Academy Coach Interview with Phil Roscoe, Head of Education & Welfare at Liverpool FC.

SIQ: If you had to prioritise the following roles of a coach being winning, fun, developing a player, and developing the person,  what order would you put those in? .

PR: I think a lot of them come hand in hand. I really do,  I think that for me, the developing the player thing is the most important thing, because if that’s right, everything else to me will follow. I really do.

I think that with regards to youth development in the ages that you talked about, I think that if you’re developing a player and it’s done the way that you want it to be done, it’s in a structured discipline, hard working environment, and if you’re looking at those areas, in that area, so when you’re developing players that in life, if you’re disciplined, hard working, put everything into it, then you’re going to develop as a person. So I think that if you get that development of the player right, the development of the person will come with that.

The fun element, again if you were to speak to a player and you were to say “do you want to go and play cowboys and Indians with a football, or do you want to learn how to, I don’t know, how to play off from the back, do you want to learn how to make better runs from midfield”, those types of things, he would say the latter. He would say that he wants to develop more as a player, that way.

So the fun element, I think the older a player gets, comes from yeah, the training is exciting, it’s demanding and they’ll get fun from that, but the fun maybe becomes a little bit more round the boundaries, the outskirts of it before a session, in the breaks of the session, after a session, because the main content for me, the development of the player is where the business gets done, and I think that as we talked about before, the winning mentality and winning, if you go out to win every game as a coach, I think sometimes what happens there, is because you send your team out to win, you lose sight of in the end what’s the overall goal.

If the whole team goes into the first team and develops through the years, then he’s done fantastic, but it’s very difficult for that to happen. So you’re only really talking about one or two individuals, so you may have a team that loses every game, but there’s an individual in it who has got the winning mentality and he’s got the ability to progress to the first team. You may have a team that wins every game but no one gets through.

So in the end, all those things that you’re working on, you want them to win, but as a coach, if you’re focused on winning, it detracts a little bit from what the overall aim of everything is, and that’s not the game that you play for the under 14s against, I don’t know, Man United. It’s the game that they’re playing for Man United in the premier league. That’s the goal, the ultimate goal. It’s getting them to there.

So I would rank it as developing as a player, developing as a person, fun, and winning, but for me it’s not a clear defined one, two, three, four.

SIQ: Academies or youth development in Britain has been criticised for not developing talented footballers when we compare to  Spain, Holland, Brazil etc. If that’s true, what would you put that down to?

PR: I think when you talk about a country like Brazil, you’re talking about a country that in areas, there’s a lot of poverty, and I think that what the children in our country are able to do at a young age compared to others are able to do in Brazil is greater, this means the need for a boy to go out in Brazil and play football and train and practice is greater. In countries such as Spain and Holland, particularly the schooling, academically it’s more structured to early starts and early finishes. The way their school academically pans out, you are able to get the boys earlier in the afternoons for greater practice. This means that from a young age from certain countries young players possibly can have greater focus on why they need to become a player (The internal rewards) and also due to the issues talked about above they are able to have more opportunities to practice with the ball so at the young and crucial ages for technical development they are blessed with greater opportunities to practice.

When you also talk about countries like Spain and Holland, you naturally think of Barcelona and Ajax. You cannot forget though that these clubs in these countries have a massive recruit zone compared to an area such as the North West of England where you have a significant presence of Premier League clubs all vying for the elite players. How does this effect the development of young English players? Well if you’ve got a talented school child and you put him in a class with other students who are okay, he will progress, but if you put him in a classroom which is full of children who are academically better or at the same level as him, he will obviously become more academically bright, because those children will challenge him. He will have to raise his game to live in that classroom environment, and it’s exactly the same on the football pitch. In the clubs highlighted such as Barcelona and Ajax they arguably because of the area they are able to recruit from and the lack of competition to do so locally are able to have the best players training with each other which only improves the level of competency of the player.

SIQ: What are your initial thoughts on the EPPP proposal from how it may help to develop players?

PR: I think it’s a good idea. I really do. I think it adds quite a privileged position because I’m at a club which is in the premier league, and because of that, you may have the ability to be able to finance your project around your football more than you would do maybe if you were a division two club where it’s not seen as a greater priority, or you just haven’t got the finances to get to where you need to be in the EPPP proposal.

I think that it will mean in the end that the best players will play with the best players if it works out the way that the proposal wants it to, which again can only be proved as we talked about in Spain, it can only be good for English football and the club that the player’s going to.

I think that if you’ve got a talented school child and you put him in a class with other students who are okay, he will progress, but if you put him in a classroom which is full of children who are academically better or at the same level as him, he will obviously become more academically bright, because those children will challenge him. He will have to raise his game to live in that classroom environment, and it’s exactly the same on the football pitch.

I think that facilities at clubs are fantastic anyway. I really do. I think that we go to some clubs and their facilities are better than our in terms of what they’ve got, in terms of pitches and so on, but you can have all the facilities in the world, but it’s being able to make sure that you’ve got the best players and they’re being coached by the correct coaches and coached the correct way.

And I think that if anything comes out of it, I think it’s, we’ve got something like, I think it’s over 38 academies now, if you grade those academies and then obviously centres of excellence after that, if you grade those academies to grade one, grade two, grade three, grade four, and you’re a grade one academy, then it will go from being 38 plus to maybe, and this is just me guessing now, to maybe 10 to 12, maybe 14.

So that naturally says that for us to become or for a club to become a criteria one club, they can’t just become one. They’ve got to raise the levels again, so all the levels just get raised, and I think for a child who’s a talented footballer; that can only help them. I really do, and I think that if some clubs who maybe can’t become a category one, category two, maybe category three club, maybe a category four club who doesn’t have a centre of excellence, just run a youth team, then surely you’re looking out even more intently then for players who’ve been released from other clubs to run your youth team.

So I think again, the players who don’t make the level at category one, category two clubs, the avenues open up even more for them in lesser clubs, in those clubs if I don’t think it’s worth running a nine to 16s programme, then I would run an under 16s team that would potentially just house players who have been released or who are going to be released, and then the chances of them getting a trial, getting a contract, scholarship wise or professionally at my club would surely increase, and I just think that the knock on effects would be great.

Obviously there’s issues around compensation, and I think that here, if it’s not agreed between two clubs it can go to tribunal, and that figure can escalated quite highly, so the initial payment that a club would receive if any other club came and bought the player, at the moment is quite high, but I’m sure with the proposals that the premier league have got in place with regards to add ons and sell on clauses and so on, if that player gets to where we all want him to get to, the rewards for a club that has sold them will be greater anyway. I really do.

SIQ: If you could change one thing about existing youth development in football in the UK, what would you go for?

PR: The increased chance of employing more coaches and support staff to work with specific age groups within an academy. For example a full time coach at under 12, 13, 14 and so on. This would mean that the focus on each group by the full time coach would allow for further support for the players both on the field technically and tactically but also off the field from an educational, welfare and mental point of view supporting staff that are already in place in these areas in guiding the players to become the best player and person they can be. These further opportunities will also raise the standards of coaching within the country as the expectations of clubs to employ the best coaches to work with the best children will see the emphasis on quality rise and also the chance to progress for coaches who gain their badges, experience, work through the age groups etc more realistic.