Q&A: Technical Director Mark Wilson

Angel City Technical Director Mark Wilson joined the club in May. Wilson had a long career as a player, including stints with Manchester United—his boyhood club—as well as Middlesbrough, Swansea, Stoke, and FC Dallas in MLS. After retiring, he held coaching positions with the New York Red Bulls USL League Two team and the Colorado Rapids Women’s Premier Soccer League team, a group he coached to the national finals in 2022. He was also head of education for the Rapids, assisting with talent ID and development methodology for both coaches and players.

AngelCity.com sat down with Wilson to talk about his role with the club, his career, and the evolving landscape in the women’s game.

AngelCity.com: Start by telling us what you do as a technical director.

Mark Wilson: There's some big-bucket items. Number one is staff management and staff development. I think when coaches get into roles in elite professional sports from a coaching perspective, before you know it you’re two years in and you can't remember the last time you did something to grow and improve beyond where you are, that challenged your current methods, processes, and beliefs around the game.

Coaching licenses are incredibly important, but don't give you anywhere near the experience in the nuances of gameday management you need. I think that's where an evolution of the technical director role becomes focused on consistent staff development and staff feedback. We have all  staff on IDPs, including myself, which we  all wanted, because we want to be the best version of ourselves in our everyday pursuit of high performance and to not just fulfill our potential, but grow beyond it. 

Bucket number two would be working with Angela on the talent ID and recruitment piece. We want to be data-informed, and we want to be able to go out into the market and bring in targets that fit our game model and our style of play and where we see ourselves positionally evolving, because we want to put bums in seats and get them out again with exciting players and an exciting brand of football, which we're building towards. So, that's a really deep dive. The world's a big place, so we’re utilizing our professional networks, but we're very clear on our positional profiles, our game model, and what data points are informing us of what targets we want to go after.

Once we have those targets in place, now it’s a case of, can we get them interested, do they want to come to the NWSL? Because obviously the league is evolving very quickly with some top talent coming in from Europe and across the world. We don't want to get left behind, and we want to be really, really intentional about how we go after these players and who we bring in. Angel City FC is a brand and club that is world-renowned already, which can certainly help us with acquiring top talent. 

The last couple items are the long-term development of the club and our strategic vision—a future academy, a future second team. That will all be determined by how the league wants to evolve and grow, and at what speed. And then there's the day-to-day stuff around how we prepare for games, which leads a little bit into staff management, but also player development. How can I be a resource and support for the players? Now that I'm fully immersed in what's expected from the coaching staff, from the game model, and from the player behavior, player action perspective, how can I support the players in their development and pursuit of high performance every day and in every game?

ACFC: What does an IDP for a member of the coaching staff look like?

MW: It's very individualized, but you have to start with character: who you believe you are, how you think you're perceived, and who you want to be. That's the really deep dive. Because now you’re defining everything you do on the field and off the field in a way that's authentic to who you choose to be every day. 

I think about words like “inspiring” and “compelling,” which are critical characteristics of the best leaders. Everyone’s character is different and unique. You have to find ways within your own authenticity to be inspiring, compelling, convincing. Especially with players, who are always looking for credibility, support, and information that can help them perform.

So we start with character, then we go into things like, what type of behaviors do you want to inspire as a coach? How can session design bring that out? How can you as a coach, with the different attributes you have on the coaching wheel—whether you're a facilitator, you're teaching, you’re Q&A, you're a mentor—what are you today in this particular moment? Are you a blend of all of those things at any given time? It's a really useful way to help you become more conscious and self-reflective as a coach, so you have the maximum impact on your environment. That's what the IDP is anchored towards.

ACFC: How has your own experience as a coach informed the way you approach your current role?

MW: I've probably taken the least traditional pathway to a role like this. I came over as a director of coaching in New York City. I did that for a few years and co-founded a software   platform that utilizes wearables for  coaching development called Beyond Pulse. Then I took on the role with New York Red Bulls’ USL League Two team for a summer. Then I went to the Colorado Rapids Youth Soccer Club as a head of education for coach and player development. So I've always coached, throughout the entire period, with ECNL teams, professional teams and with WPSL teams.

If I'm being honest, my early years as a coach probably weren't great. I was learning, developing, probably coaching how I'd been coached previously, which on reflection, makes me wonder how relevant that is to the game today. I definitely take characteristics and leadership traits from people  I worked with when I was a player into coaching. But all of the roles I've held post-playing have made me look through a different lens in how to develop and support others, whether that's talent ID, curriculum development, individual development, player development, coach development. I've been privileged to experience a broad range of environments that made me really feel uncomfortable at times, and have to consistently strive to learn. So yeah, my coach development and player development journey to date  informs a lot of what I do now with regards to talent ID and recruitment, and how I strive to support the staff and players every day.  

ACFC: What about the Technical Director role appeals to you?

MW: I think it’s the impact you have in the background from building the processes that support everybody else in achieving their goals and aspirations and becoming the best version of themselves. You need processes, but they need to be simple, they need to be actionable, and they need to be measurable. That's not always easy to do in a very, very complex environment.

It's easy to confuse simple with easy. Simple is one of the hardest things I think you can try to achieve in a game, whether that's game model, player development—we can overcomplicate these things. So it's a constant challenge in the most positive way  to work with our  staff and figure out how I can use my knowledge and experience to support the knowledge and experience that exists within our coaching staff in our collective pursuit of high performance.

ACFC: Walk us through the different pieces of the talent identification and recruiting process.

MW: So the game model and current roster composition, while it's always evolving, directs our attention. We want our game model to evolve and grow, because the league is demanding it, and teams that are going shopping for some of the world's best talent are doing that and driving the standards. That comes with its own challenges financially, because in an emerging market, nobody knows where true value really sits. So we're building our own processes based on the information we have to try and find the balance and the equilibrium there.

But we start with the game model and the players we have in our current squad. We then move into data-informed player profiles based on how we measure players who are performing in other leagues. Is the league they play in the same as our league in terms of transition? Is it the same in terms of physical output? And then we're looking at unique traits: goalscoring attributes, defensive attributes, 1v1 defending attributes, midfielders who can play a certain number of passes per game and unlock the door. That varies based on context in a game. So we have to watch a lot of soccer, but we start with the data, because that narrows down this large  global talent pool  into, say, eight to ten targets for  one  position.

Then we have to make sure that players who are coming in are coming to perform on the field. Your playing attributes might be wonderful, but are you coming here to be a winner? Do you want to achieve? Are you ambitious enough? Are you a leader? 

From there, we then have to go and recruit. We connect with our network, connect directly with clubs and ask if there’s an interest. From that point, we obviously have to put together a package that can entice some of the best players in the world into our environment, and we have to be good salespeople. We have to sell the vision. The easy part is, the way the brand has been created, we already have credibility and visibility around the world, and people buying in—so that makes that piece easier.

Finally, equally as important, if we get a “yes” and we find the right player, how do we onboard them? That's as equally as important as all of the bits that come before.

So you can see how deep a process we have. It takes time to get the talent in that we want. We have salary cap and max roster sizes to think about. It’s not about getting an inbound request that says, “hey, this is a good player” and going, “we'll take that player.” We can't do that. We need a robust and efficient process in place to ensure we are acquiring players that we believe can perform consistently at the highest level and take our club forward. 

ACFC: There are a handful of players who signed with NWSL teams this year out of the Chinese Women’s Super League, which hasn’t traditionally gotten much attention globally, who have been hugely successful—I’m thinking of Barbra Banda in Orlando and Temwa Chawinga in Kansas City, in particular. How do you see Angel City adapting to the shifting talent landscape within the NWSL and elsewhere?

MW: I get sent players all the time now that I'm in this position, from everywhere. They're usually highlight reels from players in different parts of the world. WyScout and other platforms do a wonderful job of creating sense out of mass data, even in leagues that you might not think are relevant. Talent is talent—and there's also a reason players choose to sign where they do, and it’s often financial, and rightly so.

The women's game is still catching up to the men's in terms of financial resources and what players should be getting paid. So I would never tell anybody on this side of the game not to try and get your value, your worth somewhere. Which means we have a responsibility to offer a similar or the same value here in the NWSL, because the talent's here. So first, we have to look after our own players and make sure they get the value they deserve, but we also sometimes have to look in the most obscure places for new talent. 

There'll be a trail that will lead you to a player, and they are an absolute talent, but they weren't here for this reason, right? So it goes back to the intangibles and the information gathering around talent ID and recruitment. We're still building out that department. It's myself and Angela right now, always with input from the coaching staff. We have plans to grow it and become more efficient so we can go after every corner of this planet to get the talent we want

ACFC: What lessons have you taken from your playing days? What is it important for younger players to focus on?

MW: The time you spend without the ball in this game becomes the most critical time you spend from a baseline perspective. If you get the fundamentals right, the defensive side, that gives you a platform to go and be a rule-breaker and showcase your abilities with the ball. So it’s the discipline to do the simple things to the maximum, to do your very best every single day. Discipline is not easy. You need to be consistent with everything you do every single day, whether you're in the gym, whether it's eating habits, drinking habits, recovery, all that is part of discipline.

Discipline and consistency are extremely hard to achieve as a young player. But if you can, you're setting yourself up for success in the game. 

I also think realizing that it always takes more than just you to win anything, even if you are far and away the best player in a team. I think Xavi said it best: the players off the ball make the player on the ball. A midfielder, for example, without the right runs and options from their teammates, doesn't look like the player their talent suggests they should be.

Finally, contribute to your teammates and demand from your teammates. I don't think I've ever been around a nice team that's won anything. And that's not being a horrible teammate. Being demanding and being accountable are the best things you can be as a player and leader. Creating an edge in training and in games. Doing that for a teammate means that at the end of the season, you’ve got a better chance of a medal around your neck than being passive and wanting to be liked by everybody or trying to be everybody's friend.

I don't think winning teams are made up of of locker rooms where everyone gets along, but they are made up of people who share a common goal, a deep desire and unrelenting will to winHistory and data across many elite professional sports teams who have won multiple championships informs us of this. And getting back to recruitment, leadership characteristics are a huge piece of what we are looking for as we re-enter the transfer window this summer.