England insight
Challenge and inspire
During his time on the UEFA Pro Licence course, England Women’s head coach, Phil Neville, talked to The Boot Room about his playing experiences and the factors which have shaped his coaching approach.
Be challenged and inspiredThe biggest thing I wanted from the coach was to be challenged, to be inspired and to feed off their energy. The best coaches I worked with all had great energy.
As a coach it’s one of the main things that I try to do with players when I work. I try to give energy to the team through my enthusiasm. More importantly, I need to challenge them and inspire them by the things I’m asking them to do and the example that I’m showing them.
First point of contactThe coach is your first point of contact on the training ground every day. As a player you go out onto the training ground but you don’t always feel great and some days you feel better than others.
But if the coach is enthusiastic, stretching you, putting on good sessions and challenging you to improve, then you’re going to be inspired. I think that’s the key element to coaching.
There are some days that the coach won’t need to work as hard at challenging you or they won’t need to be so enthusiastic because you’re self-motivated and that’s the best point to get to: when the team itself is self-motivated. Up until then you need a level of enthusiasm and you have to challenge your players. Every day there needs to be some kind of challenge to the team to improve. If you can do that, the players tend to respond.
Learning and development
As a player you get to an age, maybe 17/18, when you have to take ownership of your own learning and development.
Early on in your career you put your faith and trust in your coaches: to guide and challenge you, to improve your techniques and understanding of the game. Then the coach’s influence becomes a little less and you need to start thinking deeply about your game and every season you need to show some sort of improvement.
That comes from coach feedback and reviewing your own performance, but that also comes from within. I leant heavily on my coaches in the early years and then I became aware of what I needed to do myself with the help of my coach. Later on you almost go back to the start and you need the help of the coaches to manage you through the latter years of your career.
Reflecting on performancesI think it’s really important to review and self-reflect on your own performances.
Later on in my career I was very good at reviewing and self-reflecting after training and then using video analysis to review and reflect after games. Sometimes you do need the help of a coach because you need other people to give you that advice and to give you those little pointers. When you’re still in your playing career you don’t see everything, so you do need good people around you.
The most important thing is that you improve on the things that you need to. Later in my career, maybe from the age of 22/23, that was something I really enjoyed doing. I saw it as a strength rather than somebody looking at my game and picking holes in it and looking at it as a negative.
Coaching approachLong gone are the days where you’ve got a stick and a coach adopts the method of “I say and you do”.
Coaching and management is more of a negotiation now, where two parties come together to agree the best way forward. If you get the players to buy into your beliefs and they’re actually dictating and policing the training ground performances and the dressing room, then that’s a very powerful tool to have.
I was fortunate that the two clubs I was privileged to play for both had those kinds of environments. Players took ownership, there was a good dialogue between management and players and they bought into the philosophy of the manager and set the tone without the manager having to implement things with a stick.
Players lead the wayUtopia for a coach or a manager is where the players are actually setting the keystone values themselves.
You then have a situation where players are giving feedback to the coaches, which they then take on-board and use to move the team forward. Players are taking ownership and that’s what the coach or manager wants - we had that at both Man United and Everton.
They instilled great values, the same values that my parents instilled into me
Player ownershipAt United the players took ownership. The players policed the dressing room. If there was any slight misdemeanour, or any discipline action, it was all nailed upon. Any bad attitude or slacking in training – the players policed it themselves.
The players also raised the bar in terms of performance. It was all because the core values were so strong - set by the manager - and not just for the players but for everyone at the club. They all bought into it.
Earning a careerI had to fight for everything, I had to earn everything and as a coach that’s the biggest challenge to bring that out of your players.
When I went to United my career wasn’t given to me on a plate. The coaches, Eric Harrison and Jim Ryan, didn’t just say “here’s the first team” - you had to work hard for it. They instilled great values, the same values that my parents instilled into me.
I think there are stages that form the grit and determination: I think it’s your parents, then your coaches and your teachers.
Phil Neville completed the UEFA Pro Licence in 2015 and was appointed Lionesses' head coach in January 2018.