Burnley's Head of Academy Goalkeeping, Ryan Hudson, discusses his winding journey through academy football.
From the outside, careers in football can appear to follow a linear progression – join an academy, become a professional, become a coach or manager, then retire. However, there are plenty of individuals who buck that trend.
Ryan Hudson, the current Head of Academy Goalkeeping at Burnley is a perfect example, after taking an unconventional route to top-level coaching.
Hudson started his career working with primary school-aged children before working his way through the leagues and the age groups, via Notts County, Nottingham Forest, Reading, Leicester City, Tottenham Hotspur, and Queens Park Rangers, before landing in his current role.
Hudson’s route into coaching has given him a unique perspective on working with young people, communicating effectively, and how to get the best out of youth goalkeepers when the pressure of football is at its most fierce.
He spoke to Goalkeeper.com about how his journey as a coach has led him to trust the process, rather than focus too narrowly on the outcome.
Having grown up playing a wide range of sports including rugby, tennis and cricket, his journey into football coaching started as a Community Coach with Derby, where he became hooked on goalkeeping.
Hudson explained: “I've got quite an obsessive personality. Once I got the bug for it, that was it then. I think my first time doing it, I had a full-time job, which was doing community stuff.
“I was going to Notts County part-time, and then I was playing and coaching voluntarily in non-league. I was doing 65 hours a week, just because that's what I wanted to do.”
Hudson believes that this route to coaching helps him to bring a new perspective to his coaching methods, offering unique solutions to problems that academy goalkeepers regularly encounter.
“I remember there being a goalkeeper in the under 12s or under 11s at Leicester and he was a really good goalkeeper,” Hudson said. “But he wasn't the best with his feet and was going to get released because he couldn’t play out from the back well enough.
“So I said - just don't do any goalkeeping for six weeks. Make him be an outfield player for six weeks. The club said you can't do that! I said, why not? You've just identified the problem, I'm just giving you a solution.
“But the status quo said - the goalkeepers have to have their goalkeeping time and it's all already set out for them.”
Having spent his youth playing a variety of sports, Hudson is a big advocate for children not specialising too early. He explained: “I think I'm seeing so many goalkeepers now specialise so young and be at the academy for so many hours per week. I don't think they're getting the opportunity to become well-rounded athletes.
“In my opinion, what used to happen was you'd get kids who were naturally quite well coordinated and quite robust and quite strong just from playing outfield and climbing trees and doing all the other things. Now they're not.
“So I thought, I can see what's going to happen is we're going to have poor moving kids who are still trying to get to do the same things, but they've not got the movement skills.
"If they're 16, we need to start narrowing the focus but with the younger ones, I think the more they do, the better.”
As a coach, being able to communicate a clear message to your players is crucial. Hudson believes that his experience of working with young children has helped him to be able to speak clearly to his goalkeepers and distil the message down into its most effective form.
“I think if I didn’t have the foundations I have, working with younger children, I'd not have been as good a coach as I am now.
“Having to teach four-year-olds to play tennis, or having to really break down the principles of a goalkeeping action to help a 10-year-old understand it.
“I think that having that knowledge helps when you go with the older ones, because you're breaking down the same skills, it's just they're operating at a higher level.”
Hudson is a firm believer that an innate self-belief is one of the most essential qualities for a goalkeeper. To some this may appear as arrogance, however, he argues that if a keeper allows self-doubt to creep in at a crucial moment, it can be the difference between making a save and conceding a goal.
Comparing current Burnley number one James Trafford to Premier League winner Kasper Schmeichel, he continued: “The best ones I've seen, both older and younger, like Trafford. To be playing at the level he's playing at 22 is really impressive.
“And this obviously isn't me saying anything negative towards Traff, but there is a level of ‘arrogance’ with him where he knows he's good at what he does, but you have to have that. It doesn't mean you're a bad person.
“Like Kasper [Schmeichel] had an edge to him and on some days it would be a bit uncomfortable. But he was a lovely guy. We used to do loads of Zoom calls with the academy and he'd speak to the young kids.
“But he had that look that said, I'm the boss, I'm number one, I'm really good at what I do. I feel like the nature of goalkeeping, things happen so quickly.
“All you need is that doubt, and you could have played that pass, but you didn't, or you played it too late, or you were going to catch that cross, but you didn't, so you just flapped it.”
Hudson learned the importance of authenticity and being true to yourself early in his career. He firmly believes that trusting the process is more important than chasing an outcome.
Whether between the sticks on the field, or in your career off it, Hudson believes that if you follow the right process, the end result will take care of itself in the end.
“I remember when I was doing my goalkeeping B licence years ago, I analysed Buffon in the Champions League final. I can't remember who they played, and my analysis was on whether he made the right save for the right moment,” Hudson said. “I had him down for 100% and they lost 4-0. They were just four really good goals.”
“I think a lot of goalkeepers, especially younger ones, are so worried about the outcome that sometimes they do the wrong process to get there.”
He continued: “You might have a great coaching week with the goalie and it gets to the match and he throws it over his shoulder and it goes in.
“But as long as you know the process of what you've been doing throughout the week is right, eventually, especially with working with younger keepers, if the process is right, the outcome should hopefully look after it itself. I think I say that one every day.”
With Burnley riding high in the Championship, Hudson could soon be the Head of Goalkeeping at a Premier League club's academy. Whilst he would love to work with the senior team in the future, he will always retain a passion for developing young talent.
“I definitely love working in development. I know because I'm quite a driven person. When I worked with the women's first team at Tottenham, I really enjoyed it. It stressed me out a lot, as we were in a relegation battle.
“But just that drive to get three points on a Saturday and trying to edge out the opponent in whatever 1% that you can find, I did really enjoy it. So I know I'm going to want to go into men's first team as well at some stage. But I think I'm never going to get bored of being in development and developing people.”
