An online management qualification aimed at footballers in Scotland will be delivered from August this year.
It is the result of collaboration between a Paisley Business School, Scottish Professional Footballers’ Association, European Social Fund Objective 3 Programme, learndirect scotland and the Scottish Football Association.
In the mid-late 1990s, two lecturers from the department of management at Paisley University – Alasdair Galloway and Stuart Paul – delivered lectures on Management to candidates for SFA and Union of European Football Association licences.
They found that it was always limiting and difficult to deliver the course in the short space of allocated time.
In 1998, an idea was hatched by an SFA co-ordinating group comprising Stuart Paul, Alasdair Galloway, Craig Brown (then the SFA’s Technical Director), Frank Coulston (the Assistant Technical Director) and Fraser Wishart (the assistant Secretary at the Scottish Professional Footballers’ Association) to develop a management qualification aimed at footballers that could be delivered on line.
Dr Galloway said: “The online requirement was important as players have diverse, uncertain and changing demands on their time. Their geographic dispersal from one end of the country to the other rendered conventional face to face delivery difficult. Initially, the intention had been to target those players who intended staying in the game to manage, but we quickly realised that there was no reason why such a qualification could not be extended to those who planned to leave the game on their retirement from playing.
“Football remained the central and most attractive element of the proposed programme. It is the context that all players are most familiar with, and indeed we believed that it would be attractive to a wider public, to whom it will be offered after a pilot run.”
Following an early discussion involving learndirect scotland chief executive Frank Pignatelli and members of the co-ordinating group, Dr Galloway worked with operational staff at learndirect scotland to develop the concept.
He added: “We have been successful in attracting funding from the European Social Fund Objective 3 Programme. With the resources in place and materials now being developed, the online qualification will be delivered to the first cohort of players from August this year. In the near future, the qualification might be taken by players not only in Scotland, but in several countries throughout Europe.”