Analysis: What fans, onlookers and spectators think coaching involves often bears little resemblance to the job itself
In sport, judgements about coaching performance can swing one way and another very quickly. One week, everything is framed as a crisis and a coach's job is said to be under threat; the next, the narrative flips and all seems well.
As onlookers, we judge coaching retrospectively and we have the benefit of outcome information that was never available for the coach. 'Skin in the game’ means that those who make decisions also carry the consequences - which is something observers never have to do. In contrast, coaches act prospectively, under a fog of uncertainty, with decisions shaped by factors that largely are invisible to those watching.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Inside Sport. Craig Sexton reports on success stories from FAI Coaching
Researchers at the CoEx|Lab at DCU have been interested in this for some time. We want to better understand what it means to be an outstanding coach in a particular place so that we can help other coaches get better, whether that be coaching Ireland in a World Cup qualifier or providing lifelong memories for the under 11s on a Saturday morning.
Why we keep judging the wrong thing
One of the biggest challenges faced across many professions is how we try to measure complex work. We tend to break it down into tidy lists of competencies that are assumed to apply everywhere. This is why concepts such as being a "good people-manager" or "meticulous planning" seem to apply to everything from international rugby coach to human resources.
The problem is that these competencies tell us very little about what actually distinguishes one role from another and what it takes to be good in one job compared to another. This reflects what researchers describe as the gap between work as imagined and work as done. When jobs are abstracted and idealised, the practical challenges of the work are ignored and people are trained for a version of the role that does not exist.
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From RTÉ GAA podcast, how performance coaches are at the centre of GAA thinking
Good coaching doesn't always travel
A consequence of this way of thinking is the assumption that an 'expert coach’ will be effective anywhere. This is not necessarily so. Most people would agree that Jürgen Klopp is an expert coach, but would he be an expert coach if he was coaching the local under 12s? Although we call it coaching, is it even the same job?
You see this when you move between contexts. Coaching an inter-county GAA panel is not the same job as coaching a club team where players arrive with different motivations. When the context changes, so do the demands and it is increasingly clear that no two coaching jobs are the same and that each represents a highly complex range of challenges. Many of these demands are invisible to those watching from the stands or the sofa. A glance at social media after the final whistle is enough to see how many people believe they could do a better job.
What coaching at the highest level actually demands
To understand why coaching is harder than it looks, we need to move beyond what good coaching looks like and examine what it actually demands. We recently worked with Irish Rugby to better understand what is demanded of coaches operating at the highest level of the game in Ireland.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Inside Sport, former Irish rugby coach Eddie O'Sullivan on the pressure of high level coaching in a fish bowl like the Six Nations
Coaches needed to manage constant pressure: emotional load, career insecurity and a flood of information. Their performances were publicly scrutinised and rarely fully under their control. They also had the challenge of building credibility with players and staff, so that their voice could carry weight.
How coaches coached had to be continually adjusted based on what would be tolerated within the environment, rather than what they thought might be optimal. Finally, coaches felt the technical and tactical demands of the role, noting the need to continually update their understanding of both the game itself and the capabilities of their players.
What does experience change?
We then used this knowledge to design simulations for coaches aspiring to operate at the highest level, using scenarios drawn directly from these demands. This allowed us to compare their judgments with those of coaches already working in high-performance.
Coaches need to manage constant pressure: emotional load, career insecurity and a flood of information
What we found was a relatively consistent mismatch. Coaches operating at the highest level spent more time anticipating how decisions would be interpreted, how credibility might be affected and what downstream problems a decision might create. In contrast, aspiring coaches often underestimated the political and relational limitations of the role, assumed freedom to act, and treated coaching as a largely technical exercise of providing good information.
So you think you could do better?
What our work is moving towards is the development of better systems, both for evaluating coaching and for supporting coaches to prepare more realistically for the demands they will face in a role. That means moving beyond judging what is visible and towards understanding what the role actually demands.
So, the next time you think you have the solution, or the name of the person who should replace the coach or manager, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider what you are judging and whether you really should be.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
