Michael Loftman is the coach of Hout Bay United FC in South Africa.
He had coached at top soccer academies for years, including for some of the most prestigious clubs in the world.
But now, at 26 years old, Michael Loftman had ambitions of coaching professionals — and found a club nearly 5,000 miles from his native England willing to take a chance on a first-year head coach.
“I moved to Zambia and just left everything,” Loftman said. “I left my car, left most of my clothes. I said, ‘This is my aspiration’ and jumped on a plane.”
The gamble soon went up in smoke.
Loftman was sacked from his position with the Lusaka Dynamos after just six months, a seemingly devastating career setback.
But nearly a decade later, Loftman views that early pink slip less as a failure and more as a life-changing experience that provided critical lessons in resilience and perseverance.
“You're on your own, you're trying to figure everything out,” he said. “You don't really know what you're doing. But it was real deep-end learning.”
Loftman has since coached with the Orlando Pirates in South Africa and has served as a senior national team coach with the Egyptian Football Association, working with some of the biggest names in the sport, including Mohamed Salah and Omar Marmoush.
He’s currently the head coach of Hout Bay United FC in South Africa.
Best of 7 spoke to Loftman about catering his motivational strategies to the player, the two biases that often cloud decision-making for coaches, and managing the expectations of competing stakeholders.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Coach, I know you’ve worked at many levels, including low scholastic. I’m curious — how did you motivate a player who wasn’t as passionate about the sport as you were?
When I worked in the community, most of the time, I was working with people who didn't really want to be partaking in the activity. You have to find ways to inspire, push and drive that you don’t have to do when you walk into a job where everybody loves playing.
When I tried to get the team to buy into my motivation, it never worked. It was a short-term solution to a long-term problem — eventually, their own motivation would take over. So, really, it's going out of the way to find what motivates them and trying to link that into the purpose of what we're trying to deliver.
Some of them really wanted to be professional, and some really didn’t. But those who didn’t may have enjoyed making friends. How do I link their aspiration and make sure that's incorporated into what we're doing as a team in practice?
You’ve coached all over the world. How have you gone about adjusting your style based on whom and where you’re coaching?
The first thing I do in terms of going across different cultures to communicate effectively is actually step into their world. What is it like to be someone who is part of that culture? One of the small things that helped me here is I really enjoy South African music. I really enjoy the food. I understand a lot of the humor and the jokes. Being part of that means that they don't look at you as someone outside of them. They look at you as someone who's coming into them.
The communication style in Egypt is extremely different than in South Africa. Until you sit and understand why that is and how that works, and how effective that is for the society they live in and where it stems from, it's really difficult to actually buy into it. I think that communication piece really starts with the relationships that you build, and that's more important for me than the language barrier or the tone of voice.
You’ve coached at the academy level for some prominent clubs. You’ve also coached pros. How do you balance what’s best for the club, what’s best for the players, and what’s best for yourself as a coach when those may not be perfectly aligned?
I think as you move into professional or bigger organizations, the stakeholder management becomes vastly bigger. You end up at clubs with board members with other staff members on your hierarchical level, players. The biggest challenge is aligning everybody and making sure that everybody benefits from what you're delivering.
I think a lot of the time that's the piece that gets missing. You get a lot of coaches who focus on the players and making sure the players are getting what they need from the program and forget that actually there's a hierarchy above you who have their own interests. That sometimes can be marketing, it can be profits and sales, a wide variety of things. So, how do you now create one project or one program that includes all of those different elements?
You can't align anything if you don't know what they're looking for. Coaches will try and align and say, “I'm working together. I'm collaborating. Everyone's on one mission, vision and all this great stuff.” But actually, have you taken the time to listen to what's important to the various stakeholders?
It sounds like you have a real awareness around managing expectations.
The club that I'm at in the moment, marketing is really, really key. I have to consider how I manage every single marketing situation to make them feel they are really important, but also make them know that they are really important.
Then, you've got players who also have their different agendas while they're here. I've got one who’s 36 and coming to the end of his career whose objective is to probably have one or two more years in football and spend some quality time with family and keep his income coming in, but also wants to lead and deliver. How do I incorporate that?
I've also got an 18-year-old who’s desperate to be a player in Europe at the highest level, and he's got a competitive vision for how much he wants to invest. How do I now make the program align for both of those people without actually breaking the culture that we're trying to set? Trying to make it all-inclusive by listening is definitely the fundamental first part.
How do you reconcile the fact that you’re inevitably going to make some people unhappy?
I think the listening part buys you a lot of grace when you can't make everybody happy. If you can let people be heard and actually listen when it doesn't work out exactly in their favor, they'll give you some grace knowing that you took the time to try.
If there's a day that's really long and the 36-year-old can't get home to pick up his kids because training time has moved, as long as he knows that I've taken that into consideration and tried to help, that's enough for him sometimes to go, “I can deal with this.” He can manage and accept it.
Can you explain the two biases that you think coaches have and how they impact decision-making?
Outcome bias is the biggest one I see. Players are going to argue in their head, “I did it this way, and I got this outcome.” But the example I give to the group I'm with at the moment is if you’re standing at the window, and you look out, and you find a man who's got a blindfold on. He's walking down the middle of the road, and he doesn't get bumped by anyone. He can take the blindfold off, and he’s fine.
Then, a week later, you look out the road, and you see someone who doesn't have a blindfold on. He’s looking left and right, and someone flies around the corner and bumps him. The idea of outcome bias is the guy with the blindfold didn’t get bumped, so let’s wear a blindfold to cross the road because that's safer. But that’s a low probability of success if you continue to go down that path.
I do think data is really helping drive coaches away from the outcome bias of like, “Yeah, we won the game, so that means we played well,” or “This player played well because he scored two goals.”
Then, confirmation bias is a bigger one for coaches. The idea is just whatever we look for, we're going to find. So, if I believe that we played well, then I'm going to look for moments that show that we played well. But when you’re calm and focused and you watch your game back with the analytical mind, you actually find that you didn't play as well as you thought. And when you feel like you had the worst game ever, you were terrible, and the other team was bad, you go back and watch and go, “They weren’t as bad as I thought.”
I think the pre-analytical mind will find whatever you believe at the time. But then the data in context and analysis will help you come out of that. I know some coaches use too much data, too much numbers, and what does it all mean? But I think if you understand its use, it really, really helps kill both of those biases.
I could also see that creeping into talent evaluation. How have you trained yourself to be open-minded and non-judgmental when looking at players?
Evaluating talent is a really, really tough one, because it's funny. You have experience and you see certain traits and molds of players who go on to have success, and you lean on that for player identification. That’s a great skill to have through the experience.
But it’s probably less accurate than we think it is. We all think, “No, no, I've been here. I've seen the player, and I know he's going to make it.” Yes, it gives you more knowledge than the person who has no experience, but I think we can take it too far. There are more events that are going to happen in that pathway that we haven't experienced or don't know about yet.
In the same way that it helps you, it also can hold you back — if you’re not aware.
What I learned…
It’s easy to view conflict or hindrance as black and white for something like a changing practice time that is bound to inconvenience someone. But I appreciated Loftman’s larger point that even if leaders can’t directly accommodate a team member, they can buy themselves some grace just through listening to the issue.
Trust and credibility can be established simply by making people feel heard.
Additionally, I found Loftman’s point about data application after a match to be extremely practical to overcome inevitable bias.
I didn’t get the sense that he wanted every decision to be made through an analytical lens, but when a coach’s emotions are heightened and he comes in with preconceived notions of his team, the most practical way to reduce that impulse and rush to judgment is by getting to the hard facts with an objective mind.