I wrote a whole chapter of my book about four types of coach I think get in the way of player development, and I only wrote it honestly because I’ve been all four of them myself at different points in my career.
None of the four are bad people making bad-faith decisions. That’s what makes them worth naming, because none of them feel like a mistake from the inside.
The Copy-Paste Coach
This is the one I admit to most readily. In my younger days I used to copy sessions from social media without real context, no understanding of whether they actually fit my team, just that they looked good online. My learning was fragmented because I was collecting exercises, not building understanding.
The tell isn’t that you use other people’s sessions, everyone does. It’s whether you can explain why a session works before you run it, or whether “it looked good on Instagram” is the actual reason.
The Closed Coach
This coach has found one way of doing things and struggles to consider any other. You’ll recognise it in the comment-section version: “games based only,” “unopposed training is dangerous,” “the research says.” The method becomes the identity, and alternatives start to feel like a personal attack rather than a different tool.
The tell: do you dismiss other approaches because you’ve had success your way, or because you’ve genuinely tested the alternative and found it wanting?
The Results-First Coach
I’ve lived this one too. Especially early on, I felt pressure to play the strongest team to win, and I gave in to it. The players who got benched to protect results eventually left the team. Short-term wins, long-term losses, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to see the pattern clearly.
The tell: are your team-selection and tactical decisions driven by what develops every player, or by what wins Saturday’s match specifically.
The Social Media Coach
This coach designs sessions for how they look on camera, not what they actually develop. Training that looks slicker on video than it feels for the players running it. Equipment and drills chosen because they’re impressive, not because they’re effective.
The tell: would this session survive with no camera present at all.
Why All Four Produce The Same Outcome
Different as they sound, all four traps land in the same place: player development left to chance. Some players thrive despite the inconsistency. Others plateau and nobody quite understands why. None of the four coaches are being dishonest. They’re just not asking the one genuinely hard question: could I be part of the problem?
That question is difficult precisely because none of the four traps feel like traps from inside them. Copy-Paste coaching feels like resourcefulness. Results-First feels like caring about winning, which feels like caring about the team. Recognising your own version of it is the actual work, not memorising the four labels.
Worth Asking Yourself Honestly
Which of the four sounds most like you right now, not five years ago, now. If you can’t answer that quickly, that’s worth sitting with. I still catch myself slipping toward one of these, usually Results-First under pressure from a tight season, and naming it is what lets me correct course before it becomes a pattern rather than a single bad decision.
The full chapter, with more detail on each trap, is in the book, The Rise of the Dogmatic Football Coach, and the systematic session planning that helps avoid all four is what the Football Coaching Academy is built around.