Imagine an organisation that every volunteer football coach in the world belonged to. Call it the World Football Coaching Volunteers service. It would be the biggest volunteer organisation on the planet by a distance, and millions of children would rely on it every week.
It doesn't exist, of course. But the people who would make it up do. They're on cold pitches every Saturday morning and Tuesday night, and most of them have had almost no training for the job they're doing.
Volunteering is one of the best things people do. We give our time because we want to and because we can, with no expectation of anything in return, and communities have always run on it. Nelson Mandela put it well in 2002: what counts in life "is not the mere fact that we have lived". It's the difference we make to the lives of other people.
Few volunteers get the chance to make that difference as often, or to as many people, as a grassroots football coach.
Some volunteer organisations are so good at what they do that it's easy to forget they're volunteer-led at all. The RNLI and Mountain Rescue keep people safe on our seas and mountains, often risking their own lives to do it. Médecins Sans Frontières takes medical care into some of the worst places on earth. Scouting and Girlguiding have been building life and leadership skills in children for more than a century.
What they share is high expectations, and the training to meet them. Being a volunteer is never an excuse for a lower standard.
Look at how they do it and the same pattern comes up again and again. Set it against how most grassroots clubs bring in a new coach, and the gap is hard to miss:
| The best volunteer organisations | Grassroots football, too often | |
|---|---|---|
| Expectations | Volunteers know what's expected of them before they start | A new coach gets a team, a bag of balls and a fixture list |
| Getting started | Trained into the role before taking responsibility | A short introductory course, then on your own |
| Learning from others | New people work alongside experienced ones | Coaches rarely see another coach's session |
| How they're judged | On whether they can do the job | On whether they've done the course |
| Ongoing training | Regular training and re-qualifying are part of the deal | Training usually stops after the first course |
| Belonging | Part of a team that trains and socialises together | Each coach runs their own team, often in isolation |
None of that is the coaches' fault. It's how the system has grown up.
Nobody describes a mountain rescue team or a Scout leader as "just volunteers". So why do we say it about the grassroots football coaches looking after our children?
Nobody has ever counted the world's volunteer grassroots football coaches. FIFA's last global census, back in 2006, counted more than 265 million people playing the game. My own estimate is that 10 to 12 million people coach it for free. If they formed a country, it would be bigger than Sweden and about the size of Belgium.
Now consider that each of those coaches is responsible for eight to ten players. That's around 100 million of our youngest people relying on a volunteer every week, and for many of them that experience shapes how they feel about sport, exercise and themselves for the rest of their lives.
In England alone, the FA puts the number of grassroots volunteers at more than half a million. The way in for a new coach is a short introductory course: the free online Playmaker course or the FA Level 1. Those courses are good, and they've helped more people get involved. But for the vast majority of volunteer coaches, that's where the training stops. There's no structured development after it, no one checking how they're getting on, and no clear picture of what good looks like for the age group in front of them.
The FA knows there's work to do. Its own grassroots strategy puts volunteer satisfaction at 66%, against a target of 76%.
If you really think about it, it's mind-blowing. We've built the world's biggest volunteer workforce, given it responsibility for 100 million children, and left it to work things out on its own.
It doesn't have to be this way, and it doesn't need a new governing body or a huge budget. With a few simple steps, dedicated support and a slightly bigger commitment from the clubs and local organisations running the game, every coach can get proper training and development. Here's what that looks like at a grassroots club.
Do this and something useful happens. Better-supported coaches run better sessions. Children enjoy their football more and stay in the game longer. Parents see what the club gives their child and want to be part of it, and the club has more good coaches next year than it did this year.
That's a virtuous cycle, and it's how a coach goes from being "just a volunteer" to what the role really is: one of the most important people in a child's week.
The volunteer organisations we admire most didn't earn that respect by lowering the bar for volunteers. They raised it, then gave people everything they needed to clear it. Grassroots football can do the same, one club at a time.
We've spent 15 years working with volunteer coaches and the clubs behind them. We've put together a step-by-step guide for clubs that want to raise their coaching standards this season, built on the approach above.
Read our volunteer coach guide for clubs →
Or, if you're a coach looking for a plan for this week's session, start with our free coaching sessions →