Does Your Coaching Licence Actually Develop You? Three Things the System Gets Wrong

6 min read · March 2026

Welcome to the first edition of Football Academy Intelligence.

I'm Hassan Nobeeboccus, The Football Ghostwriter. I ghostwrite educational content and thought leadership for academy directors, coaching education leads and development professionals who are doing serious work and rarely have time to write about it.

This newsletter is where I publish some findings in the Football Development world and applying my own thoughts. One idea per issue. Fortnightly.

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Today we'll be discussing what your coaching licence isn't doing for you.

A coaching education system designed in the 1990s is still shaping coaches in 2026.

Many coaches went through it. Weekend courses, observed sessions, written assessments. You passed, you got your badge, you moved on. And somewhere along the way, you assumed the system was doing its job.

I'm not so sure it is.

I spent time looking at how coaches at every level - from grassroots volunteers to full-time academy staff - were actually developing. I was looking for patterns.

What I found raised a few uncomfortable questions.

Lesson 1: Instruction without context doesn't transfer

UEFA's own research grant work over the last few years has made a similar point in a different way. Several projects have found that when coach education is delivered as de-contextualised content - lectures, pre-planned drills, model sessions - coaches can tick the boxes in formal assessments but struggle to transfer that learning into messy, real-world touchline decisions. The training works in the classroom, yet it doesn't always travel to the game.

Formal qualifications consistently underestimate this. The badge teaches you what to do. It rarely teaches you why a particular decision makes sense for a particular group of players on a particular day. That's contextual understanding, and you can't assess it in a multiple-choice paper.

The coaches developing fastest in my research weren't the ones completing the most CPD hours. They were the ones with deliberate access to reflective practice, coaches who were regularly asked to explain their thinking, not just demonstrate their sessions. The thinking had to be made visible before it could be challenged and improved.

Lesson 2: The pathway selects for availability not ability

Even in 2024, women are still a small minority at higher licence levels. FA and UEFA data show that while the number of women holding UEFA B, A and Pro licences has grown, they still account for only a low double-digit share of qualified coaches at those levels in England - and an even smaller share in senior professional roles.

This is a pipeline problem and the cause runs deeper than most people like to admit.

For years, coaching education has been structured around availability. Intensive residential weekends. Evening workshops during school term. Long observation hours in full-time settings. The system filters for people who can afford the time, and that has nothing to do with coaching ability.

At the same time, FIFA's women's coaching initiatives have started to move in a different direction - more modular, more blended, and less tied to a single assessment event. Through the Women's Football Development and Coach Education Scholarship programmes, coaches are now combining online modules, on-pitch mentoring and longer-term support, rather than one-off residential courses. The early feedback from those programmes is consistent: coaches feel better able to sustain what they've learned once they're back in their own environments.

This is where coaching education is heading but most traditional pathways haven't caught up.

Lesson 3: We're developing coaches not educators

This one is taking the longest to sit with.

The players who thrive under great coaches are technically developed, able to explain what they're doing and why, capable of self-correction. They've been taught by someone who thinks like a teacher, someone who understands learning, not just the game.

Most coaching education only brushes past this. You might get a slide or a short module on learning styles, motivation or 'the four corners,' but detailed work on cognitive load, memory consolidation after practice or how different types of feedback affect motivation at different ages is still rare. Coaches are taught how to plan and run sessions. They are only lightly exposed - if at all - to the underlying science of how people learn.

Recent work on coaching and education has found a similar pattern. Studies comparing coaches with and without formal teaching or education backgrounds show that those with pedagogical training tend to use more learning-aligned behaviours - clearer rationales, better questioning, more deliberate practice design. They are not just running sessions; they are designing learning. This difference shows up in how their players talk about understanding, not just in how sessions look from the outside.

The coaching badge does give you a framework for sessions. What it doesn't give you is the science of how people learn - at least not in significant depth.

What you can do about it

You can't change the qualification system from the inside. Your development, though, is still yours to direct.

• Make your thinking visible. After every session, write down one decision you made and the specific reason you made it in that moment. Over time, you build a library of contextual knowledge no course gives you.
• Use mentoring as a mirror. Give someone thirty minutes of genuine mentoring: real questions, honest reflection, direct feedback. You'll learn as much as they do.
• Adopt one teaching technique properly. Pick one teaching technique - retrieval practice, spaced repetition, interleaving - and understand the mechanism behind it before applying it in your next session. Knowing why it works changes how you use it.

The qualifications say you're ready. Your development says otherwise until you do the work beyond them.

What's one thing from your own coaching education genuinely prepared you and one thing completely missed?