The Athletic. Hello I'm Mark Cham and welcome to the Business and Sport Podcast on the Athletic Matt Slater

back with us this week after a week away and our guest is John Herdman the English coach

looking to transform Canadian football into a force both on and off the pitch

all the way from grassroots to elite level ahead of Canada being one of three nations co-host in

the men's world cup in 2026. John is a former primary school teacher in England

was an academy coach at Sunderland and has already

led Canada's hugely popular women's team to Olympic medals and a World Cup

quarter-final. He's now in charge of the Canada Men's team who have been into qualify for a men's world cup in Qatar next year for the first time since 1986.

John, thank you very much for joining us. I've given a brief resume of your career. Just explain your pathway into coaching first of all.

Yeah, the pathway into coaching, you know, started with most young men who dream of being a football

of playing for Newcastle United, but that didn't transpire. Being told you weren't good enough at 15, 16,

pushed us in a new pathway, which seems to be the obvious one,

which is into coaching and started coaching at 16,

picked up my first FAA coaching badge at 17

and then that sort of catapulted it

as into a teaching pathway through university.

And then on the back of that, I started my own business as a franchise holder with

Brazilian soccer schools up in the northeast.

That took us into an opportunity to do some lecturing and you know from that professional academies and that's where you know I dreamed of

of being you know working at the highest level with young up-in-coming professional players so

that was at Sunland Football Club and at Hartlepool United Center of Excellence. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.

It's interesting that it's everything starts with teaching though because talk to a lot of people in this industry.

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