We'll add my playing career, so I was, yeah, 13 years as
a player and I came towards the end of it thinking
that the conventional coaching path
I needed to sort of do a bit more. I couldn't just rely on
my illustrious playing career,
I needed to try and learn to be a coach and learn to how to
manage and communicate with people.
So I Enrolled in a teaching qualification and I got a job
working in the higher education sector as a football
development manager. So coaching the students.
So that ended up with essentially a five-year period
of learning developing making mistakes in a relatively safe
environment. So taking my
experiences as a footballer
and trying to put some sort of
theory and practice on to it in a way that I could,
I could do without, like I said, making too many mistakes
and losing my job.
I so connected with his vision with Daniels Vision, he wanted
to
you know, essentially have fun on the pitch. He wanted to
create an environment that was enjoyable,
where people where it was different, where people could
feel that they were improving and feel part of something and
that sort of
picked a few boxes for me. In terms of what I thought that
the coaching job was was about
it sounded like a good opportunity. The opportunities
in England were So many because I'd been working in the higher
education sector for five years. So you're out
the professional game. So this was the chance. It was the fortius
really football. That was my opportunity.
The most important thing, I think from our perspective is
a club, we wanted to try to have that identity that we could all
work towards that we could all believe in.
And then it's, yeah, if you're lucky enough, that you can get
some results momentum can build belief builds. You know,
extraordinary things can be done
with sort of Ordinary People.
We couldn't compete on a conventional terms with the
Swedish elite football because we haven't got the money, we've
got the tradition with the hissing, you know, we had to do
some things about Player Development,
and being a little bit different, not better or worse.
Just just
be innocent.
We sort of look for more, maybe more technical players, smaller
players less for you know, physically challenged but I've
got attributes that can help in other ways to trying to fit
together, the team that that yeah, the conventional football
doesn't value as much because ultimately, if they did then we
could get the
if you can align the qualities that the people that are coming
in with the overall vision of how we want to
do it, then I think players have sort of bought in
and prepare to do a little bit extra for that because they
think it's a bit of a second chance for them.
And they're probably done more than maybe what they thought
they could.
I guess you've got to take a risk, you've got to do
something a little bit different, you've got to be
creative, how you do it? Of course, that's dependent on the
context. That's dependent on the resources, you have and
an environment you go into which you have to respect. But
I think the
role of the coach or the role of the, the sort of
the leader on the football perspective is still
fundamentally to help players get better and help the team
come together and try and win football matches.