Kalam Mooniaruck: One step at a time

Challenge and support young players

Since then, Mooniaruck has spent time as an FA skills coach, an FA youth coach educator, West Ham United’s head of academy coach development, and then head of coaching and player development.

He praises the coaches he worked with as a youngster, who he describes as “role models”.

“Tony Whelan, Craig Simmons, Andy Cale: they’re all people that do things to make you feel comfortable. It’s our job to create a good environment, be nice to them and support them, because they will mess up, because they’re young people, boys and girls, in these elite environments that are trying to work as a team but are individuals and are coming from all these different places.”

He says that coaches should be looking to make young people’s journey exciting and fun, while challenging and supporting them on their journey: “Develop strong relationships with people, support them in a way that matches their needs but also their wants, and then you’ve got to empower them to go for it.”

Coaches, he goes on, should not be making decisions for their players, but should be equipping them to solve their own problems, with coaches there as a safety-net if required. They should also be as honest as possible with their players, even when it might be hard to do so.

He gives an example: “When players are in two-year contracts, they’ve got two lots of mid-season reviews. So the opportunity in the mid-season reviews is [for players to] have real clear targets of what they need to do to achieve the next thing, but make them realistic and achievable - not 50 goals or something like that, but more things they can control themselves: how they apply themselves, how they work towards it, how they utilise the people around them.

“Squads are getting bigger and bigger in professional football now, and you need people that are part of the squad. They call them ‘good travellers’ and ‘good citizens’, because the make-up of a squad’s so different now, and your job might be to be the one that doesn’t play, but is around for your team-mates and drives training and the standards - and in the international level, we have quite a lot of that now, where some players go and don’t play.

“So the environment that you create with them and the honesty you create with them, I think it’s important.”

And of course, he knows what it takes to succeed as a young player.

“You’ve got to be resilient because if you play football, you know there will always be an end, and you don’t decide it,” he says, adding that even though football is hard work, those in the game are also very fortunate. “You know that you’ve got to get used to travel. You know you’ve got to get used to late nights. You know you’ve got to get used to not playing well.

“I learnt to be resilient. I probably didn’t know that at the time, but I just kept taking one step at a time.”

Connecting with coaches

At the very start of his career, Mooniaruck spent time at the Beckham Academy in Greenwich in London, working with a range of coaches and players from different backgrounds. That helped him understand more ways to connect with people with diverse experiences as he has progressed along his own journey.

“I didn’t want to be the person at the front that just says: ‘This is what you do, and this is how it is,’” he says. “Coaching has swung from ‘stop, stand still, rehearse this, practise this, do this.’”

He points to his work as a coach developer, supporting ex-professionals as well as those who did not play the game for a living.

“There are lots of ex-footballers that come into academy systems that know lots of the football content and knowledge and have been there. They just need some help on delivering, how they deliver it to the people they’re working with.

“Then you’ve got the up-and-coming coaches that are real students of the game. It was more about making sure for them, how they’ve learnt football, how they make it relevant for the kids, but also the perception of them by others because they haven’t played. I think helping them with that is important because the make-up of a coaching team should, I believe, have a variety of people from different backgrounds to give you that broader academy journey for the kids, because the kids are coming from these different places [as well].”

As head of coaching development at West Ham United, Mooniaruck knew that the club had a rich and storied history as well as a proud track record of player development in recent years; he mentions Joe Cole, Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand as just a few examples of the way that young players shone within the system. 

“Develop strong relationships with people, support them in a way that matches their needs but also their wants, and then you’ve got to empower them to go for it”

And his research gave him insight into what the club’s unique values were – togetherness, exciting, positive attitude, hardworking - and how they were embedded in everyone’s work. All clubs might have player profiles, but West Ham’s are underpinned by this ‘West Ham way’.

“You can’t have an attacking midfield player who’s great at rotations in midfield, but he’s not hardworking,” explains Mooniaruck, adding that the ‘West Ham way’ also relates to coach behaviour. “In some of the feedback I was giving, I was [calculating] ball rolling time, time between practices, time spent playing, time spent listening. Then I said to the coach, ‘How hardworking can the kids be if they stop 35 times?’, and the coach [says], ‘I didn’t think of it like that,’ but because we’re linking it to a value, it’s a lot easier. 

“It allowed us to celebrate being the underdog. It allowed us to celebrate something that we knew we could control, because we could always be more hardworking than everyone else. We could be more exciting than anyone else. We can definitely have a positive attitude more than anyone else because this is really important to us. The more together we are as a team, do your job for the team, it’ll help everyone, but it’ll also help you.”

He is quick to point out that the environment also needs to be right to support young people.

“They’ve got to feel safe within it because we’re dealing with people, and eventually down the line we’ll deal with players,” he says.

And of course he also wants to support and empower coaches.

“I wanted the staff to be able to practise things and have a go at trying things, because we can’t ask the kids to be creative if we’re not asking the staff to be,” he explains.

“I wanted to give freedom to the head coaches, because it’s a collective - give freedom to the coaches for them to say, ‘No, we’re doing it like this today. We’re going to play with a back three because of these reasons, and I believe in this and this is what I want,’ and it should be individually led.”

And one way in which Mooniaruck sees success is when he sees players and coaches moving on for different opportunities in different settings, mentioning Divine Mukasa and Xavier Parker moving from West Ham to Manchester City.

“I loved it, and I love it now that I look at so many different staff that have left and moved on and gone to other clubs and federations and players, and staying in touch with them and seeing their journeys.”

Embedding winning behaviours

Mooniaruck says that in his current role as youth development phase lead at the FA, coaches are using a unique set of metrics to see how their players are progressing, and how the pathway is working.

“Some of the measurements are how many players we unearth, how many of them understand the DNA which we’re trying to use, and how much of the winning behaviours framework do the kids understand,” he says. Some of the factors coaches would consider include how the young players travel, how they rest, how they behave in public and to staff, and how they cope with challenges such as not playing.”

And he describes his role as “an absolute privilege”.

“I’m so proud to do it, to work with an organisation with so many talented people and exciting players in the pathway. Credit to all the clubs for all the work they do. We’re just so fortunate we get to then bring them on camp.

“We want to embed these winning behaviours for the kids so they know what the feeling of winning is, and what it is to connect to England and the pathway, and the Three Lions, and what it means to play for your country, and the [pride] that could be for your family, your school, your teacher. I think that is a real big part of playing for England.

“But what playing for England means for us…compared to a 14-year-old, is very different. So we have to understand what their reason is for doing this, because we’ve got to make sure that we make them feel as comfortable in this England environment as possible, but [they also need to] understand that further down the pathway when they graduate from  the YDP phase into the PDP phase, [they will experience playing in] qualifiers and hopefully EUROs and World Cups, and hopefully getting up to the senior squad.”