and like he came out to countless meetings with me across the country where we would talk to County phase to clubs to leagues to coaches and Gareth was there like you know kind of alongside us talking about the stuff that he saw with his son and daughter when they were playing sport and he genuinely cared about what it was all about and then we started to kind of use Gareth in a bit more strategic ways that you know when you're when you're making such big kind of wholesale changes to the game invariably it's going to annoy a few people and they wouldn't be all happy about this and there was one particular county where the chairman did not like me because I was suggesting small-sided games and he thought that you know seven or eight year old kids should be playing 11 and 11 on the full-size pitch so we didn't like the fact I was suggesting that we did something a bit different but I knew he had a huge ego right so we would send Gareth to that meeting and I wouldn't go because all of a sudden he looks great because you know Gareth Southgate's there and blah blah blah but it was all based on getting to the outcome that we wanted which was the ability to change the game to make it better for young people but he genuinely had a big interest in what was going on and even when he kind of rolled on a few years into getting the seniors job and I actually probably could go back a little bit when he was the other 21s head coach he was still really interested in the pathway what who've we got coming through what does it look like what a succession planning look like you know Phil Foden was probably in the 17s at that stage but we knew that Phil was a diamond right so so he would ask questions what what's Phil's pathway look like how do we get him through into the 21s as quick as we can what kind of games does he need what's the environment needs in order for help to him to be the best but that was then no different when he was a seniors manager because he obviously knew a lot of the 21s but also he knew who was coming through the pathway and it's a little bit like years ago at Man United so Alex Ferguson knew everybody across the whole club he knew all the players you knew all the parents all the way through everything and I think Gareth was probably quite similar he knew all the young players coming through now so when it came to making big decisions about bringing in young players like you know Jude Bellingham at a young age Habu Meinu at a young age out of Waltons in the squad at a young age he's comfortable in doing that because he knows the plays he's got all the data intelligence he's seen them he would have spoken to them he probably knows their parents like that's the level of detail but he had this kind of insane curiosity to make sure we did a really good job of connecting the pathway and I was at the FA a long time and certainly when I was there Fabio Cappello could give less of a shit about the FA youth teams not bothered in the slightest right because his focus was solely on the England seniors and winning the World Cup that's all he was there to do was not bothered about anything else below it. Spent another bit more interest spent comes in 21s games and certainly paid a bit more interest I think mainly because Sven was a really nice man but Gareth was probably the best at wanting to connect the whole pathway all the way through so brilliant job of that. Yeah the piece of the culture in the English FA and and we've had a few people on at different levels and Michael Scubala, Aaron Danks you know it just I always think we're thinking about again back to this diversity again different skills I think about a little bit different individual coaches different coaches in moments and and again I think there's a I have a great level of respect for that because they're doing that at Cotton Edge like there was a lot at stake to change that because if you get that wrong for six months the criticism is going to be you know we see it even in the Euros when things are going well what the criticism is so I guess when that transition and that innovation how how was that done and achieved or executed where you know new new ideas and you talked there about you know different youth modules coming in and I guess from an organizational standpoint what did you see and feel there from a culture? Yeah I mean you have to recognize that you know it's a bit like I could go into my garden and pull out the load of seeds but tomorrow I don't have a whole big flowers and vegetables and trees like that's not how development happens we have to recognize and we did at the time it was like look this this is a minimum of a 10 year plan it's a 10 year plan and it's really difficult because the size and scale of the sport in this country means that fans have an expectation that you win everything that you go to but we are a nation who I think over the last few years have probably punched above our weights but the expectation is always greater probably than where we sit in terms of our ability as as a nation and I was at the Toronto Raptors and I was talking about this with them with one of their senior members of staff and they were talking about how they they'd gone through a big kind of transition in the team where they got rid of some of the older players that have been there a long time they bought into the younger players but now the developing of a new team and a new generation of players it takes time but the average sports fan doesn't get that they want to see their team win every week now but I think if you're in the system you get that you have to be far more long-term and strategic with your thinking that you're building something here for 8, 10, 12 years time and that's the reality of it so if I look at a lot of kind of teams that go through that transition process you know you see you see some good teams win things but they'll often be a drop but the real best ones are able to keep a high level consistently but but just such is the nature now that I think we've got to that stage where we're doing very well what Gareth Hughes is to do next right I've got no idea but it is a very long time process but it's also a perfect storm a lot of things coming together at the same time it's changing youth pathway it's changing coach education it's a new program going into Premier League clubs it's a whole new games program at the Premier League to give players a different experience it's a whole new games program for international youth teams giving them some different experiences and all of that has to come together then with the right manager and the right tactics at the right time for a one-month period if you're going to win the World Cup and it is the perfect storm it's not easy. E triple P I've asked a few people that have come on because I don't think we talk about this over here E triple P actually a lot of coaches don't you know there's not a lot shared on what it actually is and we won't go down we don't have enough time to go down our whole define it to what is it but I just want to get your thoughts I'm like how much do you think E triple P in terms of formalizing more paperwork around the building perhaps and I mean how much do you think that really really helped kick on the youth development side? Yeah I hugely it's made a massive difference and I think Jed Roddy at the Premier League when he kind of brought that in as a as a not no approach but a kind of a big shift and change the Premier League youth development him and the team that did that needs to take a lot of credit because what you see at England youth teams and national teams and seniors we just borrow the players you know they're the club's players we just borrow them for an event at tournament etc because most of their development goes on in the clubs but it is always collective because the coaches get trained by the FA so the FA you need to have a really clear approach to teaching and learning that really kind of focuses on modern cutting edge approach but the coaches have to then go and deliver that in a games program set out by the Premier League and the individual clubs what it has done is it's brought more investment into the game which has meant more variety in their coaching experiences more contact time with the players and I think when you've got players doing some more stuff some higher quality stuff on some high quality facilities and playing in a variety of different competition and formats all of that helps kind of accelerate and turbocharge what we're looking for now the challenges every other countries doing their own version of it right in their own culture and you can't just cut and paste what the Spanish are doing and apply it to us because it just doesn't work like that but there's still lessons that we can learn from other countries to keep evolving our own system but yeah it's made a huge difference and it continues to and I know that there's some very clever people at the Premier League it's a good group there as a forward-thinking staff that are really constantly pushing the cutting edge of what good coaching looks like which hopefully means that the long-term experiences that players are getting better I think that the Premier League is a very very big market and machine and as well hyped etc but I think that I actually think it's all it's underrated in terms of the quality that it produces on a consistent basis as a football product it's just incredible the standard and the quality of it is going up but you have to keep up with everybody else because for us in Europe the Dutch are kicking on the Spanish are kicking on the Germans are kicking on the French kicking on the Italians are kicking on the Portuguese are kicking on and all of those nations are very good and will create their own system their own incredible players at different times and if you don't keep evolving don't keep moving forwards then you're rapidly going to be left behind and then you end up not in that kind of top group of nations and you end up falling below I think they still have the challenge that the Premier League is you know 70% non British English players which makes the challenge for the England manager always really hard because if you say right there's 30% of players of English players playing in the Premier League that's already quite a small number and then you go right well some of them are 17, 18, 20 years old and they're playing they've played 1, 2, 5, 10 games right so you're probably not going to pick them you've also got you know Adam Alana James Milner who are 57 years of age and have retired from English football but still played in the Premier because they're supreme athletes so you've got either end so that 30% probably very quickly becomes 22% right and we're already quite a small nation when you compare it to other countries that you know I don't know what the population of Brazil is but I would say it's probably 10 times what we have and culturally it's you know very different but it's their national sport and so it's complex there's so many different factors that have to come together and ultimately you've got to do the best you can with the resources that you have available and if you're you know as a bijan or Trinidad and Tobago like you've got a much smaller resource so you have to start to think really cleverly about how you apply that in the best way to get the best gains but with the most sensible expectations of what you're going to achieve from it. Sensible and expectations don't go yellow and football do they? They don't right and I think like I said I had to do in a TV interview this morning and I think Gareth as England manager has probably one of the toughest jobs in the country right so I think being the Prime Minister is probably quite a tough job but the average person doesn't think they could do that job the average person thinks they could do Gareth's job better than him and and everyone says to me like you know is he too nice like he is a very nice guy but he also makes very tough decisions but he does it in a very humanistic way which is a real skill about modern leadership but everybody is an expert in his job and you know if he listens to you know some keyboard warrior in wherever having a rant on social media like his head would explode and fall off but Gareth I think is sensible enough to go right this is the plan this is what we're going to do based on all the information that everybody's given us this is how we're going to approach things this is what we're going to go after and how we're going to do it and you know I think even dropping big players you know Jack Greenish Marcus Rashford before the Euros which probably would have been quite unpopular decisions in some parts he's gone no this is what we're going to do this is how we're going to do it and the early stages when they certainly didn't do amazing through the groups and people were losing their minds because we were top of the group and qualified and people like couldn't cope that it's yeah it's a thank us job it really is a thank us job but thankfully I think we'll probably look back in went and I'm not saying it Gareth will leave but my guess is he might do we might look back in five years and go hmm can we have him back because it's such it is such a challenging job that's the that's the that's definitely going to happen like that's Bobby Robson and a new castle isn't it for the primarily can they get relegated to not to say it's going to go down but you just in football you always think you can do better but as you know if you're in the business it can get 20 times worse at all times you know you don't really appreciate that as a final thing yeah and again I think if you know they don't necessarily recognize that you know people watch it watch the game and say like for my naked eye we need to do this and sometimes it is obvious right but Gareth is also making decisions based upon the practice got 500 pieces of information from 35 experts around him and he's got to distill that down very quickly it's a high high pressure decision-making in an instant which is very different to you know Colin from Liverpool who sat on his sofa watching it shouting at the telly it's a very different place to be and with the greatest respect to Colin I'll probably write about Gareth in charge of the national team all right I promise we wouldn't go down that road and we just did last one for I don't want to take up too much time what's the you know for coaches that are listening that are saying oh you know what I would love to think a bit deeper and we mentioned earlier you're doing some corporate work are you are you open to go into clubs as well or what are you doing these days yeah so I'm running my own consultancy now which gives me the opportunity and flexibility to just do projects that I want to do and I've made this decision that with my own with my own work that I'm only doing fun stuff with cool people right so if it doesn't tick those boxes then then I'm not doing it but spend a lot of time going out to to clubs to organizations and mainly just to kind of ask them some difficult questions and challenge some of their thinking tester are they doing what they say they're doing giving them some ideas helping coaches get better a lot of my work is spent kind of looking at how do we how do we maximize the potential in individuals and also create some high-performing teams so I spend a lot of time with different sports big clubs small clubs grassroots professional game of course lots of different sports looking at right well if we're a team what does a high-performing team look like what's clarity in our vision and our objectives and key results how do we make sure people have got clarity and competence and autonomy about how they do it what are our values relationships culture anchors about what we stand for how do we do it and our ways of working and start to kind of help them shape their own strategy this is never me coming in you know telling you the expert in your club Gary how to do it but it's me going I'll have you thought about that and what does this look like for you and the best teams in the world have thought about this and what do you really stand for and what are the behaviors and if I see this what happens and just kind of prompting a lot of thinking and questions but sometimes that's kind of immersing myself in a club for a few days sometimes it's just coming over doing a keynote or a speech to coaches and organizations about whether it's some key stuff on coaching or hyperforming teams whatever it might be but yeah lots of lots of different things but lots of fun stuff so yeah rivers of thinking is the consultancy that I've set up but yeah there's a few of us now doing bits and pieces around the world which is yes good fun brilliant outstanding we will put the the information if you don't mind we'll put the information below and people can check that out and Nick I really appreciate this it's been fantastic I've loved it no problem I appreciate the opportunity to come and chat it's um it feels like it's a long time overdue it's the clarity I'm having a strategy about what you're doing and and what are that all kind of how do you piece all of the different component parts together and then going right get the right people in the right seats and then let's go on this journey together and sometimes I think we had a little bit at the FA at the time sometimes it's changed the people or changed the people you know you have to recognize that there might be a little bit of collateral damage if they don't want to come in line with where we're going and sometimes that's okay but this is what we're doing this is the course of action and everything is always driven by will it make the boat go faster to to parlons a rowing term and if it does awesome let's do it and if it doesn't then we probably shouldn't do it fantastic fantastic top class Nick thank you so much keep up the great work and I keep those videos coming well mainly it's just a ramble to get stuff out my head to be honest because it's a lot this whether it's any good or not who knows right but it certainly helps me tough class tough class thanks again Nick much appreciate it no problem at all thank you for listening to the modern soccer coach podcast for more coaching topics sessions and resources head on over to coach kernene on Facebook or visit the website at www.modernsockercoach.com [MUSIC PLAYING]