Coaches ask me some version of this fairly regularly: how do I make money from football, either as a coach or by building something like the Football Coaching Academy. I don’t have a tidy answer, because my own path didn’t have a plan behind it.
How It Actually Started For Me
My son’s team lost their coach and was stuck without one. I stepped in with no qualifications and no coaching experience. I just showed up because the team needed someone and I was there.
That’s the whole origin story. From that point: my UEFA B, two academies founded, over a thousand players coached, more than 1,500 coaches educated through FCA, a book written, and AI tools now used by thousands of coaches. None of it was planned out in advance. It built, slowly, on top of the last thing.
Qualifications Are Not The Gate You Think They Are
I’ve been open about my view on the coach education system: a lot of it is, frankly, a money making machine. Badges cost more than they should, and having them doesn’t correlate cleanly with being a good coach. Some of the best coaches I know have the lowest qualifications. Some of the worst have the highest.
That’s not an argument against getting qualified. Structured environments like academies will usually require a minimum badge level before they’ll even talk to you about paid work. But it is an argument against believing the badge is the thing that gets you there.
Brian, one of our US-based FCA members, has said plainly that he thinks the USSF coaching certificates in America “are not worth the money. It’s just a box you need to check.” Ross, in Ireland, has been stuck waiting on his National Coaching Certificate because his club can’t fund it, which tells you something about how much the system itself gets in coaches’ way even when they want to progress properly.
What Actually Builds A Reputation
Nobody pays an unknown coach a premium rate. That part is not negotiable. Whatever path you’re on, whether that’s a paid academy role, private sessions, or building something like FootballGPT or the Academy, the groundwork is the same: show up consistently, get genuinely good, and let the results speak before you ask anyone to pay for them.
I built FCA the same way. It was quiet for a long time when it started. I had to give a lot away for free before anyone trusted it was worth paying for. People were sceptical, understandably, because the space is full of people selling things that don’t work. It grew from a few hundred members to over 1,500 because the free material held up, not because of a launch campaign.
The Honest Version
If you’re asking me how to turn coaching into an income, my honest answer is: I don’t think there’s a fast version of this that works. Every real example I can point to, including my own, started as unpaid work with no guarantee it would lead anywhere.
What I’d actually say to a coach asking this is closer to what I’d have needed to hear myself at the start: keep coaching well where you already are. Build something real before you try to sell it. The rest tends to follow, slower than you’d like, but it does follow.
If you want to see what that eventually built, it’s the Football Coaching Academy, now with nearly 1,600 coaches in it, most of whom are exactly where I was when I started: volunteering, learning, with no plan beyond getting better at the next session.