Dave Wright is a UEFA A-licensed football coach and co-founder of Player Development Project. Currently completing his OFC Pro Licence, he has been coaching since 2002 in England, Australia and New Zealand with players at all levels.
During five years in the United Kingdom, Wright worked for Fulham and Brentford and in Australia, he coached the U-20s at A-League club Melbourne Victory. He is a high performance consultant for Oceania Football Confederation, director of coaching at Northern League club Birkenhead United and head coach of the Westlake Boys first team.
Wright talks with Friends of Football Writer Rachel Lilburn about his experiences and thoughts on Youth Development …
First, let’s introduce you. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your coaching journey?
I grew up in Auckland and played junior football at East Coast Bays from age four. I loved playing football, made a few rep teams as a teenager, and was a reasonable player, but I also loved a variety of sports as a kid. Sport was a mainstay in my life from as far back as I can remember, and I always had a desire to work in the industry.
I started coaching school football when I was at University (Media Studies & Sports Management) in 2002, and I fell in love with it.
After a few years working in school football, in federation youth programmes and coaching Women’s National League, I moved to Sydney in 2008, where I owned a café business with my brother, Adam. While we ran the business, I coached in the Sydney club scene and with Football NSW state programmes.
When we sold the business in early 2013, it gave me the chance to capitalise on my British passport, jump on a plane to London on a one-way ticket and chase my dream of coaching professionally.
I knocked on the door of any club I could and fortunately got a chance at Brentford FC through Stuart English who was the head of coaching at the time. After working through a pre-season for free to try and secure a role, I worked in the academy for three seasons at Brentford and it was an incredible learning experience.
Not only were the players high quality, but the game was also considerably quicker, and I was fortunate to work with a phenomenal group of coaches, diverse in their thinking and fierce in their desire to develop players.
I reflect fondly on my time at the club, and the intensity of the environment taught me a lot of lessons and at times, the experience was difficult, but it helped me grow massively.
Many of the players who were at Brentford 10 years ago are now professionals, and many of the coaches remain friends, with plenty having gone on to have great careers.
During my time at Brentford, I obtained my UEFA B licence and commenced my UEFA A licence. I then had an opportunity to take a role at Fulham FC.
Fulham was different to Brentford in many ways, but both were amazing experiences. Fulham has a tangible feel and character to the place when you walk into the training ground. I gained a huge amount of knowledge in my time at Motspur Park, particularly around developing individuals, working in coaching teams, experiencing European tours and I grew in confidence, completing my UEFA A licence in 2016.
I’m fortunate to still have friends at the club and truthfully, it was a difficult decision to leave. I loved coaching at Fulham and still support the club from New Zealand.
In late 2017, my wife and I moved to Melbourne and after doing some work in the Football Victoria State programmes, I secured a role at Melbourne Victory coaching the U-20 team. In early 2020, we moved back to Auckland just before COVID hit as I was offered a role with High Performance Sport NZ shortly after the birth of my first son.
What are you doing now?
I currently hold several contract roles across football and have been in business with my brother, Adam, growing Player Development Project for the last ten years.
I work as a high performance consultant for OFC and I’m the director of coaching at Birkenhead United, where I support the development of all of our coaches in the youth and senior phase, as well as overseeing the boys’ Talent Development Programme (TDP).
I also have a role with Westlake Boys High School which I really enjoy. We recently took a team to China to compete in the ISF Secondary Schools World Cup after winning NZSS Nationals in 2023 and the boys exceeded expectations and we had a great experience.
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What’s the Player Development Project?
Player Development Project is an online learning platform for coaches around the world. Over the last decade, we’ve created thousands of resources for coaches in the form of articles, interviews, research reviews, training session plans, and guides to help coaches access quality informal learning content from a global network of experts.
We’ve also built a collection of online coaching courses and have partnerships with organisations like Sport New Zealand, OFC and several schools and clubs to support them with online learning content, digital solutions and coach development workshops. We’ve also recently launched our new app, Coach Frank, which is a free AI-based session planning solution.
Tell us a bit about coaching in a Premier League Academy?
The UK academy system is incredible, and spending five years in England was the best learning of my coaching career – it challenged everything I thought I knew.
The fact England have made consecutive finals in the European Championships is not a surprise. The EPPP (Elite Player Performance Plan) drastically overhauled the English system after being introduced in 2012, with a view to increasing the quality of academies nationally.
A category system was introduced, tasking clubs to design programmes at such a level that they would be audited and given a category status of 1-4. This led to a significant increase in investment (and arguably quality) in youth development over the last decade.
My experience was obviously in London, and it really is a hotbed of football talent. There are thirteen professional clubs within the M25 alone, so there is intense competition. This can create pressure on clubs to identify and sign players at a very young age, and on players to perform. Combine this with parental expectations, and it can be challenging.
From U-9, identified players are being scouted and are bought into a professional environment, and training 3-4 times a week. Players in the Foundation Phase (U-9-U-12) receive one-year agreements and can be released at the end of the season. In the Youth Development Phase (YDP U-13-U-16) players get two-year agreements.
Releasing players in the foundation phase never really sat well with me, and I did have to sit in meetings to release children from the academy when it really conflicted with my own values.
Depending on the club, there can be varying levels of support for released players, and while it can be a catalyst for players to kick on and many do often find themselves signed by other clubs, it’s an area of the system I struggle with upon reflection.
However, there are a lot of great things within the academy system that are focused on the development of the players.
Things like a focus on equal game time, developing and implementing individual plans, world-class facilities and coaches, quality of competition, touring opportunities and Premier League festivals.
Removing league tables from the equation is a real positive. I never met a player in the academy system who didn’t want to compete and to win, and the games were often fierce, the level of desire the players showed was immense, but taking the three points away shifts the coaching (and parental) focus away from the scoreline and more towards individual or team performance.
One of the core Fulham philosophies was individualising the process. I know the programme has evolved considerably since my time, but all players had individual learning plans based around four key criteria and an overall definition of success for each player for a block of time (6-12 weeks).
A big lesson for me in England was to focus on players’ strengths or attributes with a view to making them better.
Delivering sessions in this way challenged me to design practices that ensured individuals were stretched based on their needs.
You were away from New Zealand for 12 years. Tell us what stood out for you on your return.
I was never good enough to be a professional player, but I count myself very fortunate to have seen what ‘good’ looks like across almost every age group in my coaching career and to have coached some really top players who now have careers in the game.
One thing I have found challenging is that in a small nation like ours, very few people (through no fault of their own) truly understand how hard it is to carve out a career in professional football and what the highest level looks like.
In New Zealand, we need to shift the dial around parental expectations and not selling dreams to kids or putting pressure on them too young. Being a kid in 2024 in the world of social media, technology and multiple commitments is hard enough.
My concern is that coaches, parents and players are often in a real rush and perhaps driven by status, when in a largely amateur system, we have the luxury of time.
Firstly, football (and sport) should be about enjoyment, engagement, belonging and fostering a love for the game, especially at junior and youth level.
Secondly, the chances of a player becoming a professional in football are exceptionally slim. I don’t say that to shatter dreams, I say that because it’s the reality of a tough, global industry.
Football is the most popular sport on the planet. Our country (and our region) is small, so we need to innovate to develop players, and find ways to keep kids in the game for longer.
Talent Development Programme (TDP) is a great example of an initiative at federation and national level to raise the overall standard of player development. It tasks clubs with hitting certain criteria, ensuring coaches are qualified and allows kids to stay with their clubs as they develop (as opposed to older models of regional talent centres).
This is great progress, and I do believe in my time away, players have generally become technically better. However, TDP is not elite, and clubs who scout youth players or sell TDP programmes as “academies” in an amateur system concern me because the word has elitist implications, creating pressure on kids and expectations from parents that perhaps, their son or daughter is elite.
This can lead to poor sideline behaviour and an intensity that is, frankly, a bit unnecessary in the context. Acknowledging there are some private providers who have had success with their programmes, if we’re honest, there are two professional clubs here now who could be described as academies.
One, (Wellington Phoenix) has an established academy, has clearly had some success developing players and has had some great people involved over the years. Now, Auckland FC have arrived and at this point, are not starting a conventional academy as such, instead building slowly with a view to identifying and tracking players before selecting them later. I’ve been impressed with their approach so far.
My point is, if we contrast New Zealand’s system of player development with the brutal nature of many players being released in England at 16 (from the YDP) or at 18 from scholarships, we are under no pressure to do this.
Both the Wellington Phoenix and Auckland FC will be a pathway for top young players who may have a chance to forge a career, but beneath that we need to stay patient, allow players to excel in their clubs, strive for first team selection, or simply, stay in the sport and enjoy the game.
Another challenge we face is the school vs. club environment (at least in the Northern Region). In good news, NRF and NZF have recently formed a new working group which I’ve been invited to be a part of. The group is examining the current system with at community and development level with a view to change. The first meeting was positive, so hopefully, things can improve.
For me, the system is currently not serving the player’s needs as well as it could in the sense that the training demands and timing of games across both environments are too much.
Clubs and schools need to do better, and we do need to make change for it to be sustainable and use it to our advantage in player development.
I am fortunate to be collaborating with several clubs on load management and player welfare with players at Westlake Boys, and reducing training time and physical distances to ensure players are fit and available for matches.
However, I am aware of clubs who block players from opting-in to school football, or schools who could do better in their approach to coaching.
Ultimately, the child should always have the right to choose their environment and enjoy their football. Coaching in the Auckland Secondary Schools competition over the last two seasons has reiterated to me how much school football means to the kids, the passion they have representing their schools, playing with their mates and the value of the stories and memories school football creates.
It’s a limited time in the lives of kids, we should ensure they get the best of both worlds, and no adult should deny children this chance of playing based on one being ‘better’ than the other. The volume of games our club and school system provide could be a competitive advantage for us if we put egos and results aside along with a more player-centred structure.
Players will develop by playing more competitive games and experiencing different challenge points in each setting. We just need to ensure the players aren’t overcooked and burned out because of demands from either environment.
Tell us what ‘development’ means to you, and some of the philosophies you bring to your coaching environments
Development is messy, it can be complex and as adults we often crave black or white outcomes, or want to measure everything, but in the world of athlete (or people) development there is a lot of ‘grey’. Whether it’s players or coaches, we must meet people where they are and support from there.
I think for development to be effective, systems need to create exceptional learning environments that find a balance of stretch and support, but beyond the technical and tactical they help athletes develop character traits through sport.
We need to allow opportunities for athletes to enter (and potentially exit and re-enter) systems at different stages, understanding that talent development varies from sport to sport, and athletes develop physically, socially, emotionally or technically at different rates.
If we know roughly what the performance age of our sport is, (in the Premier League the average age of a debut is around 22/23 years old and the average player age is almost 26) then we can design systems to ensure athlete readiness at the right time to suit our context.
Successful development is about more than winning competitions. There are moments where performance is very important, but building an environment which is engaging, connected and fosters curiosity can lend itself to some really positive long-term outcomes.
From a coaching perspective, I think the first thing we need to do is understand our players individually to connect with them.
Who are they? What is their background? What are their goals? What are their strengths and development areas? What interests do they have beyond sport?
Having one-to-one discussions with players formally around things like individual development plans can be valuable, but taking time to chat with players informally when you have time can help understand the person and how we can support them. Managing difference is also a critical piece of facilitating a good development (or high performance) environment.
Communication is a fundamental coaching skill, perhaps not addressed well enough in formal coach education. We need to build trust to enable honest conversations.
Players often crave feedback, but they need to trust that we have their best interests at heart to really hear honest feedback if it’s critical.
Most importantly, the environment should be joyful but also demanding and challenging for the players. I like to collectively set standards and then try to ensure the players have ownership of their team and their own development.
Effective coaching is a melting pot of ingredients, but if coaches show self-awareness, curiosity, empathy and are high quality communicators, they’ll be on the right track to supporting players whether it’s in a developmental or performance environment.
About Player Development Project
Player Development Project (PDP) is an online learning platform and coaching community which features a comprehensive library of content to help coaches, with a focus on children and youth. The content includes live sessions, coaching guides, session plans, masterclass discussions, Q&A videos and world-class online coaching courses you can complete at home.
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This story was first published on August 20, 2024.
