The Assistant's Decade

For most of the modern history of team sport, the route to a head coaching job ran through being a player, then being a slightly older player, then being handed a team. The assistant was a functionary — someone who put out cones and got the coffee, and whose ceiling was more cones.

That has inverted, and the inversion happened fast enough that most of the sport's institutions have not caught up with it. The specialist assistant — set pieces, individual development, opposition analysis — is now a role with its own market, its own salary band, and increasingly its own agent.

What drove it

Data, mostly, but not in the way people assume. The analytics revolution did not replace coaches with spreadsheets. It created a volume of information that one person on a touchline cannot process, and therefore created jobs for people who process it.

The second driver is contractual. A head coach lasts, on average, less than two seasons. A specialist assistant hired for a defined technical function outlasts three of them, because the function does not depend on the philosophy of whoever is currently in charge.

That is a genuinely better career than the one the sport advertises. It is more stable, the skills are more portable, and — in several leagues I have looked at — the top of the specialist band now pays more than the bottom of the head coaching band.

The part that is not better

You are invisible. When the team wins, someone else is on the podium. When it loses, you are part of the block that gets cleared out. The person deciding whether you are worth keeping has usually never spoken to you.

Every assistant I have interviewed for this piece said a version of the same thing: the work is the best it has ever been, and the recognition is exactly where it was in 2010.

That gap is the story of the next decade. Either the sport builds a way of crediting the people doing the technical work, or it keeps losing them to the jobs that will.