“Who is the spare player? Where’s the space? Yes, yes, let’s go!” is the shout, as Manchester City’s under-16s girls’ squad are put through their paces at the City Football Academy and the net ripples at the end of another slick move.
On this particular ice-cold December night, the future stars being developed are not only the youngsters but those in the tracksuits too. The next generation of coaches, participants on the latest Uefa A Licence course run by the Football Association, are leading the session and they are faces familiar to any Women’s Super League supporter.
Overseeing drills are the former City and England captain Steph Houghton, the former City, Lyon and Everton midfielder Izzy Christiansen and three current players in Scotland’s winger Lisa Evans, the Manchester United defender Aoife Mannion and the City and Scotland goalkeeper Sandy MacIver, as they reach the halfway stage in a course that has the potential to be groundbreaking.
They are part of the first all-female A licence cohort, unveiled in May in a collaboration between the FA and the Professional Footballers’ Association, with the aim of increasing the number of women coaching. The FA’s senior professional game player-to-coach lead, Steve Guinan, says: “We’re trying to keep good football people in the game as long as we can and, with the knowledge of people here, we’d be foolish not to.
“We’re trying to address some of the under-representation and encourage more women’s coaches into either the men’s or the women’s game. If you look across the WSL, there are more men’s coaches than there are women. Ultimately, we want English head coaches working in the WSL and the Premier League.”
Five of the 12 WSL head coaches are women, including the interim Arsenal head coach Renée Slegers, and only two of those five are British: West Ham’s Rehanne Skinner and Crystal Palace’s Laura Kaminski. No women have been employed as a manager in the English men’s professional game on a permanent basis.
Mannion says: “Because we’ve not been professional as a league for [long], there wasn’t maybe a natural pathway of professional players going to become coaches maybe 20 years ago, so we’re now seeing loads of people being able to do their badges and that, in five years’ time, will be a really exciting development. Having more female coaches is only going to be a good thing.”
This course, which involved 17 current or former WSL players including the division’s all-time record goalscorer, Vivianne Miedema, the Chelsea and Sweden goalkeeper Zecira Musovic and the Arsenal midfielder Lia Wälti, started with a residential camp at St George’s Park and has split into geographical groups. Here in Manchester, some of the north-west contingent are working together, and this session is aimed at building the attack.
Mannion has been partnered in it with Houghton, who retired at the end of last season after a transformative career that included 121 caps. “I think I retired on the Saturday, went out on the Saturday night, probably was hungover on the Sunday and then went straight to St George’s,” Houghton says. “Your mindset adjusts to doing something different quickly. I’ve really enjoyed it.
“I always wanted to challenge myself and this was me challenging myself, bringing myself out of my comfort zone and learning from different people. If you can get a number of former players who know it inside out [into coaching], the game is going to be in really good hands.”
Evans and MacIver have been tasked with playing with a box midfield and trying to create attacking situations. “It’s been eye-opening, more than anything, seeing just how difficult coaching can be and how many elements there are to it,” Evans says. “I don’t think players quite realise the prep work that goes on behind the scenes to get everything spot-on for a session.
“I don’t really know yet what element I’d like to home in on after football but I know that I will love, eat, breathe and sleep football. This course has opened my mind to lots of different things. We’ve learned about psychology, the sports science side of things and periodisation in football too, which has been really interesting.”
Guinan, who made almost 500 appearances as a player, has been working for the FA for about a decade and secured his Uefa Pro Licence in a cohort alongside the new England men’s assistant head coach Anthony Barry. “The A Licence is heavily based around practical sessions,” he says. “It’s about managing a group of players, it’s about intervening at the right time. It’s about observing problems that arise on the pitch and diagnosing them, and helping the players identify and repair them. Most [of these coaches] have aspirations to get into senior management and this is a chance for them to earn their stripes away from the spotlight.”
This one-of-a-kind all-female course is funded by the PFA, Uefa and the FA. Mannion says: “There are definitely days when I’m thinking: ‘I’m ageing five years here in the space of six months’ and I’m sure that would only speed up as a coach! Because coaching is definitely a lot harder than being a player in terms of brain power during the day, but I think I’d like to be a coach. It’s exciting to be part of a team’s progression, and having ideas, having strategies and really putting your best foot forward.
“Every single manager I’ve played under, there have been elements where I’ve thought: ‘They’re really cutting edge on this,’ and the biggest thing I’ve learned is to try and find my own identity, rather than necessarily copy. My favourite people to work with are always the people who are truly themselves.”
Houghton, like Evans, is taking her time to consider what she wants to focus on in retirement. She is working as a television pundit and in November returned to City as an ambassador. “I love being on the pitch and seeing the girls learn off you and take information on board – there’s no better feeling,” she says. “I’m quite a bit of an organisation freak. I’m doing it [the A licence] to try and find out what I really, really like. Coaching, you have to be so obsessed with it, if you want to be the best. At this moment in time, coaching is still there or thereabouts [in my thinking] but I’m still kind of just finding my way through.”
Guinan keeps a respectful distance from those running the session, standing quietly, observing and noting things down. Feedback and further on-pitch sessions will follow, as this group continue towards a future which they hope will bring more women into technical areas up and down the leagues.
