The sun beams down on the pitches at the University of Hertfordshire as Arsenal’s under-16 academy girls begin afternoon training.
But today’s practice comes with a twist: star power.
In the middle of the action, directing the team through a drill, are Arsenal forward Beth Mead and former Watford goalkeeper Sophie Harris. Watching from the sidelines are two more Arsenal players in club captain Kim Little and Lia Walti, as well as Chelsea goalkeeper Zecira Musovic.
They are among 17 former and current players participating in the first all-female UEFA A Licence coaching course. Funded by the English FA, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) and UEFA, European football’s governing body, it is a joint initiative to improve the number of female coaches in the game — when the 2024-25 season began last month, only a third of the 12 teams in the Women’s Super League, the top division in England, had a female manager/head coach.
The course began with a two-day session at the FA’s national football centre, St George’s Park, in May. Participants attended practical and classroom sessions that focused on training drills, sports psychology and self-awareness. Six sessions with individual tutors break down the pitch into a defensive third, middle third and attacking third and look at those areas from both attacking and defensive perspectives.
At the end of the year, the students will be assessed for their UEFA A Licences, when tutors will judge whether they are proficient at 11-v-11 tactics and strategies, as well as position-specific analysis. If they have not yet reached that point, they will receive further support to try to reach the point of qualification.
All participants are juggling the course with their own careers. Musovic only got back to the UK at 4am that day after playing away against Dutch side Twente in the Champions League. Walti, Mead and Little endured a turbulent week after a run of poor results led to their manager Jonas Eidevall resigning. It is a balancing act between the demands of the present and an opportunity for the future.
Explaining why she’s taking the course, Mead says, “There are a lot of successful female coaches but not enough. I really enjoy playing under Sarina (Wiegman) for England. She’s an ex-player, she understands the game. She’s seen it evolve. So why can we not help the next generation?
“I always appreciate working with a coach who has played, because they understand the demands of the game and even silly things, like the importance of downtime.”
Little has similar motivations: “Football has been dominated by men for so long because the game has been professional for men for longer. Male coaches have come across to the women’s game but hopefully, over time, that pool of women will grow. Then the quality grows and that will feed into there being more female coaches within WSL clubs.”
Each player brings different experiences to the course — and thus a different perspective on coaching.
“I’ve played professional football since I was 15 years old so it feels like I’ve been coaching since then,” says 28-year-old Musovic. “In the goalkeeper position, you see the whole pitch so it’s like I do coaching every day. I love to lead my team-mates. Communication is a big part of who I am.
“I was having an interesting discussion with Sonia (Bompastor, Chelsea Women’s manager) the other day about the goalkeeper’s role being similar to the coach’s, because you see the same things. You have the same frustrations when things aren’t working because you can’t affect it.
“The challenge we have in life is that we see things from different perspectives. I see from my goalkeeper perspective the pitch in front of me. Beth (Mead), for example, sees the perspective from the side of the pitch where she is playing.”
Mead agrees. “As a player, I hone in on what I am meant to be doing as a forward and a winger,” she says, “but what does that look like for everybody else on the pitch? How can I affect people on the pitch on a different level as a coach? That’s the important thing we have come away with: how can we affect more than one person on the pitch in different positions and different roles? It helps you on and off the pitch as a coach and as a player.”
The course leaders are keen to challenge the participants’ preconceptions about different roles and how they want to play, which are often based on what they enjoy or the players and managers they look up to.
“We all come with our biases,” says Steve Greaves, a senior professional development coach with the FA. “If one of these players has spent the majority of their career playing in a 4-3-3, that’s their safe frame of reference to start. They’ve got all this prior knowledge and experience around this game model, its movement patterns, the level of detail for individual players.
“We would then challenge them by setting a task. For example, a 4-3-3 coming up against a 3-5-2. They would have to think about the game problems that come from facing a different formation. That’s where they grow their coaching craft and their knowledge.
“We would not impose a game model on anyone — that’s theirs to build — but we will set tasks using different shapes, different systems, operating with different strategies.”
Greaves stresses that, beyond it being an all-female group, there is nothing different from any other coaching course. “We work to the content of the course, challenging participants — male or female — to be the best that they can be. Our aim is high challenge, high support,” he says.
The focus is on shifting that mindset from player to coach, having to consider training sessions and matches from a different viewpoint, which is already having an impact on the participants and how they think about sessions and their purpose.
“We get frustrated in training sometimes that we’re doing repetitive drills of pressing and build-up,” says Mead. “Now we’re here today trying to get these girls to understand it. Even we, as senior internationals, struggle with these things. So it’s interesting to put it on the pitch and see how the next generation try to apply themselves.”
“I feel like I’ve got a new pair of glasses,” says Musovic. “I’m looking at the game differently. I’ve always been a reflective person but this has taken me to another level. In team meetings, I see things from a different perspective. I understand better what Sonia and the team want. I can see a drill and understand how this applies to our game model. I’ve gained another tool to take my game to the next level.
“I’ve always been a person who asks questions. I work better when I know why I am doing certain things. That’s something I’ve challenged my coaches on throughout the years. But now it’s a different level of understanding of how and why. If I was a pest before to my coaches, I’m a bigger pest now.”
(Top photo: The FA/Getty)
