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The 1973 men’s FA Cup final is famous for second division Sunderland’s unlikely victory over Leeds United, the holders of the trophy, who at that point ranked among the foremost sides in England. Neither among the 100,000 spectators at Wembley that day, nor allowed to watch on a big screen at the shipyards with her father – it was just assumed that football wasn’t for girls – watching avidly at home was a very young Sunderland supporter who was determined to be part of a match that sealed her lifelong love of the game. Her name was Sue Bridgewater and she would go on to design and direct the first ‘off-the-pitch’ qualification for professional football managers, which would be undertaken by the likes of Mark Hughes, Sean Dyche, Hope Powell and Chris Hughton – among many, many others.

A fascinating journey took Sue from her working-class Wearside roots to her current position as Professor of Sports Management and Marketing at Liverpool University. When she stepped down from her position on the Women in Football board of directors earlier this year, it seemed a good moment to find out more.

Her first move was to study languages at Durham University, and after that Sue parted ways with academia for a time. She worked in marketing in the food industry but after a few years found the live-to-work culture unsatisfying: “If you weren’t there long enough to have three meals a day in the works canteen, you weren’t taking your job seriously.” It was early in her career and Sue was already rethinking her direction of travel. “I always say I had my mid-life crisis early,” she chuckles.

It was during a part-time MBA with Warwick Business School that Sue discovered her calling. “I enjoyed the MBA,” she says, “and jumped at the chance when Warwick later wanted some people to do a bit of tutoring on the course. I found that I really enjoyed helping people, particularly adult and returning learners, to enhance their skills.” An initiative to bring in people from industry led to an opening at Warwick Business School alongside study for a PhD in entry strategies for central and eastern Europe and working with the EU. It wasn’t until 2001, though, that the opportunity to work with the football industry arose.

“Warwick Business School were approached by a number of football stakeholders: the Professional Footballers Association (PFA), the League Managers Association (LMA), the Football Association (FA), the Premier League and the Football League. They were looking for an educational provider who would work with them to develop and run training courses for football managers. When Warwick asked ‘does anybody know anything about football?’, I jumped at the chance and that was the pivotal point in my career.”

Based on her interest in football and marketing, Sue had written a paper about football fan loyalty but had never applied for a job in the industry. “I wanted to work in football, but I’d see a job advert for a football club marketing director ­– Aston Villa, I think, came up at one point – and I never even applied for any of them. I just assumed that you had to have some kind of background or experience that I didn't have. You had to have worked in clubs, you had to have direct experience of football that would allow you to go for these jobs.”

 

Meeting the bosses

Warwick won the tender to develop the Certificate in Applied Management for football managers, and, helped by the LMA, Sue set about conducting a needs analysis – interviewing leading managers like Sir Alex Ferguson and Sam Allardyce to determine the content of the course. “They were all fantastic with me,” she says. “I was this weird person from an academic world coming along and asking stupid, naive questions! But they all gave me a lot of time, and I got this massive list of things that they thought it would be really helpful for younger managers to learn – from time management to managing up and media training.”

Once the qualification was up and running, under the auspices of the League Managers Association, Sue never looked back. After ten years at Warwick University, the course moved with her to Liverpool University, undergoing further development to become a diploma, and is now widely recognised across the game. Sue estimates that, of the 92 managers in the England’s senior men’s leagues, around 30 have been through the programme. So at what point in their careers do managers typically enrol?

“People joint the course at different career stages” says Sue. “The course is for both current and prospective football managers, so you get some people who are already managers with established careers when they come on the programme. Over the years we've had Hope Powell, Phil Brown, Billy Davies, Nigel Adkins, who had already managed for a number of years when they joined us. And then we would have some people who, at that time, were just starting out on their management careers, like Sean Dyche and Mark Hughes. The course often has future managers who are in transition between playing and management careers.

And which students stood out as potential future stars of the management game? Sue is mindful of the hindsight bias – “we can all look at people’s successful careers and go, ‘yes that person was always going to make it” – but analysis of course graduates has ascertained that at any point, around 80 per cent of the course’s graduates are achieving as highly as, or more highly than, they were when they joined the programme. “It takes me a long time to watch the football scores because I’m looking out for a lot of managers’ results now, not just Sunderland’s! I’m particularly pleased that we’ve had a lot more managers from the women’s game in the past five years.”

 

Joining the board

In the mid-2010s Sue found herself in discussions about joining the Women in Football board of directors – but was far from certain that she would fit the bill.

“I said, I'm not sure what you're looking for, what a woman in football looks like. Are you looking for people who work in governing bodies or clubs? I count myself as a woman in football. I'm a woman who works for football ­– but I'm also an academic, a person who works in a different field, maybe not what you think about when you think about women in football.

“I went along and talked to Women in Football and they were great and they said, look, we're trying to broaden the range of skills and backgrounds of people who are on the board. So I joined at the same time as Lungi [Macebo] and Ben Carter and was on the board for five and a half years.”

Over that time WIF has benefited greatly from Sue’s specific research skills, as her input on the organisation’s regular member and community surveys has helped to ensure that questions have been formulated and results analysed to a professional standard. The WIF team and Sue’s fellow directors agree that she’ll be a hard act to follow. But what did Sue gain in return for serving on the board?

“It's been fantastic to see the developments that have gone on. It has massively changed in terms of the scope of things we're doing, the range of partnerships which allow us to make bigger contributions ­– the Be Inspired Conference, running more levels of the Leadership Course, and so on. And I've thoroughly enjoyed working with the people on the board because they have such a passion for what they do. The championing of women, the development of opportunities in all kinds of different ways.

“The thing is that I hadn’t ever been on a football board – I’ve worked in football, but I feel like I work in football from the outside – and then I was working on a board with a lot of people who work on football from the inside. It was interesting and I learned a lot, whether they’ve got experience like Ebru [Köksal], in the finances of football, or Paul Barber with Brighton and the wonderful things he's done, or Jo Tongue with all the great work she does with players and representation.

“So I've learned from them as individuals and I've also looked at their careers and seen the range of things that they've all done – and it’s just inspiring, isn't it, to see the paths that people take?”

If serving on the WIF board has been so positive an experience for Sue, then what are her reasons for stepping down? For one, she has other professional responsibilities, not just with the LMA diploma at Liverpool but also on UEFA’s research grants and awards panel, and two more exciting new projects are coming up. But Sue is also a great believer in making space for the next generation.

“We don't want just an ageing board,” she says “we also need to create opportunities for new, younger people to come through with different perspectives and energies. I was beginning to think maybe it was time for me to look for a new challenge and also to make way for the next generation of WiF directors.”

It's exciting to imagine what Sue’s new projects will look like – but equally, for that next generation who might dream of following in her footsteps, it’s salutary to take note of her journey so far, and how she reached this point.

“People say to me quite often, you were really lucky that you found this way of working in football. I absolutely am, and I owe so much to an awful lot of people who gave me those opportunities. But I also look back and, in some ways, think I made my own luck. If I hadn't written that paper in my own time about football, when Warwick came along and said ‘who knows something about football?’, they probably wouldn't have taken me seriously and I wouldn't have been the person who went along and pitched the course.”

The same goes for the UEFA work, which came about after Sue moved to Liverpool University, with its great reputation for sport-related research and teaching. Again, it’s a case of making your own luck – so let’s play out with this moral of Sue’s story, because it serves as great advice for the next generation of women in football.

“Don't give up. Take your opportunities and stick with them. If it's not always easy, there will be a way, and football people do recognise effort and passion. It doesn't always happen straight away. But keep believing and don’t be put off; I had to ignore people saying: ‘this woman has come along and she's going to run a football course, that's a slightly odd thing for her to be doing’, and it has developed into something that's just given me a fantastic career, which I'm very grateful for ­– and a whole batch of other opportunities.”

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