Jon de Souza was appointed Academy Manager at Colchester United in July 2016, after a coaching career that has taken him from club he joined as a schoolboy, Luton Town, to a coach education role at the Football Association and Brentford FC. PDP spoke to Jon about his career, and discussed the importance of coaching the individual.
Jon de Souza began his footballing journey at Luton Town, signing for the Hatters as an under-14 player. Despite their fairly lowly status, Luton Town are a club with a reputation for producing fine footballers; in the youth team at the same time as Jon were several who would go on to play Premier League football, such as Jerome Thomas, Kevin Foley, Leon Barnett and Curtis Davies. Future England and Republic of Ireland internationals Matty Upson and Gary Doherty were also at the club a couple of years ahead of de Souza.
It gave Jon a feeling that the Premier League wasn’t actually that far away. But although he made it through the ranks to the under-18s, Jon “didn’t quite make it” as a professional. De Souza realized at that time that success, or reaching his dream of the Premier League, would need to be achieved as a coach rather than a player.
“As a player I wasn’t going to be good enough to reach the Premier League,” he says. “But I was seeing coaches who had worked with me and my colleagues and helped develop us, and I wanted the opportunity to work with players at Luton. Luckily enough, the Head of Youth at the time gave me a job.”
And so de Souza’s career in football took a turn into coaching. He began as a part-time coach for the under-9s, before working his way up to Academy Manager while also holding down the roles of under-18s and reserve team manager over the next five years.
Speaking about his break into coaching at Luton, Jon remembers: “When I started coaching I was lucky enough that the Head of Youth at Luton at the time Gregg Broughton, who is now academy manager at Norwich, saw something in me and gave me the under-16 role. What was really valuable to me was he appointed someone called Wayne Turner, who had a lot of experience of first-team football and in academy football, so basically, he mentored me as an under-16 coach. Wayne was a massive massive help and still is a massive help, and I don’t think I would have got to where I’ve got to without working with Wayne.”
“I’ll still speak to him, I’ll have an hour on the phone every couple of weeks and it still blows my mind. It just shows you that people like that, it still keeps you on your toes that you’ve got so much to learn and do to become very, very good.”
A move to Brentford followed in 2011, where he oversaw the under-18s and under-21s at the Championship club in his role as Senior Professional Development Coach and Coach Developer. Luton had just been relegated and as a result were starting to lose their better players. Despite his fondness for the club fostered over his 11 years with the Hatters, when a phone call came in from Brentford, de Souza made the move.
He describes the programme pitched to him by Brentford as “interesting and exciting” due to the fact that the club was essentially starting its youth development from scratch. The club had plans to change from a Centre of Excellence into an academy, with an aim to become Category 2 after the launch of the Elite Player Performance Plan.
“Ultimately the aim was to produce a consistent level of players that would have gone on into our first team and be able to help the owner to achieve his ambitions of becoming a minimum of a Championship club, ideally a Premier League club.”
Over the next five years, Brentford almost achieved the goal of Premier League football, the club losing in the Championship Play-off semi-final in 2015. Despite the club not managing to reach their aim of Premier League football, de Souza is proud of the fact that many of the players who came through Brentford’s academy are playing regular Football League football, including one in the Premier League.
“You look at the England squads and I think we’ve had four players in England’s squads right up until Under 21 from Brentford in the past year,” says Jon, “so I think we can look at it positively.”
But then, a change of direction. In 2016 Brentford FC made the controversial decision to close its academy and restructure their youth setup. Their new model would see an “elite squad” of 18 players aged between 17 and 21, which would be closely tied to the first team.
Many of the players dropped by the club during the restructure ended up at some of the biggest clubs in the country. A sign, believes Jon, that the academy was doing something right in producing players with potential.
He explains why he thinks Brentford was doing well, saying: “We had a head of recruitment in Shaun O’Connor who was very active in and around London, that was very helpful. We had a group of really hard-working staff that put the player first. We were very much an individual-based academy. Luckily, we got players that were at the right level and we were able to create a programme that allowed them to develop.”
De Souza believes the closure of a high performing Category 2 academy is “worrying” in terms of setting a precedent. “Ultimately the aim for Brentford closing down was the owner wants to get in the Premier League, and I think they looked at the finances they’ve got available to them and thought how could we spend it most effectively in order to help the team achieve its goal of promotion,” he says.
“I think the problem is that the whole of football is looking at Brentford and asking: ‘How successful is it?’ I think it will be judged more in two or three years’ time. At the moment a lot of their ‘B’ team squad is made up of academy players, so in two or three years’ time it will be really interesting to see where they get their players from once those academy players have been released or graduated into the first team.”
He adds: “It will be an interesting development. I do understand the reasons why Brentford have made their changes, I can’t say I agree with them, but I do understand the reasons. Only time will tell if it has a knock-on effect or whether Brentford will remain unique in it.”
In July 2016 Jon moved to Colchester United to take up the role of Academy Manager, a move which de Souza believes is a real change in terms of culture having always previously working in inner-city areas of Luton and London.
Although, as he says, “kids are kids nowadays wherever you coach them”, he also believes there is a different mentality in the players he works with. “It’s difficult to say as I don’t want to blanket the London boys or even this area, but I think the boys in London are a little more independent,” he explains. “For example, at Brentford we used to have a nine-year-old that would get the tube into training, and he has to develop that hunger himself. Whereas I think sometimes when you go outside of London, you get far more parental support.”
“So, it’s about how we develop the strengths of the area, the strengths of the players brought up in around Essex and Colchester, and how we help maybe address the needs that are different to in and around London.”
It has been a case of so far, so good for Jon in his post at Colchester. “The club has been fantastic,” he enthuses. “Its completely behind developing young players and that starts with the chairman, Robbie Cowling. He’s set a precedent in that he wants 50% of the academy players to be playing in the first team squad. Then we are looking at achieving 30% game time from those players, so it’s very much driven by the chairman to get young players to a certain level then to give them opportunity and pathway to play.”
The club’s philosophy is all about promoting from within. Interestingly, Colchester have similar pathways for staff, with four out of the past five managers being appointed from within the academy. That way, believes de Souza, everybody in the club understands the values of the club. “It means you have an affinity with Colchester, you’ll care about Colchester far more than a manager or player who comes in from another club.
Jon’s focus now is to make sure he produces players who are good enough to be sold. Although there are players who he believes will one day make the first team, it is also important to make sure players are good enough to be sold to Championship level clubs or higher. He also wants to make the academy self-sufficient financially: “That way,” he says, “we can really look at it as a pioneering academy. I don’t think there are many in the country that are self-sustainable at the moment.”
In the foundation phase at Colchester, one of the current guidelines is “everything with a football”. “Although,” smiles Jon, “I wouldn’t say it was particularly innovative.” He continues, “everything we do tends to be with a football and we do work on key motor skills: speed, agility, quickness and their understanding of the game. But everything is related to the football.”
“We always say to them, if you’re learning and you’re improving then you give yourself a real chance.”
“If you’ve got players that are willing to learn and improve, you always give yourself a chance. We all see the Premier League as this outstanding elite environment, and it is, but I’ve played with and worked with players that aren’t actually that good but because they’ve learnt and improved they’ve given themselves every opportunity to go and play Premier League football. We always say to them, if you’re learning and you’re improving then you give yourself a real chance.”
Between 2008 and 2014, de Souza worked as a Coach Educator for the Football Association. His approach to coach educations is, he says, “very similar” to how he deals with players. He continues, “It’s about looking at the coach, and they need and what their strengths are. We could look at the coach and their weaknesses but we could also look at some of the best coaches in the work and nit-pick about them. So, it’s very much a focus on strengths and helping coaches realize what their strengths are and identifying areas of development.”
A focus of this approach is to identify development areas relevant to the structure in which they work – in their club, for example – rather than for the coach as a person. “We work to make sure they’re able to deliver the philosophy and style of play and the session that’s required, encouraging them to think outside the box as well,” he explains.
Jon gives an example of a coach who needed to work on their communication, but who rather than being told “you need to work on your communication”, was instead referred to a communication coach or drama teacher.
“It’s about how you deal with players and how you speak to players as well. I try to give the coach as comprehensive programme as possible.”
“A lot of coaching isn’t based on just on your technical and tactical knowledge,” he says, “It’s about how you deal with players and how you speak to players as well. I try to give the coach as comprehensive programme as possible.”
At Colchester, he is trying to get his coaching staff to concentrate on the mentality and social skills in the players as early as possible. He explains, “We try to give our players the skills off the pitch needed to become an elite football player, because anybody who has played in the Premier League or worked with players who have played in the Premier League will tell you, you don’t have to be exceptional technically but you do have to be exceptional with your mindset.”
But there is no such thing as a list of key characteristics for an effective coach, says de Souza. His philosophy of the individual extends to coaches not just players, it seems. “For me the best coaches find a way of connecting with the players and letting the players know they care,” he explains.
“Once you are able to do that – whether you’re positive or negative, whether you are on top of the players, whether you shout, whether you use guided discovery or whatever that is – as long as the player knows you care about them and you’ve got that connection with them, I think you’ve got a chance of developing them.”
The ideal development environment should focus on a balance between the individual and the team, says de Souza. “I look at a lot of clubs and they are all about the individual, as am I. But the problem I have with that is at what point do they learn to play within a team? At what point do they realise that their role within a team is to help the team win? By the same token, though, I look at a lot of clubs and it’s about winning, and I think ‘are you really developing individuals or giving them the tools they need to progress?’”
“We are here to develop individuals that can help a team win a game of football. That’s what we are trying to achieve at Colchester. It’s not just about developing individuals, because I don’t think you’ll get players into the first team if you do that, and its not just about winning games because in 10 years time nobody cares if you’ve won 10–0 on a Saturday or not.”
“I’ll keep saying to all the staff here philosophies don’t make debuts, styles of play don’t make debuts, possession stats don’t make debuts, players make debuts. So everything we do has to be judging the player on how they performed according to their own ability. We don’t necessarily need to compare our players to the opposition, we need to make sure our best players have got the ability to do what they’re good at, whoever they’re playing against. They are the core things in terms of developing individuals to win games of football, and the philosophy is about the individual first and everything else feeds into that.”
