18/02/2026
🤔
I got a message yesterday from a coach who was concerned about something he'd seen.
Another coach, someone working with 8-year0olds, had described a couple of children in his team as "disruptive." His solution wasn't to reflect on his sessions or to find solutions to support those players, it wasn't to ask why those children were behaving that way.
It was to get rid of them, he then published an advert looking for "high-level 8-year -olds" to replace them.
I wish I could say this was unusual but it's not. We've all seen it, coaches at grassroots level, foundational, community football, actively recruiting children they consider "elite" while quietly removing the ones who don't fit neatly into what they want their team to look like on a Saturday morning.
I need to be careful here because I'm not trying to vilify anyone. Coaching is hard and often for many volunteers, time is short. Sessions don't always go the way you planned and yes, behaviour can be challenging. I get that, but when the response to a child being difficult at 8 is to push them out of the environment altogether, something has gone wrong in how we understand what grassroots football is actually for.
This isn't about winning or losing, I now that conversation gets dragged in every time and it's not what this is about.
This is about access and participation, the idea that a child in your community, regardless of where they are in their development, regardless of how they behave on a Tuesday night, deserves to be coached and deserves to be welcomed. Deserves the same patience and investment as the child who turns up, listens first time, and looks great on the ball.
When we start labelling 8-year-olds as elite or non-elite, who is that actually for? Is it for the child's development? Or is it to make our sessions easier, our results better, our reputation shinier? I think most coaches already know the answer to that if they sit with it honestly.
Your role, my role, all of our roles, is not to recruit a squad of children who make coaching convenient. It's to build something where every child who walks through that gate gets better because they were there. Even the loud ones, even the distracted ones and even the ones who test your patience every single week.
Grassroots football doesn't belong to the coaches who shout the loudest or recruit the hardest. It belongs to the children, all of them.
If that challenges how you're currently doing things, good, that's the point.
