Coaching: Training the men in charge

"Technique is very important, pace is important and you have to be physically strong. But you also have to be mentally educated." So said the England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson this week. The Swede was talking about young English footballers, but some in the game wonder if his words shouldn't be applied more widely. "We coach youngsters, we coach pros, we coach refs, we even coach coaches," says the FA's Dave Pigment, "but the guy with the most important position in any football club receives no coaching whatsoever, the chairman."

The situation abroad is very different. In Amsterdam the famous Ajax system brings in self-satisfied and hard-hearted boys as young as eight and begins the process of grooming them for the task of launching a new heritage replica kit while withdrawing concessionary season tickets for the unwaged.

At the superb Clairefontaine facility just outside Paris, meanwhile, the French are already bringing through the next generation of the country's club presidents. Visit on a weekday afternoon and you will see the cream of the Gallic crop, sleekly fat, immaculately manicured, prematurely balding adolescents, their skins glowing with wealth, being put through their paces.

One group is sensuously slurping the aspic from canapes without spilling a morsel down the front of their ostentatious calf-length cashmere overcoats; another sits stern-faced next to a platoon of pneumatic yet dead-eyed blondes; a third smiles uncomprehendingly at remarks whispered in their ear by a team of distinguished ex-players led by Michel Platini and all this under the watchful eye of the maestro himself, Bernard Tapie.

In France genetics play a part in identifying the potential chairman of the future. "Because of financial DNA we find that children with parents who are rich make the best chairmen," says Tapie. "They have what our sports scientists have identified as a higher percentage of the type of green tissue that helps them when it comes to developing the muscular bank balances needed to succeed in the boardroom."

England has so far lagged behind. And that's something Pigment, the Football Association's new director of director development, has been brought in to address. It is not before time. With the likes of Roman Abramovich, the Glazer boys and Mohamed Al Fayed filling up positions traditionally occupied by British scrap offal merchants many fear that the opportunities for English chairmen these days are severely limited.

"I sometimes wonder if the Ken Bateses, Robert Maxwellses and Peter Swaleses would make it through today," whimpers Peter Ridsdale, a man who lived the dream and reaped the whirlwind. "If these foreigners are allowed to keep coming over here and taking our seats, a whole generation of English directors may be flushed down the toilet without ever getting a chance to run up massive debts, make portentous speeches and sell the stadium to a supermarket chain. In the long term that's going to be disastrous for our national game."

"We got complacent," says Pigment in response. "We believed we had a production line for chairmen and could turn out Louis Edwardses, Bob Lordses and Michael Knightonses indefinitely. Times change. The days of the old street chairmanship in which groups of grubby-faced lads with scabs on their knees would kick a ball made from old potato peelings held together by twine up and down an alley, while one pitiful outcast with a weak chest and a dad who owned the local pickled onion factory peered out through the gap under an outside toilet door imagining it was the director's box and vowing that one day he would be in a position to suddenly sell the best of them to Stockport County despite opposition from fans just because they forgot to say "good morning, sir" to him one Saturday no longer exists," says Pigment,

"It's sad, but it's fact".

Some will doubt that it is possible to coach the sort of skills displayed by top English chairmen such as Rupert Lowe or Freddy Shepherd. Pigment disagrees: "Clearly when it comes to self-awareness and human insight you can't take out what God put in," he says. "Rupert and Freddy are both incredibly talented chairmen. But they didn't get where they are today without honing their God-given gifts. After all there are thousands of smug middle-aged men in Britain with pomposity to burn and absolutely no sense of their own ridiculousness, but you don't find many of them singing the praises of Oliver Cromwell in a national newspaper, or saying 'We're not going to be anybody's mugs any more' to groups of journalists. And the reason for that is hard work.

"I know for a fact, for instance, that during his younger days Freddy was handicapped by a hint of irony that often prevented him keeping a straight face during some of his pronouncements. He spent hours on the training ground getting rid of it. Not many young lads are prepared to make that type of sacrifice. If we want to see the Ruperts and Freddys of the future, we have to encourage the ones who will."