Daily life in a professional football club
Wexford’s Jason Goodison, an intern with Norwich City, goes behind the scenes
THE RUMBLING groan of a tractor engine sounds remarkably like south county Wexford.
Sitting alone in my new workplace on a warm summer day, the noise begins to get consistently louder, as if it’s crawling through the parking lot located just outside the office door. I walk out onto the stairway to take a closer look and then I see it: Armageddon.
As if a scene taken directly from M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’, an impenetrably thick wave of crop dust rising from the newly-harvested field right beside Colney training ground cascades with the wind into the home of Norwich City Football Club.
Engulfing every office with an open window or door, every pitch or 3G area, not to mention Darren Huckerby’s open roof convertible.
Colney sits well outside the bustling city of Norwich and as you may gather is surrounded largely by farmland, so the ex-Norwich and Man City striker learned the hard way. This was my initial observation when I first visited Colney back in June, its location away from prying eyes.
Getting to Colney then had been the hard part; it had been the end result of twelve frustrating months sending letters, CV’s and e-mails to just about every club in the British Isles. However, the wait had been worthwhile and the frustrations fell away when I was offered a year-long work placement at one of the country’s most impressive coaching programmes.
Norwich had recently retained its ‘Category 1’ academy status in an audit. Doing so, with their biggest ever points tally, effectively meant that the academy has never been in a better place. It was a perfect time to enter the fray.
Norwich City is a club with strong Irish links. Memory takes you back to the recent European Championship in June, when two Canaries in Wes Hoolahan and Robbie Brady linked up to fire Ireland into the knockout stages of a major tournament for the first time since 2002. Seeing them in and around the training ground every day acts as a constant reminder.
Ex-Ireland goalkeeper Dean Kiely is another Irishman who walks the halls of Colney. Working as the first team goalkeeping coach, he recently re-emerged into the spotlight when his adapted ‘spikeball’ drill, filmed on a drone in Colney, went viral.
I was lucky enough to witness that moment live, albeit from afar. It was one of those ‘I was there’ moments.
All of my work hasn’t been done just in Colney, as away trips to top academies like Liverpool, Chelsea and Wolverhampton Wanderers have also been highlights of my time so far. The money being invested in youth by these clubs is unimaginable.
Cobham training ground in particular, which houses Chelsea’s academy and first team, is a picture of wealth, encapsulated by an enormous lake at the heart of their vast complex and what seems like hundreds of carpet-like pitches sprawling out from it.
You get an immediate sense of a club’s identity when you spend time in their academy. Chelsea’s is lush and extravagant, while Liverpool has more of a family vibe. Every club has a different identity, and nobody is necessarily right or wrong.
When you don’t have the luxury of being funded by billionaires from the United Arab Emirates or rich American businessmen, you have to be smarter than those who are in order to compete. The absence of wads of money means some football clubs need to be innovative, and clubs like Norwich must lead the field in this scientific and methodical world.
Norwich have certainly done that in recent years, being one of the leading pioneers in the ‘biobanding’ surge, the practice of grouping children by physical maturity rather than date of birth.
Football has changed a lot in the last 15 years, in many ways. Investments from companies like Sky have created a surge of capital to improve facilities, technology and almost every aspect of the football environment.
However, it has needed the impact from some famous names in the coaching world, including basketball coaches John Wooden and Phil Jackson, to propel the art of player development to the next level. An obvious migration in coaching style from autocratic to democratic is visible wherever you go.
From academy to academy, players are being allowed to make their own decisions and their own mistakes with a new generation of deeper, smarter-thinking coaches leading the ‘guided learning’ revolution.
A professional football environment is a constantly turning wheel with many relevant cogs. Coaches, analysts, sports scientists, physio’s and more, all work hand in hand in the hope of producing the next Messi or for the more pressing job of preparing their teams for the weekend’s fixtures.
Football is not your average 9 to 5 with weekends off. It is early mornings and late nights, six times a week. It is a massive commitment with the hopes of young children resting firmly on your shoulders.
But, it is addictive. It is football 24/7 and for some, myself included, this could not be far from the dream.
The player-centred approach which allows academy products to flourish not only as a footballer, but as a human being, is being explored nationwide. Clubs have begun to embrace the harsh reality of life after football as only a small minority of their academy players will ever become a professional player.
An idea embraced by City to act on that has been the ‘player-led’ theme. In a unique way of building players’ confidence and social skills, they are tasked with being the manager on ‘player-led match night’. They make the decisions. Who starts, what formation and what style they play are decisions all to be made by the player.
Once they’ve decided on these they must then communicate that information to their team-mates, and deal with any questions or conflict which may arise because of these decisions. To add to the pressure, they are often faced with the challenge of trying to ignore me as I point a video camera in their face as I document their every move.
As much as it is interesting for us as coaches, it is also beneficial for the players. To be exposed to such situations is somewhat unique.
It also has echoes of the past, when children playing football in the streets, solving whatever problems arose by themselves, was an everyday occurrence. It’s an event nearly unheard of in the modern world but still so key for children’s social skills.
Norwich’s coaching staff is somewhat of a gold standard line-up. The wealth of experience gained from ex-professionals including Darren Huckerby, Alan Neilson, Matt Gill and Adrian Forbes is invaluable. With their lives being shaped by the game, their outlook is unique.
Their stories and experiences are like gold dust for somebody like me who has never experienced that life. With experiences like theirs, it is obvious to see why so many ex-professionals take the coaching route upon retirement.
Apart from working alongside a star-studded cast, my days are as varied and enjoyable as possible. The unique role of an intern gives me the opportunity to be creative and try to come up with my own ideas whilst still having responsibilities linked to almost all of the academy teams, from Under-9s to Under-23s.
Daily roles include compiling training data for our Under-18 squad, which we use to monitor the load and intensity of each session. Coaching in the ‘pre-academy’ and ‘futures’ groups is also common.
‘Futures’ are categorised as late developers born in the final three months of the year who may be overlooked due to a maturation bias called Relative Age Effect (R.A.E.).
Collecting stats and making stats reports can be an interesting area when attempting to identify trends and reoccurrences, while I tend to clock up multiple hours each week filming or just being around academy training sessions.
Each experience has been as invaluable as the next, and with every different experience I understand more and more what it takes to be a part of these environments and inevitably, what it takes to get to the top.