Woah the Hokey Cokey! Back in to Full-Time Employment I go...
“I certainly would never say never, as although I have intentions for where I want to take PRPerformance in the next five years, I am by no means attached to them – but the likelihood of me returning to full-time football seems slim at this stage”
One of my closing remarks in a blog post I launched over three years ago, and yet, here I am, about to return to a full-time environment on an employed basis, and put the business I’ve spent the last 4+ years building on to the backburner as no more than a ‘side hustle’ for now. So, if you’ve read this far, you might be wondering why? or how, I’ve arrived at this point.
I look back on my previous aforementioned blog post and I think in part, I probably come across quite despondent about the state of the industry and the nature of the work and not only that, but I have spent the last few years championing the self-employed route - and have even lectured graduate students on the concept of forging their own path and the endless benefits and possibilities that starting your own business can bring.
I still have the utmost belief that coaches can forge successful and fulfilling roles for themselves within self-employment, especially seeing as I like to think I have done exactly that over the last few years. I started amidst a national lockdown, with very few ‘leads’ and instead relied on pre-existing relationships and referrals to scrape a business together with very little financial and business acumen.
When I first went into Self-Employment, I loved the various amount of people I would be able to support again, something I hadn’t done since my day as an intern and then-graduate coach at Northumbria University. Post-lockdown, I had a great balance of in-person coaching and online based work, which was supplemented with some casual associate lecturing contracts and other bits and pieces spanning coach-education, LTAD curriculum design, corporate health and wellness, and for a brief period - formal mentorship.
Coaching at PWR - A Sports & Healthcare Facility in Essex, my first hub once going into Self-Employment post COVID.
That diversity was essentially what I had sought after, and it felt aligned to a core value of mine, compassion, in that I felt like I was helping more people than I was in my previous employment, and without as much detriment to my own personal life.
“Work:Life Balance is a myth, it does not exist. Work will always be a part of your life - it is not simply one vs another.” - Paraphrasing from something I heard Josh Fletcher talk about in 2022, that has stuck with me ever since. It is not about balancing two separate entities.
That said, I wanted to accelerate the growth of my business, bluntly from a financial perspective, as I got engaged to my now wife in 2020, and we started to look at the prospect of buying our first home. In a strange twist of fate, I was offered an opportunity to step back in to Women’s football in a coaching capacity, with Charlton Athletic, whom conveniently trained just 30mins from where we were living.
I didn’t want to go back in to full-time football, and instead proposed a consultancy agreement, in which I would work through the week - where I felt I could have the most impact - but without the matchday travel and weekend commitments. This felt like a win-win, I could have a meaningful impact and try and support the team, giving me some stability from a financial perspective and a ‘regular’ income for the in-season, whilst retaining the flexibility that self-employment allows in order to maintain some of my other teaching, coaching, and travel commitments.
The role allowed me to go back and enjoy all the parts of the job I had done when I first started working in Professional football. Being amongst a team environment, being out on the grass, and getting to know what makes individuals tick within a team environment - in order to mould development opportunities for each individual. It felt like I was a better practitioner for taking the time away, and a more rounded person too with a better handle on work boundaries, to which I was more attune to switching ‘off’ once I left the training ground.
Although it definitely felt like a good-fit, my attention was frequently fleeting to the bigger picture, and what the future held for me. The job still had it’s cons, as most jobs in sport do. Through the week, I was largely operating as a one-man department, and then handing over the reigns to another part-time member of staff for the weekend. Despite a couple of pushes to have their contract expanded, such expansion wasn’t forthcoming, and I, as previously, felt slightly over-stretched and that ultimately the players were being slightly short-changed from a service provision perspective. Don’t get me wrong, I think the we did a good job on building support for the players, but in a professional environment, I still felt we could and arguably should, have been given the tools and time to do more. I myself knew that I didn’t want to be in this type of role for too much longer, and although it re-affirmed my want to perhaps to move into a more senior role with some management responsibility of a larger staff group, these opportunities are still few and far between in the women’s game, where my stock and credibility was unarguably at it’s highest given my experiences to date.
And so, I zoomed out, and started to think of the bigger picture and the next 5-10 years. I was in a position where financially things were going well across my multiple commitments, but despite freeing up time at the weekends, I’d gone back to working 50+ hours a week. With Monday to Thursday evenings spent coaching privately, alongside 30hrs with Charlton.
Pre-Season 2023 at Italian Olympic Training Centre
The decision for what came next was accelerated towards the end of 2023, and although I wont divulge many of the details, I was rather abruptly informed, somewhat out of the blue, that a decision at board level had been made and the club no longer wanted me in on a contractor basis, and instead wanted to fill the role on a full-time basis, at with all due respect, an entry level salary. Working in sport, these things are unfortunately quite common, with decisions at board level impacting the operational performance of a club, team, or staff. Working as a ‘contractor’ per-se, this further nodded to one of the pitfalls of the work, in the absence of some of the security offered by employment contracts. As I came to learn, Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) between a contractor and contractee, are not necessarily legally binding and are more of a mutual agreement of over-arching terms.
Although over the months that followed, the First Team Manager managed to fight a case for me to stay longer and draw out the process, but as there was constant uncertainty over when my last day would come, I started to look at alternatives to bridge the impending financial gap.
I met and worked with some superb people at Charlton. There’s some outstanding practitioners at the club, some of the best I’ve worked with and I do wholeheartedly wish them all the best. At the time of publication, they have the opportunity to gain promotion still - but irrespective of whether that comes or not, I hope it is not the sole barometer for the success of the group this year as there has been palpable growth across a wide-spanning variety of areas, and it’s been a genuine pleasure to be a part of such a wonderful playing group too.
If I was going to go all-in on my business, I knew I had to make it scalable somehow. To increase the passive income streams within the business by developing courses or template programmes and honing in on my marketing and sales skills to grow long-term. The way I saw it, was that I either had to turn my hand to the elements of the role that I wanted to preferably ignore, and try to build something more sustainable for the long term - or look at side-stepping industry, or even going out the back-door in to something completely different. When I first went self-employed, I did so because I wanted to help people, I enjoy building relationships, and trying to bring value to peoples ambitions, and to be a part of other peoples success and development. That is why I have always promoted and offered a bespoke service - there is absolutely no issue or problem with selling templates and cookie-cutter programs, and pre-recorded workshops and courses, but it’s just not something that appealed to me with the lack of human connection associated to it. It simply didn’t speak to my values. And so, I started to grow slightly despondent with my private work too, still very much enjoying the coaching I was doing, but knowing that there is only so much time that can be exchanged for money and long-term, this probably wasn’t going to be sustainable for 15-20 years.
In truth I had wrestled with this dilemma for several months, and was something that I was genuinely struggling with. At times I felt like I had wasted the last decade of my life going down a career path that perhaps didn’t hold the longevity and fulfilment I’d once thought it would.
I would swing between just shutting up and getting on with it, trying to find a new role with a club and venturing back into full-time position. Or go back into academia, with a long term ambition of lecturing being something I am genuinely still invested in - but of course, that would come with a financial sacrifice in the short term to try and attain a PhD. Or, pivot altogether, try and join the Fire-service, continue to do some coaching as a ‘side hustle’ and find a long-term career elsewhere. I weighed up all of the above, and more, pretty much daily, and stoked fires around prospective roles elsewhere, spoke with those I trust the most to get their thoughts and opinions, some of which have been, or even currently are, in the same situation themselves.
Then opportunity knocked. I had seen a role advertised around on social media, at London City, a team playing in the Women’s Championship, competing with Charlton. I noticed that multiple staff at Washington Spirit were sharing the role, and so, I reached out to a friend, and former tutor of mine from Northumbria, Prof Kirsty Hicks, who is leading the Research & Innovation team in Washington, simply to ask the question as to how involved they were with the recruitment process.
For those unaware, the owners of Washington Spirit, competing in the NWSL in the USA, had recently acquired ownership of London City Lionesses, and then shortly after, Lyon’s women’s team in France. With a mission statement centred around the growth of the game, built around the support, education, research and innovation, needed to push things forward.
It turns out, they were quite heavily involved, as they were overseeing the restructure of the performance staff at London City. This sparked my interest, and after a whirlwind of conversations with the recruitment team, I learned more about one of the available roles, and almost as quickly as I’d heard about the role, I found myself accepting a verbal offer to start the job in April 2024.
Why? What made this role different to others I’d seen or looked at previously? I was after all, returning back into a full-time role. in Professional football, that in the first instance at the very least, would mean weekend travel and match day support, and all this for a team operating at the time of writing, at the opposite end of the table to Charlton.
Without pouring out the entire job description, this lead role represented definite progression from a career perspective. It allows me to gain more experience, working with a wider group of performance support staff, in a role that as I mentioned earlier, are often few and far between outside the upper echelons of the WSL. It has superb collaborative links outside of the club itself, across the ownership group, giving me an excellent platform to continue to grow, learn and develop whilst also sharing my own experiences and knowledge to date. It also allows me to join a club with a clear identity around its Women’s side. There are pro’s and con’s of not being attached to a men’s club, of those I have experienced many throughout my time at Sunderland, West Ham United, and Charlton, but this time round, there is a clear ambition and plan in place to grow something important, and to contribute to the women’s game as a whole. I feel like my experience to date means I can put all of that to good use, and I intend to try and play my part in educating and empowering every player that spends time with the club, be that for 6 months or 6 seasons, to hopefully leave in a better place, in as many different facets as possible. From an education perspective, there is huge scope from an academic perspective too, with the possibility of personally contributing to a desperately sparse sub-topic of research, within the female game, and for female athletes.
As well as all the aforementioned benefits of the role, there is certainly an element of symmetry about this one. I am not a massive believer in fate, but the way it has worked out, and the collaborative links with practitioners and academics in which I first crossed paths with 13 years ago as an undergraduate student at Northumbria, makes me feel at ease, and that all of my experiences to date have led to this point. On the personal side, it also rules out the need to move house, with the training ground equidistant from our home, to that of Charlton Athletics. It allows for me to return to an element of financial stability associated with a monthly salary, whilst meaning I can continue to support a select group of athletes remotely to keep the business I have worked hard to built alive in the background. Despite also often wrestling with imposter syndrome as I think most, if not all, coaches do - I also came to the conclusion that I’m not bad at what I do, and that I have something to contribute. And I want to do exactly that.
Another of my values as a person is Growth, and I believe wholeheartedly in constant development in whatever avenues are available. That has led me to some physical challenges in the last few years, with a 50 mile ultra-marathon under my belt in 2023, as well as intellectual challenges as I now sit nearly 500 days deep into my Duolingo streak, tackling Welsh and Japanese simultaneously, with varying levels of success. In a professional sense, I believe that I have continued to develop year on year since finishing formal study in 2015, and have no intent of slowing down as human physiology and sport science continue to provide me with an endless rabbit hole to broaden and deepen my knowledge. This new role excites me above all else as I genuinely believe it gives me the opportunity to accelerate that growth and understanding, whilst implementing all of the tools, skills and knowledge I have managed to acquire to this point.
This blog is exactly that, a blog and some insights to my own experiences. It’s not a character assassination of Charlton Athletic, nor is it a criticism of the life of a self-employed coach. I implore anyone in the industry, at any stage of your career, to forge your own path, and stay aligned to your values as a person. Doing that has led me to this point, and has allowed me to continue to grow and develop professionally simultaneously.
All of the decisions I have made in the last 5 years have been guided by my values and beliefs as a person. Whereas early career decisions were perhaps driven by differing motives, as of late coming back to those values regularly has empowered me to make the decisions that feel right for me, and this one is absolutely no different.
I have no idea what the future holds, but certainly for the next chapter of my career, I’ll be all in and bringing the best version of myself, to my role with London City.
