A UEFA B coach with over twenty years of experience once said to me, honestly, that no matter how experienced or qualified you are, it doesn’t matter, you still make the same mistakes over and over sometimes. I’ve found that to be true of my own coaching more than I’d like.
Here are the real ones, not the tidy hindsight version.
Giving In To Parent Pressure
Especially early on, I felt pressure to play my strongest team to win matches. I gave in to it more than once. The players who got benched to protect results eventually left the team.
Short-term wins, long-term losses. It’s exactly the Results-First trap I later wrote about in the book, and I lived it before I named it. Someone in our academy once challenged me with a version of this that changed how I think about it permanently: if Atletico Madrid had won the league by one point, and the player who scored the winning goal had been left on the bench at eight years old by a coach chasing wins, Atletico wouldn’t have won the league. You don’t know which of your quiet, less-used players is the one who matters five years from now.
Talking Too Much
This was a real, real problem in my early days. Players’ eyes would glaze over. Information wasn’t landing, it was just noise they had to sit through before they got to play.
I’m honestly still not sure I’ve fully solved it. I think I’m the world’s worst at explaining, if I’m being fair to myself. What’s changed is the discipline around it: keep instructions to around 20 seconds, get in and get out, start with free play and layer the rules up gradually rather than front-loading everything before a ball’s been kicked.
Trying To Solve Everything Alone
For a long stretch, I tried to solve every coaching problem myself, and took too much of my direction from scattered advice on social media, which is a bad combination. One post says no drills, just principles. The next says 20 drills. The one after that says 200. It’s confusing even for an experienced coach, and it’s the central problem the book ended up being about.
What actually helped was building something systematic for myself first, rather than chasing whatever the loudest voice online was saying that week. That personal system eventually became the Football Coaching Academy.
Three Books That Actually Changed How I Coach
Not a mistake exactly, but a genuine gap: for years I hadn’t read the material that would have shortened the learning curve considerably.
Doug Lemov’s The Coach’s Guide to Teaching moved my sessions from lecturing to scaffolding, questions instead of telling. David Baird’s Scoreboard Soccer webinar was, in his words, “such a simple concept that makes so much sense” that I became a Scoreboard Soccer Coach Educator off the back of it. Tom Byer’s Football Starts at Home was the same kind of simple, obvious-once-you-see-it idea, and Tom later presented to our community three times.
None of these fixed everything overnight. But they’re the closest thing I have to “wish I’d read this on day one.”
Burnout Nobody Warns You About
Running 360TFT alongside my other work became, in my own words, a full time job inside another full time job. I got complacent with my own coach education because there wasn’t time left for it. I was, and to some extent still am, running on very little sleep.
I don’t have a tidy resolution to offer here. Moving more of the coaching resources online made it more manageable, but the honest answer is that burnout in this line of work is a real risk, not a hypothetical one, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.
What I’d Actually Tell A Newer Coach
Not “here’s the wisdom I wish I’d had,” because most of it I still catch myself getting wrong occasionally. More: expect to make these mistakes, because experience and qualifications reduce them, they don’t remove them. The Atletico question is worth asking yourself honestly at least once a season. The instinct to over-explain is worth fighting every single session. And you don’t have to work it all out alone, scattered and unsupported, the way I tried to for years.
If you want a shortcut on that last one specifically, that’s what the Football Coaching Academy is for, nearly 1,600 coaches who’ve made a lot of these same mistakes and are fairly open about it.