Well, we are here today with Ben Bartlett. Ben, you know, obviously, thanks for joining us and I wanted to open the show by asking you to discuss how you got your start in football. And maybe take us through a little bit of your early journey and kind of how that's led you to where you are now.

Okay. Yeah, I guess like a lot of career coaches, I was a failed footballer. So I played at a club that are in League two in England now called Colchester United as a schoolboy, never made it as a professional footballer and started coaching for Colchester United when I finished playing. I played semi professional football at the same time and coached, both within a community programme at Colchester United and also within the boys and the girls excellence programmes. I worked there for around 10 years. The women's programme was relatively successful in the sense that we took what was then a women's club that were planning a regional league to play in the National Premier League, and we had players that have gone on and played Champions League, international football that started off developing in that programme. I was fortunate in the sense that back then, coaching wasn't an enormous industry. So you ended up coaching 20/30/40/50 hours a week in a whole range of different environments, which I guess allows you to make a lot of mistakes, learn a lot of stuff and hopefully get a little bit better. 

The success of the women's programme there, I guess, generated some interest so I was fortunate to go to Chelsea for a couple of seasons, just as they kind of took on a full-time women's programme. I was responsible for leading and managing that and I guess, trying to put some foundations in place that would take that Woman's Club forward in the future. And then the last 12 years, I've been employed as a coach developer, coach educator with the Football Association. Principally in the early stages our coach education programme shifted about 15 years ago to take more of a youth focus. And in the early stages of the job, it was very much about delivering those qualifications to try to shift some of the way that people thought about coaching young people, rather than a one size fits all approach to education. In the last six, seven years, I've been fortunate to work in a programme which focuses on the development of coaches working in professional football clubs. I have four professional football clubs in the south of England and try and spend an equal amount of time each of those clubs supporting the formal and ongoing CPD for the coaches working with players in a young professional Academy set-up.

Well, it sounds like you have a pretty interesting perspective, because I'm sure when you first started your coaching journey, you got to see what the education or what was being taught or accepted at the time in terms of, if we call it coaching theory, or whatever principles were guiding coach education at the time, and now you've been part of that transition into a different way of educating coaches or advocating best coaching practice. What do you think are some of the assumptions that have changed over time? And, how coaches should be coaching?

Yeah, probably from a coach development perspective, we've tried to make significant changes in two areas. The first one is about the way that coaches are assessed in the broadest sense, because a lot of the way that coaches coached on courses and a lot of the way that coach education functioned was out of convenience. And if you had 25/30 people on a course you needed to find a relatively convenient way of getting them to pass. So coaching became a relatively narrow thing - coach one relatively narrow theme, typically to a group of players you've never met before, and affect performance typically, in a relatively short space of time. The risk is that became a percentage of people's perception about what coaching was because they learned to coach in their formal education in that way, a lot of those behaviours transcended into their own environment, which perhaps wasn't that helpful. So, over the last sort of 10/15 years, we've tried to make some significant shifts in the way that coaches are assessed. <inaudible> going with a more long-term approach and, finally, probably, for them to identify what's important to them, and their players and then decide the appropriate way to coach for that particular context. There isn't necessarily a right way to coach but maybe there's an appropriate way to coach in relation to what your purpose is, and what you and your environment believe to be true. That's probably been the first perhaps most significant shift. 

The second shift has been about the type of content that we deliver, which in the early days was very much about the tactics and the techniques for football. And they're not not important, but there's probably a disproportionate balance of what we delivered that focused upon those elements, which lead to people maybe having a brain full of technical and tactical info, but not necessarily the understanding of the whole of the human body, the way that it might change when you're young and developing than when you're an adult. And so a more proportionate delivery of content about what some of the football demands are, but also what some of the human demands are. And trying to integrate those two things together a little bit to support people to think about what football looks like for human beings.

That's interesting, I think one thing that one thread that I'd like to pull on, before we dive a little bit deeper, is what you just discussed there in terms of, I guess you can call it coach evaluation. But I've noticed just in the US, a lot of the coaching courses have shifted that way as well, where the coach educators are now going into the coaches environment and assessing them with their players over a longer stretch of time. And it's more, I guess, appreciating the context that they may be working more than putting them in this sort of artificial environment and then saying, 'here you go', players you've never seen before, and maybe topics that don't relate exactly to what you would maybe do or that are relevant to you. But that does leave the door open, I guess for a little bit of sort of relativity, where it's like, does everything go so to speak? Have you created some principles, or some standards, or some objective characteristics that you say, Okay, these are going to be building blocks to which we evaluate coaches - so it's not just everything goes, but we still appreciate some individuality and context specific application.

Yeah, great question. I guess the England DNA has had a deal of traction in recent years. And in its early phases, the England DNA was broken down into five main areas, 1) Who we are - so what's the purpose of our environment? What things are important to us? 2) How we want to play - what's your style of play? What are your principles that underpin the way they want to play? 3) What we call the future player, which is the characteristics of the players that are in your care, and perhaps some of the qualities that you might want to support the development of within those players. 4) How we coach - that might be how we combine the things that we value, with the way that we want to play with the needs of the players to then decide the way that we might coach to try and agree and get some healthy tension across those elements. And the final part (5) is the way that we support, which I guess is typically what we would call the holistic four corner approach, which is how do we factor in some of the psychosocial, and physiological elements of player and human development into our coaching. 

As part of assessment, we ask each coach to detail who they are, how they want to play the game of football, who the players are in their care, and as a result, how they're going to coach. And then the final part is how perhaps they integrate some of those holistic elements into their approach. And then when being supported, we ask them, and challenge them to look at the degree to which they align what they actually do in practice with what they believe to be true. So if, for example, they say, we want to play out from the back, and we want to get the centre halfs on the ball and want to contribute to a positive, possession based approach, fantastic. If a disproportionate amount of time their goalkeeper is kicking it long, and perhaps squeezing up the pitch and not dominating possession, then there's probably a misalignment between what they say they believe is true, and perhaps what they're doing. And the same could be said from a coaching style perspective. If you say you want to develop adaptable decision makers, and the coach runs lots of practices that have got very few decisions in them and the coach decides what's important - again, there's probably a misalignment between what we say is true, and what we actually do when we practice. So the assessment is to enable each coach to determine their own model, if you like and assessment, what things are important to us? - and then the job for the observer, for the person that's supporting them is to challenge them to align their practice with things they've stated to be true.

The big challenge in that is that historically, what you've had is a group of assessors or coach educators, who have had a relatively narrow view on what football was and asked the coaches to line up with their view. You've now got a reverse which is you could have 50/60/70 different, subtly different approaches to coaching and the job of the assessor is to now to better understand that and make decisions about the degree to which the coaches are aligning their practice with their stated beliefs. It takes significant amount of development from a coach education perspective so that the educators can understand what might be going on in front of them. 

Yeah, I gotta ask, it seems like you're implying a little bit there that football is different than, so to speak, in every different country maybe on how they're going to approach coach education. You mentioned there at the beginning that what you've done there in the FA is you've sort of changed things, you're looking at things from a different perspective. My question is, there are some educators that believe that football is universal, and that it's coached the same way everywhere, we're all playing the same game, so thus we must then do things the exact same way or use the exact same language, it should be universal. Do you think that is true? Or are there other variables that are impacting how coaches are actually doing things on the field? 

I guess there's probably a couple of things in there. First one is that there are social and cultural differences. I spent a little bit of time in the Far East, the culture there is much more autocratic, leaders lead, followers follow. Whereas I guess when you come further west, certainly in England, we've probably got more of what might be called a Socratic approach to coaching which is we ask questions, we find ways, we recognise a way that works for everybody in an attempt to seek to move forward. So there's probably quite a stark difference. But there are certainly some social cultural differences in different parts of the world that perhaps impact on the way that we see stuff. I think the bit that is the same is the laws of the game are pretty much the same wherever you go across the world. However, how people interpret those rules of the game and how people interpret the principles of the way that game is played, may be quite different. And I think again, you'll see that if you look at World Cups as perhaps where you've got the broadest social cultural mix across a particular tournament, you'll see differences in the way that Iceland might play to the way that Brazil might play. And they're not good, bad or indifferent. I guess, if you grew up in Iceland, it probably looks quite a bit different than if you grew up in Brazil. But then you'll also see some of the demographic challenges, which is Iceland, might need to plan a particular way, relatively reductive, relatively tight, difficult to break down, to give themselves an opportunity to succeed. And perhaps the characteristics of their players best fit that particular approach, whereas a Brazilian side might take a slightly different approach. So I guess we're bound by the same laws of the game, but the way that plays out can be slightly or. significantly different. 

Yeah, I'm going to tug on the thread you mentioned about using the Socratic method there in the UK. Is that a pretty big staple in the coaching education that is done in the UK?

I'd say it's a commitment, I think there is still a percentage of the population that believe in, it is best to lead by telling. And that isn't to say that telling has no place, I guess it's got a place. But what we've gone down the line of saying what is important is we've gone after decision-making. So there's decision-making from players, there's decision-making from teams based upon the demands and the situation that's in front of a particular person. I guess if you fundamentally say that decision-making is important, which we have, then that probably requires more of a Socratic, probably more of a compromising approach to coaching. If you say you want, more routine expertise where people have a narrow profile and can fit a particular approach to playing the game, it might be that more of a command approach would be appropriate. 

Now, I'm gonna lean on you on this, specifically, because you're in the coach's head department much more than I am. The Socratic method for me, and I've used it a lot, I am wondering if we're going down this path that really, we're sort of unconsciously doing it, because we think it's actually working, but maybe it's not. And here's my question - when we're using the Socratic method, are we using it to really get authentic answers from the players, or are we just questioning and to get the decision that we already have formulated in the narrative in our head? 

Yeah, I guess that depends upon how skilled the coaches have been able to develop a Socratic Method and work with the players. And less so but certainly in the early years of taking this approach, you saw more people that would ask questions that weren't actually questions, they were answers. And I guess if you want people to genuinely feel as if they're being empowered and supported, then we need to find ways to support them to come to perhaps an answer that works for them. What that isn't saying is that we're absolving the coach have any responsibility to lead, to drive, to build understanding in the players where maybe there are already gaps.