Lots of people talk about resilience in football without really defining what that means. For us, it doesn’t mean ‘toughening up’ and ‘doing better’, it means compassion, understanding and celebrating the effort not the result, modeling how to deal with failure and mistakes with dignity and respect for ourselves and others. We see mistakes as learning opportunities. We adapt our coaching to fit the needs of the players to enable them to develop their skills at a pace that builds them up, not knocks them down.

Football culture doesn’t just happen on the pitch, it’s everything around it.