I recently came across a fascinating report into some of the top football academies across Europe.
The ECA Study on Youth Academies looks at the main trends across these academies focusing on:
- vision and objectives
- organisation
- education and scouting
- infrastructure
- technical content and coaching
- finance and productivity.
Depending on your own interests, you're likely to focus on different parts of the report, but I was most interested in the coaching aspects and in particular the required characteristics of a coach in the different academies.
Required characteristics
For me, one of the most interesting aspects of coaching is whether a high level sporting background is valuable for coaching.
I recently wrote a blog about this and suggested that coaches with representative-level playing experience were more likely to commit to long term coaching.
However, as several people pointed out, this doesn’t necessarily mean they will make good coaches!
In the report I noticed that different clubs seemed to have a different opinion on the role of ex-players in coaching.
Six of the ten explicitly stated that one of the required characteristics for academy coaches was to be an ex-player, however Barcelona, Dynamo Zagreb and Bayern Munich (to some extent) did not feel the need to employ ex-players as coaches. You can see the full breakdown at the end of this blog.
Required characteristics of a coach by academy
Ajax: Ex-player with lots of experience at high level (except for under 10s).
Arsenal: Ex-player with significant experience at high level.
Barcelona: Coaches are usually very young and do not necessarily have past experience at high levels.
Bayern Munich: In the younger age group (u8-u12) mostly sport students and adults with pedagogical background and at least UEFA B licence; from U-13 mostly ex-players or coaches with significant youth experience and all UEFA Pro-Level-Licence.
Inter Milan: Quality, receive specific information from the top and have to respect it.
Levadia Tallin: Mainly ex-players, also young coaches.
Dynamo Zagreb: High level of intelligence, stable personality, ability to transfer knowledge, feeling for the game, not necessarily a former top player.
Lens: A former Lens player with a minimum of coaching experience.
Standard Liege: The ideal coach is an ex-football player with a lot of experience at a high level but he must be qualified and he must be the holder of a diploma.
Sporting Portugal: Ex-players at several levels with academic background.