Posted by There is a joke in Germany that the hardest job in the country is the head coach of the national football team. Every time the team plays a match there are 60,000+ people in the stadium all of whom think they would do a better job1. Something similar applies in sports, and not only among spectators and fans. Officials and management within various sports do too. I have heard word for word from one club director that they could do a better job then me. I have sat across from one who was literally shaking with emotion utterly convinced I was completely wrong and they knew better2. The ones who have been coaches are often the worst. Although I did work with one ex-coach who was conspicuously different, i.e. supportive. When I asked why, they replied that they knew exactly how hard it is to be a coach.
At the professional level coaching entails managing so many different areas that what is ‘right’ one day can be ‘wrong’ the next. And a ‘good’ coach in one club can be a ‘bad’ coach in another. As Jonathon Wilson3, the prominent football journalist, recently wrote4, “It’s horses for courses but the course keeps on changing.” My favourite story about the paradox of coaching is a quote from Carlo Ancelotti5:
“They hire me to be kind and calm with the players and then at the first sign of trouble along the way that’s the very characteristic they point to as the problem.”
Of course most working coaches don’t have the same issues as coaches in professional sport. Many of them ‘just’ have to organise a practice that helps their team and players get better. Pick an appropriate drill, give appropriate feedback and Bob’s you’re uncle, not that hard at all. Learning styles may (or more likely may not) be a real thing, but what is indisputable is that individuals have preferences on what makes them feel like they are learning and improving and preparing themselves for performance. Many of these preferences are based on past experiences, and may not be research based, or even rational. A coaching colleague recently sought feedback from their team on how to improve practice. From within the group they received two different sets of recommendations that were directly contradictory. One player suggested one thing, another player suggested the exact opposite. Now that coach has three options; make one player feel unhappy and unheard, make the other player feel unhappy and unheard, or some form of compromise that potentially makes both players feel unhappy and unheard. Coaching is hard.
Coaching is hard because there is no recipe. It involves constant toggling between theory and practice. There are courses, and seminars, and influencers and bloggers6 who will tell they have a recipe, but anyone who tells you that is lying. Or trying to sell you something7. The dirty secret of coaching is that no one knows what the right thing is until after the event.
Coaching is hard.
- I am pretty sure there is a version of this joke in nearly every country, I just heard it first in Germany. ↩︎
- The point of contention was that I had not sufficiently punished a team for a series of bad performances arguing that punishment at this point of the season would do more harm than good. After the meeting the team went on a long winning streak and a deep playoff run. After the season the coach had the opportunity to seek a new challenge. ↩︎
- For the eagle eyed, Coach Beard in Ted Lasso was often seen reading the book ‘Inverting the Pyramid’, by Jonathon Wilson. ↩︎
- https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/may/09/football-manager-market-roberto-de-zerbi-vitor-pereira ↩︎
- …who turns out to be not nearly as grizzled as I had once imagined. https://marklebedew.com/2014/07/10/the-passion-of-the-grizzled/ ↩︎
- Not me obviously ↩︎
- https://marklebedew.com/2021/08/26/coach-education-resources/ ↩︎
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