Following on from our most-read article, The ‘Unknown Damage?’ caused from the sideline, I took the chance today to run a further experiment, this time on the sideline of an academy football match.
In the original experiment, at a grassroots Under 8s game sixteen months ago, we counted 134 direct instructions yelled at players in 40 minutes, from spectators and coaches combined, and looked at the damage that kind of environment does to young players.
A follow-up experiment at an Under 10s grassroots game recorded 100 instructions in the first half alone. We already had a fair picture of the environments being created on a lot of our sidelines.
Today, at an Under 9s academy game, over the same 40-minute window, there were 43 shout-outs from the sideline. Around 30 of those were positive praise, the rest small coaching instructions from the relevant coaches. That’s a genuinely fantastic result. In my own experience over the last two years watching plenty of academy matches, I’d say this figure is typical, not an outlier.
So, here’s my question to every administrator, club and coach reading this: why the gap?
At WWPIS, one of our driving aims is to support every sporting parent and coach, regardless of experience, in working together to give children the best possible sporting experience. That support shouldn’t be reserved only for children fortunate enough to be in high-performance, academy or pathway programmes.
Having watched both environments first-hand, there’s no doubt which one was more productive for players and parents alike. Players were free to make their own decisions without fear of getting shouted at for it. Parents were noticeably calmer, because that’s simply become the norm in academy football. The question worth asking is why we can’t get more children playing in that same kind of environment.
How has academy football got there? Largely by clubs taking the lead, setting out clear standards of behaviour for parents well before any training session or match takes place. New parents arriving into that system tend to mirror the environment they find themselves in, which is genuinely encouraging, since it means change is possible. There’s probably a little more fear involved too, a sense that poor behaviour might reflect badly on their child within the system, but that shouldn’t stop the rest of us trying to create the same shift at grassroots level.
Coaches’ behaviour is just as important. A coach who stays calm and offers a handful of well-chosen pieces of advice signals to parents that this is what normal looks like. A coach who sprints the touchline, joystick-coaching every player and berating every refereeing decision, effectively gives every parent watching permission to do the same.
So, who carries the responsibility here?
Do clubs need to take more of a lead in setting out their culture and ethos, what they expect, and what they’re trying to achieve?
Do coaches need to make sure their own behaviour matches that culture, and sets a genuine example for the parents in their team?
We saw a coach criticised on social media this week for “not shouting enough” at an Under 10s game. Their response was simple: they’re Under 10s. Plenty of inexperienced coaches feel real heat from parents on the touchline and end up believing they need to perform enthusiasm this way just to look like they care, or that they’re doing a good job. Without proper support from more experienced coaches or their club, many of them feel genuinely isolated in that.
Do parents need better information and support about what a young person’s sporting experience should look like, rather than building their own assumptions from what they’ve seen on TV, or from their own childhood in sport?
Clubs and coaches need to remember that plenty of parents’ entire frame of reference for sport comes from their own upbringing, where methods now considered outdated were simply normal. We know far more about the science behind development than a generation ago. It also comes from how sport is portrayed on television and in the media, and from watching how everyone else around them behaves. Humans are built to conform to the crowd they find themselves in.
All this needs genuine buy-in and a properly thought-through process, with every stakeholder playing their part. In the clubs and organisations we work with, we talk about creating cultural alignment between club, coach and parent.
That’s the easy part to discuss and set out on paper. What’s harder is everyone involved then actually living it. Words on a wall or a line in a code of conduct rarely create real culture change unless the right behaviours are modelled and celebrated consistently.
Our own experience is that simply preaching at parents, telling them what to do, has very little impact. What’s needed instead is creative, genuine engagement, helping parents understand the how and the why behind the environments we’re asking them to help build, both at the club and at home, so their child has the best possible chance of success. Not just on the field, but in every part of life.
There’s no quick fix here. Until we find the time to build effective organisational cultures, properly support coaches through coach education on why their behaviour and communication matter so much, and inform parents in genuinely engaging ways, we’ll keep running into the same old issues.
We don’t have all the answers. What we do know is that plenty of football academies create genuinely effective match-day environments, as do several grassroots clubs who’ve properly got to grips with this. However, there are still a great many children playing in environments where their enjoyment is quietly draining away, and their progress along with it.
No parent sets out to cause that. We all love our children. It’s simply that a child’s own reasons for playing sport are often very different from the motivations and priorities of the adults around them. Children still ultimately play for fun, which can mean plenty of different things but research by Amanda Visek shows that winning and playing in tournaments sit well down a child’s own list of priorities. Ask an adult the same question, and those two would almost certainly make their top five.
I hope this has raised some awareness and given you plenty to think about, and in some small way, started to address the issue with a basic framework to work from.
