What is success in football – Full article

Success is defined by the individual. As a coach I have players saying I want to be the best I can be. Ok, that’s good but why? what is the end goal? If your goal is your local div 1 team and you make that then you are successful. If your goal is to become a Socceroo, well then as a coach I have to do everything in my power to get you to be successful.

Many people think of success in football as playing for the national team or in the national league but that is a very naive view. Most people don’t even play football for the money so why do most people think that success in football is about playing at such a high level. See to me being successful as a coach right now is seeing a child who hasn’t played football before start to develop a passion for it. If that player goes onto play football for 10+ years, then I have done my job.

My job however changes with each team I take on though, at representative level it is more about development and results. People are paying a lot more money for their kids to play football, so the weight of expectation is a lot higher. The further you go up in football the more expectations you have. So success at that level is players improving in both their weaknesses and their strengths, because unless you can do something 10/10 100% of the time then you can still improve on it.

My overarching goal is to be able to improve football in both quality and popularity. I know that in order to do that I will eventually need to coach at the highest level because I will have gained greater knowledge and have a wider reach.

That’s just a little bit of insight into my life as a coach and what success is to me. Its important to know what success is to yourself. Without it you cannot set goals, without goals its hard to achieve a sense of accomplishment. I think a sense of accomplishment is very important to someone’s life as without I know I personally need that to feel like I am always progressing. Anyways that’s what success in football is to me.