What I learned coaching and managing soccer teams

I’ve had the opportunity to coach and manage different soccer teams.

A couple of teams were just kids, where I was mostly a coach. I also had a couple of amateur adult soccer teams, where I played the role of both coach and manager.

I like to make the distinction between coach and manager because I think it often gets confused.

A coach is a person that helps you perform better, they might say things like “run that way after you make that pass”. A manager is someone that provides a plan of action, they’ll plan the logistics of the game, they’ll have a contingency plan when a starting player gets injured, and they’ll try to anticipate as much as humanly possible.

They’re similar but not the same. With kids, I didn’t care about the results of competitive matches, whether we won or lost it had no impact, what I did care about was cultivating a great team culture, I focused on relationships and raw technical skills of the sport, rather than results as a team.

With adults it was the opposite, we were an amateur team, however, we cared about results, which without coaching and nurturing the team culture is impossible anyway.

As a manager, I planned every single training session. I planned the matches and the pre-matches presentation. As a coach, I did my best to help my players improve their fitness, understanding of the game, and improve their movements and skills, though I focused less on skills, not because you can’t improve that, because the highest impact on the team at the time was to make sure that we all followed our game plan, were in top fitness capacity and that we behaved as a coordinated team on the field. Time is finite after all.

Game plans are a dime a dozen. There are many ways in which you can win. You can win being defensive, playing the counter-attack, or you can win playing an attacking style. There’s no shortage of examples of teams winning one way or another.

What matters is two things: above all, the talents of your team, and secondarily the ability of the coach to convince the players to follow the game plan. If your team has great defensive players, playing a great defensive game, makes sense. Optimizing for what you have is the most rational way to approach the “how to play” problem.

Similarly, with training, there are many methodologies, each of them have their merits, there doesn’t exist one that’s the end-be-all of training methods, however, whichever helps me and my players achieve our goals is the best one, and that might change depending on the context.

A few key takeaways:

Show and tell

When explaining things to players, visually showing them, rather than using words was way more effective.

Ruts are bound to happen

In my first season with our adult soccer team, I only lost three games out of 15 or so that we played. It hurt when it happened and almost broke the team, we were used to winning, after that we fell into a rut, and winning became hard.

Winning is important for morale, but managing losses is key for team-building. Navigating the down moments together as a team, and using that as fuel for motivation is super important.

Trust is earned not given

As a coach and manager, you need to earn the trust of your players because if they don’t trust you, they won’t put into practice your game plan, and they’ll not play like a team. Instead, it will be like a dysfunctional family. The tricky part is that you don’t need to convince one or two, you need to convince the whole team, even people that might not be on the team but play supporting roles, like the team delegate. That’s why professional coaches usually bring their full-on team when they go to other clubs.

Have fun

This period of my life was one of my happiest. I had a lot of fun, and neither of these activities had anything to do with money, as I did it for free. The day-to-day is something that I miss to this day. Players also should have fun in the field, many at times were anxious and angry, however, it’s really hard for players to be in a state of flow and playing their best if they feel as if they have to win, the added pressure works well for some, but rarely for the majority. Going to the field with the idea of having fun will yield more productive results.

The score takes care of itself

The book with this title was highly influential in the way I prepared my sessions and competitive matches. I did my best to always communicate to my players what I wanted of them in terms of tactics in the field, but above all, I asked them to be happy and have fun in the field, which is counter-intuitive but super important. The best players in the world always look like they’re having fun: Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi, Neymar, etc.

Very often something off-script will happen

As a coach and manager, I wanted to control as much as possible but in reality, the nature of the game doesn’t allow for that. Planning for eventualities is hard, however, understanding that off-script situations during the game are bound to happen and preparing your players for the unknown is key to deal with this situation. Being okay with this will make all the difference in the world.