Practical football development, from session to system.
Modern Soccer Coach Podcast turns elite and academy football ideas into usable coaching conversations. Its interviews move from big claims about development, data, culture, and tactics into the messy details of sessions, feedback, age groups, and club environments.
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Modern Soccer Coach Podcast is a coach-to-coach interview series about the details that shape football development. It is practical first. The show does not treat coaching ideas as finished wisdom; it keeps testing them against sessions, age groups, club structures, and the behavior of actual players. Recent episodes focus heavily on how players improve, why they stop improving, and what coaches can do about it. That means deliberate practice, technical repetition, center-forward movement, pressing in big spaces, decision-making, and the culture around feedback all sit close together. The conversations often start with a strong claim. Then the guest is allowed to stretch it out. A point about voice AI becomes a discussion about tracking the how of performance, improving tryout processes, and communicating development work to families. A set-piece conversation becomes a broader argument about role definitions, positional profiles, and the cultural shift toward taking restarts seriously. The show is especially good when it links elite examples to grassroots or academy problems. Liverpool, Bodø/Glimt, Fluminense, PSV, Arsenal, Blackburn, and Shelbourne appear not as name-drops, but as reference points for how methods travel through the game. There is a steady interest in the coach as a learner too. Martyn Bowles talks about self-awareness, humility, peer mentoring, and the awkward work of helping coaches see blind spots. Olav Øverli brings the conversation toward alignment, identity, and curiosity inside an academy. Andre Medeiros frames methodology around respect, decision power, and developing players rather than manufacturing them. The tone is warm but not soft. Guests challenge common habits, especially around young players, technique, defensive learning, and the temptation to hide behind fashionable language. The result is a useful show for coaches who want detail, not decoration. It rewards people who enjoy long answers, repeated clarification, and ideas that end up back on the pitch.
Made for: Built for soccer coaches, academy staff, analysts, and development-minded parents who care about how players actually improve. It suits people who want practical detail more than polished punditry.
What sets it apart: The show connects elite football thinking to everyday coaching problems without stripping out the complexity. Its strength is the way guests translate methodology, data, culture, and tactics into coachable moments.
Our goal is to bring in-depth content to coaches with a combination of interviews, chats, and personal thoughts on the topics that really matter in the beautiful game and elite-level sport. Enjoy and thanks for listening! - Gary
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Gary turns soccer coaching theory into practical questions about sessions, player development, club identity, feedback, and the proper place of data.
Modern Soccer Coach Podcast keeps returning to the decisions beneath player development: how a session teaches technique, when club identity should guide an academy, and where data belongs in evaluation.
One spare defender, and your pressing plan has already blinked.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Voice logging gives coaches clearer context for player feedback and tryout decisions.
Sam makes a clear case for moving player evaluation beyond instinct by capturing sideline observations by voice. Coaches can log a turnover and add the detail that explains it, such as a "bad first touch." Recorded consistently, those notes can reveal problem areas and give…
A grounded coaching conversation on turning repetition into purposeful, game-relevant development.
The episode takes aim at the easy coaching shorthand that more practice naturally produces better players. Its central case is for deliberate work: sessions built around quality, purpose, and outcomes rather than hours logged.
A grounded case for coach development built on self-awareness, humility, and deliberately different perspectives.
Coaching development is treated here as a question of self-awareness before it becomes a question of method. Speaking from Walsall, Martin Bowles makes the case for humility, a clearer understanding of leadership style, and the honesty to know where a coach's knowledge begins…
Tom shows how set pieces can fit naturally into positional coaching and player development.
Tom treats set pieces as a competitive measure for teams near the top of the table, not merely a survival tool for those near the bottom. He argues that coaching and player development should catch up with their growing value.
A grounded look at how Bode/Glimt turns culture into daily academy habits and age-specific development.
Modern Soccer Coach's conversation with Olav follows how Bode/Glimt turns culture into everyday academy behavior: caring for the body, eating and sleeping well, being a good teammate, and giving six-to-12 players a real love of the ball.
A thoughtful Brazilian coaching discussion about perception, structure, and player-centered environments.
Modern Soccer Coach Podcast looks at Brazilian soccer through a coaching question: how can players be given space to see, choose, and move, while still working inside useful structure?
A grounded look at how Red Bull identity becomes youth-development behavior.
Sean McCafferty frames the New York Red Bulls Academy around a recognizable club identity: passion, energy, and enthusiasm made visible in recruiting, coaching, and the way players are asked to press.
Rivalry panic with tactical receipts.
Gary interviews Sean McCafferty, Academy Director at New York Red Bulls, about the club's high-intensity methodology.
Methodology expert Eduardo Oliveira discusses how Brazil develops creative football thinkers, not just technicians.
Tom Shields discusses how STA is turning US Youth Soccer's age-group change into an advantage by keeping members informed and prepared.
John Wall discusses his time as assistant coach for the Jamaican national team and the power of simplicity in coaching.
Andre Medeiros discusses Fluminese's player development philosophy focusing on decision-making and adaptability over rigid positions.
An interview with Mirko Mazzantini, technical director of ACF Fiorentina's youth academy, discussing their methodology for player development, coach retention, and fostering community spirit.
Ray Shearwood discusses Liverpool's academy culture, analysis methods, and his coaching journey to the Saudi Pro League.
Modern Soccer Coach Podcast talks with Sam Sackett, founder of Impressive Play, about voice AI for live game data collection and the limits of the traditional “eye test.” Sam says coaches still lean heavily on subjective evaluation, especially in tryouts, where he argues that video, pen-and-paper, and clipboard methods miss detail or take too much time.
Saul Isaacson-Hurst tells the Modern Soccer Coach Podcast that “practice makes permanent,” not perfect, and says deliberate practice beats hours of untargeted repetition.
Gary introduces Martin Bowles, Academy Manager at Walsall and recently Head of Coaching, as the guest for a conversation about coach development becoming a process rather than an event.
Transition coach Joop Oosterveld discusses how to develop young elite football players by teaching them to press in large spaces, using examples from Liverpool and his own experience.
JP Owens discusses how to coach strikers by relating their movements to passers, defenders, and goalkeepers, and offers a detailed analysis of center forward play.
Tom Dent says corner kicks are now part of a “game within a game,” not an add-on.
Olav Overli, Head of Academy at Bodo/Glimt, tells host Gary that the club's culture demands players adapt quickly or be 'eaten alive,' built on non-negotiable basics and what Olav calls 'engaged and curious footballers.' He describes deleting data-tracking tools like GPS vests because the club couldn't act on the numbers, redirecting that budget into coach development and reference games instead.