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Greg Brooking
Is it possible to ask a player if they want to become a coach?
Brett Bayley
There is no surefire method for finding which players would make the best coaches. Players will typically carry over their Determination and personality attributes after hanging up their boots, but their current and potential coaching ability will be randomized.
It’s true that successful players don’t always make successful managers. For every Pep Guardiola or Zinedine Zidane, there is an Alan Shearer or Lothar Matthäus. On the flip side, there are plenty of top managers whose playing careers were unremarkable or were cut short by injury, or who never played senior football at all.
A determined player with a strong personality – and perhaps high Leadership – would be a good candidate for a future coaching role. There is also a simple way to find out what a player wants to do when they retire…
Any player aged 29+ will have a long-term plan (shown on the Information page on their profile) which will give you hints about their future career. One player may be “seriously considering” going into coaching or management, while another may prefer another backroom role. Some players may even want to leave football altogether once they’ve stopped playing.
You can talk to a player about their future plans by viewing their profile and going to Discuss > Advice > Recommend Possible Future Staff Role. If the player agrees with your suggestion, it could increase the chances of them taking up that role in the future. However, telling your captain that they should forget about management and become a physio instead probably won’t go down too well.
The player might even make themselves available for a coaching role immediately. If you agree, this will add non-playing attributes to their profile, though you will need to offer them a new contract to give them a non-playing job (you can’t just add a staff role to their current deal).
A veteran player may also gain non-playing attributes naturally, without you recommending a role first. This usually happens when they announce their plans to retire from playing. You can then give them a new non-playing contract, which will take effect at the end of the current season.
At first, your new coach’s attributes may be quite low, especially if they have few (or no) coaching badges. Those attributes should improve in time, but you may want to start them off as a reserve or youth-team coach, rather than throwing them straight into management or senior coaching.
If you micro-manage your training assignments, you may also want to give them only one or two assignments, working alongside a more experienced coach. It’s not a good idea to give a coach a high workload, or spread them too thin over too many assignments.