LET'S LISTEN TO THE PLAYER: Learning guide for coaches Paperback – October 7, 2025

Coaches are constantly making decisions; I would say that decision making is one of the most important skills a coach must excel in for creating, maintaining, and evolving the learning we need in a professional football environment. However, there is one nuclear decision that will guide and give meaning to all the other decisions that have to made daily.This book will guide you through this ‘decision’ in your own experiences as a coach. You will discover that it is there in your daily football actions such as your training preparation, your focus during the game, your conversations with the players and the team, and we will consider how this decision can create the necessary learning needed to flourish. Importantly, this requires cultivating a culture of learning. To achieve this, the book offers a compass that will help you not get lost along the way, it’s a method that roots this learning culture in the people that are all part of a football environment, and all part of the player’s life story. To do this, we must all accept that "Learning is a journey that begins within oneself," something I learned from my friends at the Self Institute: Javier García de Andoin, Pilar Ruiz de Gauna, Marcos Mansur, and Inigo Etxeberria. This book is the result of their generosity and all the leanings they shared with me on my own learning journey to understanding ‘oneself’. Morning, afternoon, and evening sessions of in-depth dialogue on major human issues and questions in football such as vital learning, generating knowledge, dealing with uncertainty, creating teams, leadership, and many others are vital learning spaces in football development. All of these are great concepts that, as I understand it, are cornerstones in a coach's daily decisions and actions they need to take regarding a player's development."This is not a book that provides techniques and recipes, but rather thought-provoking and inquiring questions about yourself and your process as a coach."ABOUT THE AUTHORMaría Ruiz de OñaMaria holds a psychology bachelor’s degree and has 26 years of experience applying psychology in professional football. Her education is focused on Humanistic Psychotherapy, emphasizing Transactional Analysis, Relational Analysis, Organizational dynamics, and Family Constellations.Over the years, Maria has developed a deep understanding of fostering a learning culture among coaches and staff through aligning concepts, unifying meaning, and integrating a vision with values and philosophy to support sustained learning needs and results.She specializes in Organizational Transformation by nurturing people and team development through self-knowledge, listening, sensitivity, and intuition. Her catalyst being: ‘training the coach to learn’.With two decades working at Athletic Club Bilbao and the last six years at Aspire Academy in Qatar, she lectures on personal development, lifelong learning, relationships, leadership, and the development of competitive teams.She facilitates and participates in coach training education programs with FIFA, the Premier League, Italian Football Federation, Chilean Football Federation, Bayern Munich, and Club América of Mexico, among others. Read more