The coach of coaches helps those in charge of teams perform at their peak

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Selection headaches, disgruntled players, and back-breaking losses. Just a small cross-section of the never-ending parade of problems that will likely plague all 32 head coaches over the course of this Women’s World Cup.

While players have each other to turn to in times of crisis, as well as an array of support staff and attendants designed to ensure they are at their mental and physical peak come kickoff, there are very few such contingency plans in place for the people ultimately in charge of the squads.

As someone who recently called time on her tenure as a head coach in the pressure cooker that is Mexican club soccer, Carmelina Moscato is all-too-keenly aware of the highs and lows that come with the role.

After one year as head coach of FC Nordsjaelland in Denmark, the former Canadian women’s international took charge of Monterrey’s Tigres UANL in June, 2022. She had instant success, leading the Tigres to the Apertura (opening) championship last November – becoming the first foreign-born coach to win a Liga MX Femenil title – but resigned last month after falling short against eventual winners America in the Clausura (closing) semi-finals.

Despite her achievements, Moscato said the media “ate her alive” at one point after a run of less-than-stellar results.

“I deleted my app, my Twitter app, it was like damaging,” the 39-year-old said. “And, you know, in my second full year, my fourth tournament, my second full year of head coaching, I am in the highest-pressure club in a country like Mexico, the most passionate football country. So, how am I supposed to deal with that?”

Luckily Moscato had something of an ace up her sleeve. Since her time in Denmark, Moscato has employed the services of Cody Royle, an Australian who spent 10 years as the head coach of the Canadian national Australian rules football squad.

More recently, Royle has turned his attention to serving the needs of the human beings who everyone else simply knows as ‘Coach.’ He has written two books on the subject and is working on his third, due out in the fall, called Second Set of Eyes.

He works one-on-one with coaches such as Moscato, and currently has working relationships with 12 other head coaches from seven different sports in five different countries, stretching from the NBA to Major League Baseball and the English Premier League. For Royle, though, the nature of the specific sport is secondary.

“It’s actually not about sport at all,” Royle said. “It’s about the human being and my expertise is in coaching and coaching people and so I’ve been a practitioner of that for 15 years. So as a head coach myself, before that as an assistant, so whatever the game is, doesn’t matter at all.”

There are very few people who know the ins and outs and what it’s really like to be a head coach – save for those who are or have been a head coach themselves. As a result, the position can be lonely to begin with, and gets even lonelier when turmoil starts to rear its ugly head or results haven’t gone the team’s way.

“I’ve definitely texted him 2 a.m., 3 a.m., that critical time where you cannot sleep and you’re carrying the weight of the expectation, the scrutiny, the consequence of the job itself, but more importantly, the hopes, the dreams, the successes, the failures of like 50 people,” Moscato said. “And, you know, your staff, your players, it’s extremely difficult to navigate when, especially for me personally, I’m an empathetic person. I’m very conscientious.”

With professional sports teams always in the market for that extra 0.1 of a percentage point in helping to grind out one more win or to score one more goal, it’s little surprise that some of the biggest sports organizations in the world are always looking to innovate.

Pep Guardiola, the head coach of English soccer’s treble-winning Manchester City, has long employed former Spanish water polo player Manel Estiarte as director of first-team management, operations and support, even though Estiarte – known as ‘the Maradona of the water’ – never played professional soccer.

Royle said it’s long overdue that teams started to surround their head coaches with as much top-level support as they do their multimillion-dollar players.

“If we’re scrounging around for 0.01 per cent of performance advantage somewhere else and I say I can get you multiple percentage points just from your head coach,” Royle said. “Someone’s going to get well ahead and there’s going to be a Moneyball moment in this world and everyone else is going to be scrambling around thinking, ‘How do we do that?’”

Royle, who has delivered presentations to both the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors’ staffs in the past few seasons, keeps tabs on all his current and former clients through social media. He has set up a list so that he can see how all their teams fared the night before, and just as important, what’s being said about them.

He doesn’t have to worry about that with Moscato for the next little while, though. Having committed the summer to working for TSN as an analyst in Australia at the Women’s World Cup, Moscato is taking a well-earned break from head coaching. But the pair will see what the future holds once the tournament ends on Aug. 20.

Wherever that future takes her, Moscato will be bringing Royle along for the ride, having long recognized his skills as indispensable.

“For me, it’s about an understanding of what the head coach is going through and I think Cody does a brilliant job at educating people on what that is,” she said. “I think, in the past, [people would say] what do head coaches do? ‘Oh, they just put a few tactics together, arms around players, smack them on the butt and here you go.’

“No, that’s an old-school thought and maybe the more we can eradicate these old-school thoughts because that’s not modern coaching, the more people will realize this is necessary.”