“That’s Football” Isn’t a Welfare Policy: Who Supports the Coaches?
A parent/carer/guardian (PCG) steps forward because the team needs someone. Just temporary, they say. A few weeks. Then the weeks become months and the months become seasons. Before long, they’re running training, messaging PCGs at 11pm, managing the WhatsApp group fallout from a result three days ago, having a quiet word with the child who cried in the car park, and somehow also responding to a committee email about kit allocation.
Nobody asked them to do most of it. It just filled the space they left open.
This is how most grassroots coaches arrive at exhaustion. Not through one dramatic moment but through accumulation. Small loads that seem manageable individually, stacking up without anyone noticing, until the person carrying them starts to bend.
We talk about youth mental health constantly. We should. Three quarters of all mental health conditions develop before the age of 18, which means the environment children play in matters enormously. The coaching relationship matters. The touchline culture matters. But somewhere in that conversation about protecting young players, there’s a question grassroots football keeps sidestepping:
Who is looking after the people looking after the children?
In 1983, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild introduced the term “emotional labour” to describe the sustained work of managing your own feelings in order to manage other people. She was writing about flight attendants and debt collectors. She could just as easily have been writing about volunteer football coaches.
Emotional labour isn’t the same as being emotional. It’s the active, repeated effort of staying regulated when the situation is difficult – staying calm when a PCG is aggressive, finding encouragement for a child who’s visibly struggling, holding your composure through a complaint, showing up with energy on a Tuesday evening when you’re depleted. Done over time without support, it creates a specific kind of exhaustion that’s easy to dismiss precisely because it doesn’t show up anywhere official.
A grassroots coach at a junior club might manage anxious players, friendship disputes within the squad, neurodivergent children who need individual approaches, safeguarding concerns, selection complaints, and social media pressure – all in the same weekend. None of that appears in a job description, because there isn’t one. Most volunteer coaches are unpaid. Many have their own children in the squad. Some are managing their own mental health alongside everything else, which matters more than clubs typically acknowledge given that one in four people in England will experience a mental health problem in any given year (Mind, 2023).
The FA’s welfare framework for affiliated clubs is built around protecting players. Club Welfare Officers are required, and for good reason. But the same clubs where that requirement exists often have no equivalent support structure for the coaches themselves. The assumption built into that gap is that adults will manage. That stepping forward voluntarily means accepting whatever the role costs you.
That assumption is wrong, and its consequences are real.
Girls’ football is one of the most visible examples of what happens when a game expands faster than its infrastructure.
Grassroots participation in women’s and girls’ football has grown substantially over the past decade. More clubs, more teams, more players – and an urgent need for coaches willing to lead in a space that’s still finding its shape. Women coaches are central to that growth, not just in numbers but culturally. Girls benefit from seeing women leading training, making decisions on the touchline and occupying positions of authority within their clubs.
But growth without structure creates pressure, and that pressure lands on coaches. Women stepping into these roles frequently encounter the same structural vacuum that exists across grassroots football, compounded by thinner institutional confidence and the specific demands of building something that isn’t fully formed yet. “Women are welcome” is not the same as women being supported when something goes wrong.
A female coach who handles a PCG dispute, raises a safeguarding concern, or goes through a complaint process without clear backing from her club doesn’t just lose trust in that club. She recalibrates her expectations of the whole environment. Clubs that want more women in coaching need to understand that representation is built on retention, and retention depends on whether people feel genuinely backed when things get difficult.
This isn’t specific to girls’ football. Whenever any team grows faster than its support structures, pressure concentrates on coaches. Too many players, not enough minutes, PCGs who believe their child is being overlooked, coaches trying to balance development with competition and fairness with no clear framework behind them. The problem usually isn’t bad intentions. It’s a structural gap that goodwill alone cannot fill.
Most PCGs care deeply. That’s not the issue.
The issue is that caring deeply, combined with the emotional charge of watching your child play sport, can produce behaviour that coaches are completely unprepared to handle. A PCG who believes their child is being treated unfairly can move, within 24 hours, from a touchline comment to a WhatsApp thread to a formal complaint. A coach who responds badly – through defensiveness, panic, or simply not knowing the process – can make it significantly worse without meaning to.
Research into volunteer retention in community sport consistently identifies interpersonal conflict with PCGs as a primary driver of coaches leaving the game. And yet most grassroots clubs have no formal PCG communication structure at all. No written expectations at the start of the season, no clear complaints route, no guidance on when and how concerns should be raised, no protection for coaches when things escalate.
A club without a PCG communication policy is essentially asking its coaches to invent the rules under pressure, in public, while the people they’re trying to manage are watching.
The basics aren’t complicated. PCGs should know before the season begins who to contact with concerns, when, and how. They should understand what the club expects from them on and around the pitch, and what the process looks like if a formal concern is raised. Coaches should know the system will support rather than expose them if a complaint comes in.
Without that structure, everything becomes personal. And once it becomes personal, it’s much harder to fix.
When a player is upset after a game, someone checks on them.
When a coach has just handled a safeguarding referral, a confrontation with a PCG, or an emotionally distressing incident – often within the same afternoon they were managing twelve children and fielding messages from twenty PCGs – the expectation is frequently that they’ll absorb it and move on.
That’s a mistake, and clubs that operate this way are taking a practical risk as much as an ethical one.
A welfare check doesn’t require training or an official framework to start with. “Are you okay? What do you need? Do you know what happens next?” Those three questions, asked genuinely, cost nothing. For someone who’s just handled something difficult alone, they can matter enormously. When coaches feel abandoned after difficult incidents, they leave. When experienced coaches leave, children lose trusted adults, teams lose continuity, and clubs lose people they’re unlikely to replace quickly.
The connection between coach welfare and player welfare is direct, not incidental.
Structure matters more than intention here. A culture of goodwill without systems behind it fails the moment things get hard.
Every club should have a written PCG communication policy explained to families before the season starts. A clear complaints process that all parties understand before any complaint is made. A named welfare contact for coaches, separate from the one for players. Regular check-ins during the season, not only when something has already gone wrong. Guidance on WhatsApp and social media that’s proactive rather than reactive.
None of this is out of reach for a grassroots club. Some of it costs nothing. But it has to exist before things go wrong, not get improvised in response to them.
Grassroots football doesn’t need different people. The coaches who are already out there, giving three evenings a week and their entire Saturday, are doing something genuinely valuable. The issue isn’t their quality. It’s the absence of structure around them.
A coach who knows their club will support them through a difficult PCG situation – who has had basic mental health training, who knows where to find resources and who to call when something goes wrong – that coach stays. Stays longer, coaches better, and creates a more stable environment for every child in their care.
The clubs still operating on the assumption that volunteers should simply cope haven’t found a sustainable model. They’ve found one that collapses quietly, over time, one resigned coach at a time.
“That’s football”, ends the conversation. Better clubs build the systems that make it unnecessary.
This article draws on themes raised across grassroots football communities and reflects issues experienced widely in junior and youth football clubs throughout England, shared with FMHA. Details have been anonymised to protect those involved.
The resources and support provided in The Vault are designed to promote mental wellbeing and provide general guidance on mental health related to grassroots football.
However, the content is not intended to serve as specific mental health advice or replace consultation with a trained professional. If you or someone you know requires personalised mental health support, we strongly encourage you to consult with a licensed mental health professional and/or seek appropriate services in your area.
