The Best People in Football Development Are Invisible Online. Here's Why That's a Problem.

6 min read · March 2026

Fifteen years in the game. Category One experience. National working groups. Their LinkedIn profile says 'first team coach' and hasn't moved since 2022, with no articles, no posts and no public record of what they actually know about football development.

They are the norm.

More than 200,000 people hold valid UEFA-endorsed coaching licences across Europe. Behind that figure sits a much smaller, more concentrated group of academy directors, technical directors and coaching education leads genuinely shaping how the game develops people. The people who have spent years building frameworks, running pathways and designing courses.

Almost none of them are publishing.

The silence has a cost most of them have never calculated.

How commissioning decisions in football development actually get made

Bain & Company's survey of more than 1,200 B2B buyers found around 90% ultimately choose from the shortlist they had in mind before they made contact. TrustRadius put a sharper number on it: 78% of buyers consider only products and suppliers they already knew when they began their search, rising to 86% in enterprise contexts.

Football development commissions expertise the same way enterprise organisations procure vendors. National associations, leagues, clubs, foundations and local authorities commission pathway reviews, coach-education frameworks, technical strategies and CPD programmes. Those decisions are made by committees of executives and technical staff who already have a mental shortlist of 'the people who do this kind of work.' A list built from prior work, word of mouth, conference appearances and, more recently, what they have read online.

If you are not on the list before the conversation starts, you rarely get the conversation.

What the thought leadership research says about shortlisting

The Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report (2024) found 9 in 10 decision-makers are more receptive to sales or partnership outreach from organisations consistently producing high-quality thought leadership. Eighty-six per cent said they are more likely to include those organisations in formal procurement processes. Active thought leadership in a category climbed from the 20th to the third most important buying criterion in just two years, according to B2B International's 2024 Superpowers Index.

Publishing has become the mechanism through which buyers decide who is worth talking to.

Coaches' Voice is trusted by more than 100,000 grassroots, academy and professional coaches worldwide. Training Ground Guru draws more than 150,000 unique monthly visitors: Premier League executives, academy managers, heads of performance, analysts. Both platforms demonstrate there is a paying, engaged audience for practitioner-grounded football content.

But look at how both platforms work. Coaches' Voice features a curated minority of elite coaches, almost all delivering content through the platform's editorial structure. Training Ground Guru is journalism about practitioners, not publishing by them. In both cases: a small number of people with institutional backing speak; everyone else reads.

Why the public conversation about football development is shaped by the wrong people

The pattern holds because no professional expectation exists. In healthcare, studies consistently find only around 16% of professionals report creating and posting original content online, despite the majority having a social media presence. The 1% rule, documented across online communities, finds roughly 1% of users create the majority of content while 90% consume only. Without explicit professional norms, almost all credentialled experts remain passive in the public conversation about their own field.

Football development has no such norm. So the public conversation about how the game develops coaches and players is shaped largely by three forces: commercial platforms optimised to sell products, journalism driven by storytelling and engagement and algorithm-favoured generalists willing to post daily takes regardless of depth. The people who actually design national pathways and academy methodologies are, for the most part, silent.

What coaches and commissioners read shapes what they believe is possible. Right now, most of what they read is not written by the people who know most.

A 2023 Frontiers in Sports and Active Living study tracking coach education in Swedish football found context-specific expertise circulating in tightly bounded channels: academic journals most practitioners never read, internal reports that rarely leave the organisation, CPD rooms that close at the end of the day. The Sport Information Resource Centre has documented how sport organisations generate valuable insights that 'often get piled into internal reports and largely forgotten' rather than shared with the people who could use them.

The three objections that don't hold up

'I don't have time.' The academy directors building public credibility are not spending hours a day on LinkedIn. They are writing one clear piece every two weeks. The compounding effect of doing so for a year is significant enough to change who knows you exist.

'It'll look self-promotional.' Explaining how bio-banding works or what the research actually says about constraints-led methodology is not self-promotion. It is the kind of thing the game needs more people doing in public, not fewer.

'My work speaks for itself.' It does, to the people already in the room with you. Bain & Company's data is explicit on what happens outside that room: 90% of decisions go to vendors already on the shortlist. Your work cannot speak to someone who has never encountered it.

The structural argument for publishing

Not every technical leader in football development is positioned to convert visibility into commissions. Some roles are internal. Some sectors of the game are tightly relationship-bound, where the next contract comes from a phone call, not a LinkedIn search. For those people, the argument above applies differently. Publishing still builds reputation and opens doors, but the mechanism is less direct.

The structural point holds regardless. When qualified practitioners stay silent, the public conversation about how football development should be designed, funded and evaluated is shaped by whoever is willing to publish. That matters whether you are trying to win consulting work or simply care about the quality of thinking that reaches the people making decisions about the game.

The argument for publishing is not that you deserve more visibility. It is that the people making decisions about how football development is funded, commissioned and designed are forming their views from whatever content happens to be most visible, and the most visible content is rarely produced by the most qualified people.

If the sector's best thinkers remain invisible online, it does not stay neutral. Someone else fills the space.

The UEFA Pro licence holder with fifteen years in the game and no digital presence is not protecting their integrity by staying quiet. They are ceding the public narrative about their own field to people with less experience and more consistent posting schedules.

Whether that bothers you is the only question.

If you want to build a professional presence that reflects the quality of your thinking, I write LinkedIn content, newsletters and educational email courses for football development leaders. I have also built a five-day email course on this specifically: Build Your Public Voice.