“It can be a jungle, you rock up to a training session, the kids are very receptive and if they notice even an ounce of hesitancy from a parent, they’re like animals all over you. They run riot and you can lose the session quite quickly.” 

Jack Ryan is talking from experience but it is also an experience anyone who has volunteered for their son or daughter’s sports club would understand.

Ryan has developed an app MyClub which he believes will help with this element of local club management and many more.

“This is coming from experience, myself, I’ve often gone through a session and you can see it kind of getting away from you a little bit. So having that a guideline, it can be sent here directly to your app, Virtual Reality session plans that can map out exactly how the session will unfold can be sent directly to your app. It just gives you confidence. If you’re nervous before the session on Saturday morning, you can plug in and see what outcomes they advise.”

Ryan has a background as a coach. His father Greg moved from Clondalkin to Ranelagh in the 1990s and having been involved in football in Clondalkin wanted the same in his new home which was, as Ryan says, not a football hotbed. Greg didn’t drive so he started his own club, Beechwood, and his son, from an early age, was involved in all kinds of admin for the club.

He worked too with Dave Collins – Nathan Collins’s father – at Cherry Orchard but one Sunday after a long day playing Football Manager, he realised he had to make football his life.

“I found myself spending more time playing football manager online than doing any homework. I think it became a real issue when on a Sunday afternoon, I lost the Champions League final in Football Manager. I was probably in my early 20s. I had a bit of a strop, got a bit sulky and I went downstairs to the dinner table on the Sunday dinner, slammed the door, after losing a Champions League final in an imaginary game. I said, ‘This is an issue here. I need to make football my life’. From then on, I was looking at applying for jobs everywhere, I Googled every imaginable vacancy in football that you could imagine.”

“Every aspect of the app is something I’ve suffered from – at Red Bulls, when we were doing session plans for free kicks, it was a case of drawing them out on a whiteboard.”

This led him to the Cayman Islands where he was interviewed for the manager’s job there by Jeffrey Webb, head of the Cayman FA and one time Fifa vice-president, before Webb was among those Fifa executives charged with corruption. “Probably grateful that didn’t materialise,” Ryan says.

“I had a contact who knew someone in Red Bull and put me in touch with them there and went over to do a practical session, sort of as my job interview, and it was one of New York’s biggest snowstorms in years. So that was put on hold. I was back and forth for a while and I got the job and worked there for five years. I started out at the academy level, and sort of worked my way up, worked in a bit of coach education, and everything like that.

“It was a great environment. There were really, really good high-level coaches that were there. Jesse Marsch was obviously the first team manager at the time and he would have given a lot of time to the kind of younger staff. It was just a really good environment to learn. Being involved in that every day, I was just like, this has to be my life.”

A return to Ireland provided a reality check and he went in to business but his love of football saw him come with the idea for the app.

“Every aspect of the app is something I’ve suffered from – at Red Bulls, when we were doing session plans for free kicks, it was a case of drawing them out on a whiteboard. You can present it to the players, and you know for a fact they’re not taking in that information. When I started coaching, I would have been very, very nervous ahead of sessions so having that security of having an online platform to log into on a Friday evening to go, ‘Right, what am I doing tomorrow?’ And develop your skills that way, would have been something that I’d have really loved. So yeah, the opportunity was brilliant, we feel there is a big, big gap in the market for that. It’s something that we’re just excited to sort of push ahead with and the feedback has been unreal so far,” Ryan says.

The app is free to clubs and MyClub makes its money by sharing ad revenue, promising local advertisers access to the local community. MyClub has already launched and has 50 clubs already using it – including Sligo Rovers –  while the platform is also getting investment from Jordan Larmour and Rhys Ruddock. “They are just obsessed with the session planning technology. They just think that can be a game changer, even at elite level with Leinster,” Ryan says.

Kilkenny’s Walter Walsh and Tipperary’s Noel McGrath are on board too. 

“They obviously love the session planning as well, but they can also see at a community level, how that can impact their own clubs. Every local club these days is strapped for cash. Noel and Walter both said straightaway that they identified that. We have a built in advertising technology, The platform is a very sticky platform, you’re going to be going back to it every single day to look at session plans, a bit of educational stuff, communication over training. So we introduced a built in advertising platform. So what that will happen is, obviously people are going be viewing the page every day, but with the ad tech, it can give you an opportunity to generate sustainable revenue for communities.”

Ryan explains more about how the app will work in the accompanying podcast and he also talks more about how Irish football needs to open itself up to new ideas and how the emphasis needs to change for those matches at an early age,

“Irish football is broken in that regard, because it’s about results. It’s about a parent’s son looking amazing. I’ve heard stories of agents – kids as young as nine or 10 have an agent. It needs to be stripped back and completely revisited, how we restructure it. There are steps being made. But it’s a long, long way off. I work on summer camps in the summer with Nathan Collins, his father, Dave, and Conor, another coach, and it’s the purest sporting environment ever. 

“We always wonder, why is there such a shift in atmosphere here? It’s because there’s no parents. The parents drop them off in the morning. The kids make mistakes, they have fights, they resolve their own fights. There’s heartbreak, there’s ecstasy, but it’s a pure environment and they figure all the solutions out themselves. And it’s no parent influence, it’s nobody saying, ‘Oh, why isn’t Johnny playing right full?’ or ‘Johnny needs to play up front’.

“It’s an environment where they figure out, they make mistakes, they learn things themselves. And the improvement is ridiculous. I know there are steps being made to address that on match day. I think the best format is just to try and eliminate as much parent involvement as possible. Make it as fun as possible, get the kids buzzing to come back the next week, just playing matches, especially at a young age while they develop and eliminate the parents’ ego – and the coach’s ego.  Quite often a Saturday morning can turn into how I’m the next Pep Guardiola and how I use my false nine in an under eight match to crack the local derby. So strip the ego back and realise who were ultimately here for and give them the platform to get better. So I think that’s the biggest issue by far.”