How a teenager’s bedroom fix for drills flourished into ‘Netflix for coaches’

W hereas most teenagers are known for spending countless hours on their phones doing nothing useful these days, Jordan Haskell decided to put his time to good use. His passion for concocting football training drills gave him a focus and he never imagined where it would take him.

“I used to sit there at night in my bedroom putting them all together on my iPhone and that’s when things really took off,” he says. “It started off as just a hobby where I could share what I had been working on but it has grown into a real business.”

Haskell – a former academy player at Wigan, Morecambe and Southport who decided to become a coach when he was 18 after realising that he “wasn’t really physical enough” to play non-league football – set up his UltimateplayerHQ page on Twitter in 2017 when he was about to complete his FA level 2 coaching badge.

“I was looking online for drills to use but I found that so many were too static and had too much detail,” says Haskell.

“I’ll always remember when I came up with the idea: I was driving back from a coaching session at a school in Liverpool and decided to create my own platform where I could showcase some of my drills.”

Six years later and still only 25, he has his own website and app, has produced five coaching manuals and counts Steven Gerrard, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Míchel Salgado and Phil Neville among those to have used his sessions.

Haskell’s business got off the ground when his animated drills caught the eye of the Brazilian app TacticalPad, which asked him to design sessions for it and offered to sponsor his new page.

“There were a few sessions that I remembered from my days in the academy but every coach will tell you that they use drills and give them their own variation,” he says.