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Friday Coffee Break: From beautiful game to the boardroom

SPORTS and business success coach Richard Nugent chats to bdaily about board and changing room stresses and the parallels between them.

HE MAY not be a household name, but to many of nation’s football stars he is the Mr Fix It who has helped strikers find the net again, managers take control or unruly dressing rooms and the under confident believe in themselves.

As a success and business coach, Tyneside-based Richard Nugent works for renowned UK consultancy Kaizen – in a role which sees him training some of the largest firms in the world such as Tesco Bank, Alton Towers and EDF Energy.

In the US, Having already worked with Merlin Entertainment – the world’s second largest visitor attraction operator – he is also expecting to extend his training sessions to management teams at West Coast attractions such as Madame Tousauds Hollywood and Lego Land, San Diego.

He spoke to bdaily about his work with football, rugby and cricket clubs and his experiences working with business empires large and small.

BD: How did you get involved in coaching in sports?

RN: Success for football came about because of a challenge from a client. Quite a lot of my clients tend to be people mid to late 40s, maybe 50s, have the job, car, money and career. They get it all and realise that they are dead unhappy. So I ask them on a scale of 1 to 10 how happy they are. Someone turned it round and asked me and I said eight or a nine. He asked me what it would take form me to go from a nine to a 10 and I realised It would be to do exactly as I do now except in football, so he said do that, so I did. If you want to do some thing, anything you want to do you can do. Any business you want to create, provided there’s a market for it, it’s entirely possible to do it. So since then, a lot of my time is working with bluechips, entrepreneurs and footballers, athletes, rugby players. Its great spending one day with a leadership team, the next helping someone set up their business and then working with sportsmen.

BD: Did you already have an interest in football?

RN: I played football locally and did my football coaching badges really young. I really got the culture. There’s probably quite a lot of psychologists in football who don’t get the culture of it. It’s a very specific environment and it’s been really useful having that background.

BD: It must be tough being a footballer earning all that money to play a game they love, what sort of problems do you help them overcome?

People go for football because it’s sexy and there’s quite a lot of money in it. But it’s a really fearful environment to work in in any capacity from a kit man to a player to a manager to a coach. There is a differential between the premiership players and the top championship players and the rest. The average salary in the premier league a couple of years was I think around £25,000 a week. Where as the average salary in the Championship was between £2,500 and £3,000. Now for most people that would be brilliant, but you’ve got players who are only going to play for 10 to 15 years and wont get their biggest salary in that time.

BD: So it’s as equally a stressful environment as in business?

RN: They know their career can end at any time. And from a management point of view, lets say the average championship manager lasts in their job about 14, 15 months. So you are always on the verge of being sacked. If you look at it in a business context, knowing that you could not have a job in two years time and know that your career will definitely be finished in ten year’s time. It’s an interesting environment.

BD: I know you’ve worked for some major Premier League stars which you’re not allowed to talk about but could you explain some common problems you are called on to fix?

RN: I did some work in Liverpool’s academy a couple of years ago around the time they had won the youth cup, and they had a guy in the first team who was brilliant from a psychological point of view but culturally he had not fitted in, which you get quite a lot.

I also worked with the management team at Scunthorpe United. They just survived in the Championship this season on a budget which is absolutely minute. It’s so small their training ground is a field by a country road with no changing facilities. Their budget is so small its untrue. They’ve competed at this level and beat Newcastle this year. Contractually they wont know where they are from one season to the other. So there’s so little security outside of those top 10 or 20. You speak to most players, they’ll say to you, 50% of the game is mental at least. If you look at what players spend time on week to week, they don’t do any mental stuff. A lot of the clubs will have a psychologist that is available to them if they have a problem but it’s not part of their routine. So I’ve got to coach them on maintaining their form, their confidence, making sure they are preparing right, and a lot of the time things off the pitch, will also come into that.

BD: Are there any parallels between the problems sports players experience and those which blight is in our business careers?

RN: Yes. For example, one of the Liverpool players I worked was the captain of the academy and was the brightest young thing. If in the first five minutes of games he did a bad pass, he’d do it again three or four times so we discovered it was because he was thinking of the next one and the last so actually he was mentally trying to play two passes at the same time. If you relieve that mental pressure, there is a technique you can use during the game to deal with situations that come up. All of a sudden he wasn’t worrying about all the other stuff. The same concept happens in business as well, for example if you are at a company, and you don’t think your manager rates you and you get given a project, you do it, but also spend the whole time thinking how to prove your boss wrong, so it doubles the pressure straight away. Quite a lot of stress in organisations is created by what we are doing in our own heads.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .