If you sat in on a typical week at a football academy, you’d see technical drills, tactical sessions, strength and conditioning, video review, and probably a nutrition talk. What you likely wouldn’t see, structured with the same rigor, is a dedicated curriculum for character — how a young player handles disappointment, manages ego, communicates under stress, or takes accountability without collapsing into excuses. I think that’s a serious design flaw in how most academies are built, and I say that as someone who’s spent years thinking about how organizations, of any kind, actually develop people rather than just extract output from them.
A Curriculum, Not a Poster on the Wall
Most academies will tell you character matters. Very few have actually built it into a curriculum with the same seriousness as their technical program — sequenced content, defined outcomes, regular assessment, coaches trained specifically to deliver it. Instead, it tends to live as an informal byproduct of good coaching culture, which is fragile, because it depends entirely on which individual happens to be leading a session that day. If your character development strategy is “hope the coaches model it well,” you don’t have a strategy. You have a hope.
I’ve seen the equivalent mistake in companies I’ve advised. Leadership development, communication skills, how people give and receive feedback — these get treated as personality traits people either have or don’t, rather than as skills that can be taught, practiced, and improved with a real curriculum behind them. The organizations that outperform over time are almost always the ones that treat these as trainable disciplines, not innate gifts.
Why Character Is Harder to Teach Late
There’s a reason this has to happen inside the academy structure and not be left until a player turns professional. By the time a young athlete signs their first senior contract, the habits that will define how they handle fame, money, criticism, and setback are largely already set. Trying to instill discipline and self-awareness in a twenty-two-year-old who’s never had to build those muscles is possible, but it’s remedial work, done under far higher stakes and far less patience than the same lesson delivered at fourteen or fifteen.
Academies have a genuine developmental advantage here that almost no other stage of a footballing career offers: young people who are still forming their identity, in a structured environment, with years of contact time to work with. Wasting that window on technical training alone is, in my view, one of the most underused assets in the entire talent pipeline.
What an Actual Character Curriculum Looks Like
I’m not talking about occasional motivational talks from a visiting speaker, however well-intentioned those are. A real curriculum has defined content at each age group: emotional regulation and self-talk for younger players, accountability and conflict resolution as they move into adolescence, and identity, media literacy, and financial literacy as they approach a possible professional pathway. It has coaches trained to deliver this material specifically, not just senior staff who happen to be good at it informally. And critically, it has some form of assessment — not to punish players, but to know whether the work is actually landing, the same way a technical coach tracks whether a finishing drill is improving conversion rates.
The Business Case Underneath the Human One
There’s a purely commercial argument here too, and I think it’s underappreciated. Players who’ve had real character development are lower risk across almost every dimension a club cares about: fewer disciplinary incidents, better adaptability when they’re loaned out or transferred into unfamiliar environments, more resilience through injury, and generally longer, more stable careers that protect the value of the initial investment in their development. None of that shows up in a scouting report focused purely on technique, but all of it shows up eventually on a balance sheet, in retention, and in reputation.
Building the Habit Early, Not Retrofitting It Later
I don’t think this is a controversial idea so much as a neglected one. Nobody disputes that character matters in football. The gap is between believing that and actually building a curriculum disciplined enough to teach it on purpose, at scale, across every age group in an academy, rather than leaving it to chance and hoping the right coach is in the room at the right moment.
Academies that close that gap aren’t just producing better people — although that would be reason enough. They’re producing more resilient, more coachable, more durable professionals, which is exactly the kind of long-term value creation I look for in any organization I study, on a pitch or anywhere else.
ThePrint BrandIt content is a paid-for, sponsored article. Journalists of ThePrint are not involved in reporting or writing it.