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- Help football players develop skills and work as a team
- Work at a range of levels from youth and community through to high profile professional teams
- You'll need a love for football, to be a great motivator and be able to bring out the best in people
As a football coach, you'll be in charge of managing a football team and their game strategy.
DAY-TO-DAY DUTIES
- Running and planning amateur, semi-professional or professional coaching sessions
- Providing feedback on performance and fitness
- Discussing tactics
- Giving guidance on nutrition and injury prevention
- Keeping up to date with good practice
- Helping players keep a positive mental attitude and self-discipline
DAY-TO-DAY ENVIRONMENT
Community coaching jobs are often part time and can sometimes be voluntary. Commonly, coaching is combined with other full-time work. Part-time community coaching jobs may pay by the hour. You could work at a school, at a sports arena, at a college or at a university.
As a coach for a professional team, you may need to run training sessions every day. Your working environment may demand frequent travel, and might be physically demanding.
You'll need
To be a football coach, you'll need leadership skills, the ability to teach pupils how to do something, patience and the ability to remain calm in stressful situations, the ability to monitor your own performance and that of your colleagues, excellent verbal communication skills, knowledge of teaching and the ability to design courses, thoroughness and attention to detail, and good initiative.
There are undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications for football coaching as well as courses that combine football coaching with subjects like sports business, management, and talent development. For some courses, you may need an FA Level 1 Certificate in Coaching and experience of coaching in a team environment, alongside the academic requirements.
You can do coaching qualifications from the Football Association. Qualifications start at Level 1 and go all the way up to the Level 5 UEFA Pro Licence for the professional game.
You could do a college course such as Football Coaching Studies, Sport with Football, Sport Development and Fitness. You'll need to check if your course includes the FA Coaching Awards, or if these need to be taken separately.
You could also do an intermediate apprenticeship as a sport community activator coach, if you want to work as a football coach in the community.
You could start as a volunteer at a local football club to help build experience and lead into training for professional coaching qualifications.
To coach children or vulnerable adults, you must pass a background check by the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS).
CAREER PROSPECTS
As a community coach, with further training you could move into sports development or youth work. As a coach for a professional team, you could move to a bigger or higher profile club. You could also move into a specialist area like sports psychology or goalkeeping coaching.