Interview with Alan Irvine, Academy Manager at Everton FC

 

SIQ: In terms of an academy coach, I wonder if you could prioritise and rank the following four coaching priorities, winning, fun, developing a player and developing the person.

AL: Well I don’t find that very difficult to answer. I’ve got to be honest, very much the first thing, no the first two would be developing the player and developing the person. They’re absolutely huge. That’s what the job’s all about, and winning ranks a very, very low fourth in the early development of a player. That is not what the job’s all about as far as I’m concerned. The job is about developing players, developing people who are going to be the right ones to make progress..

At the youngest ages fun is always vitally important, because they’ve got to want to come back again, and they’ve got to go away from sessions saying “I enjoyed that and I’m looking forward to going back tomorrow”, so the fun element should never disappear.

They should always enjoy coming to coaching sessions, but obviously as they get that bit older, then it’s less about having a bit of fun and more about what they learn, but the only result we’re looking for at the end of it all is that we get players who play in our first team. That’s the result I’m looking for at Academy level. Learning to win is the final step in the development of young players.

We could win every game all season at under 18 level because we have a strong team, but not get a player through, and to some extent one or two of our teams are a little bit like that. We’ve got good, well-organised teams, but I’d much rather have two or three very good individuals within a poor team than have a whole load of average players within a strong team.

 

SIQ:  There’s also a perception that in the UK we haven’t developed talented footballers sort of comparable to other countries such as say Spain at the moment, but also Holland, Brazil etc. Is that a fair perception, and if it is, what are your thoughts on why that hasn’t happened?

AL: I think it’s probably a fair perception in some ways. I think everybody’s trying to be like Spain at the moment. A number of years ago, when I started out in coaching, it was Ajax, then it was France in the late 1990s, but of course everybody now wants to be like Barcelona. Clearly that’s not easy to do or we would all be doing it.

I think it’s probably a fair point, and it’s a strange one for me. I’ve been out of academy football for 10 years, and having come back into it, I’m surprised and very disappointed to hear many people saying the same things; that our players aren’t as technically gifted as the players in Spain. 10 years ago it was the players in Holland and France.

The Academy system in England started in 1998, so surely we should be producing technically gifted players by now. At the younger ages I think we might be producing technically capable players, and I’m not sure that there’s a massive difference between one of our best under 10 boys, and one of the best under 10 Spanish players. In actual fact when our young ones go to tournaments abroad, they do extremely well.

Now is that because of technical qualities or is it because of our mentality and our competitive nature. It’s probably linked to the competitive nature. I think we have a poor attitude to practice, but that is offset to some extent by our attitude to competition. You try and put on a technical session for young lads in this country and one of the questions they keep asking is “when are we going to have a game?”

Everything seems to revolve around playing a game, and so we may have to be clever enough to get the technical work done possibly in more opposed practices that are more game-like. We don’t have the same mentality as some of the foreign players; well we’re going to do a session on receiving the ball with our left foot for 20 minutes. We don’t seem to be keen on that idea. We seem to need to get into some kind of competitive element, so perhaps that’s one of the skills that the coaches need to learn.

I think we also cause ourselves a problem to be honest, because I think that a lot of our coaches of children are more focused on winning rather than development. I’m talking about coaches from kids’ Sunday teams right through to academy level. There are coaches who think that everything’s perfect if they win, and everything’s wrong if they lose, and going back to the first question, I believe that if you get the development right, you’ll actually win games anyway in time.

 

SIQ: The next question’s about the elite player performance plan (EPPP), and I know there’s lots of elements to it and we haven’t got the scope to talk about it all, but I would like your views on how you think that might impact academies’ abilities or processes to produce elite players.

AL: Well first of all I think it’s quite simply best practice. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t agree with absolutely everything that’s written in it, but I think by and large it’s good practice. It’s the right way that we should be doing things. It’s making people more accountable. It’s certainly making academies perhaps more measurable and more transparent, and it’s actually saying to people “well you’ve got to actually deliver what you say you’re going to deliver”, and from my own point of view, it’s come at a fantastic time.

It’s causing me a great deal of work and unfortunately keeping me off the training ground far too often at this moment, which is disappointing for me personally as I’m here to coach. I want to coach mornings, afternoons and evenings, but right now I’m putting the structure in place to try and get Category 1 Status for our Academy. We have a good chance of achieving that but I certainly don’t think it is a foregone conclusion.

There’s a lot of work to be done. We do some things well and we do some things not so well, and obviously it’s important that we do everything well enough to make sure that we get category one first of all, and that we then continually try to improve. I think the EPPP is simply saying to people this is what should be done, now go and do it. I’m all in favour of it, and I think that any club which does all of the things that the EPPP is asking them to do will develop more players.

 

SIQ: If you could change one thing about youth development in football in the UK, what would that one thing be?

AL: Change the attitude of all the coaches involved in youth development. Make sure that people really do put the development of players before winning a game. That would be the biggest thing for me without any question.

Coaches say “well results aren’t important”, and then I watch them changing when they lose a goal and that disappoints me. I see the reaction of a lot of coaches when their team loses a goal. I see very relaxed people on touch lines while they’re winning games, but I see people changing dramatically, and it’s been very interesting coming back into this after spending 10 years in first team football and really being in a position where you do need to win, and it’s not about development anymore.

At first team level you have to win to stay in the job. It’s not about how well we played. It’s about winning the game. We all want to win with style of course, but it’s really about the three points at the end the day. At that level you move on very quickly to the next game. If you lose it is little consolation that the team played well, and that is soon forgotten by the supporters, the board and the media. However at academy level the level of performance is more important than the result, so the mentality of the coaches would be the biggest thing that I would change.

And don’t get me wrong on this Gareth. I want us to win games, but I want us to win games for a different reason. I want us to win games because I want the players, I want the parents, I want the coaches to all believe in the development programme, and sometimes you need to win some games in order to do that, but my belief is that develop the players first and the games will be won later.

And of course there does come a point again as you get older that it changes. The balance tilts from fun at the young end to learning to win at the top end of the academy, so there are things that our full time boys have to learn about winning before they go on to the first team, because if that’s the first time that they have to learn how to win, then it’s probably too late.

I believe our job in the academy is to prepare the players that get right through to the first team for everything that might happen, and that includes going into that environment where yeah, “today lads you’ve got to win”.

 

SIQ: What are the attributes of an excellent youth development coach, and what do you look for in your staff working in the academies.

AL: Well first of all, before I start talking about the technical side of things, top coaches must have enthusiasm, passion, commitment, attention to detail and a terrific work ethic. I want coaches at our Academy who don’t have a huge ego and who are totally focussed on and dedicated to helping our players to improve.

And then of course they must have good technical knowledge and an understanding of how to teach players of the age that they’re working with. I’ll be perfectly honest Gareth, there are people in our Academy who are much, much better at coaching our under eights than I am, and I wouldn’t even dream of trying to tell them how to do their job. You need different skills and a different approach to be an under eights’ coach than to be an under 18s coach.

One of the problems I see is that too many coaches of young boys want to be like Jose Mourinho, even though they’re coaching little boys, and I think “well they are not ready to play the kind of game that a Jose Mourinho wants them to play”.

So I don’t want coaches who try to be like Jose Mourinho. If you are coaching children, become an expert at coaching the age group you’re working with. It’s only at the older end, in the Professional Development Phase of our Academy, that I am looking for coaches who work like Jose Mourinho. In the Foundation and Youth Development Phases, coaches have to have a different approach.

So it’s very much having the right qualities to work with the group of players that you’re working with. Everybody that we bring in is a qualified coach. Most of our coaches are UEFA A at least already. Only one or two of them are not UEFA A, and they’re working towards that at this moment, so in terms of being coaches, well they’re highly qualified, but it’s what they’re like as individuals, what they’re like as people that is more important. That’s what separates the good coach at different age groups from a poor coach in my opinion.