The Backroom Staff - Coach: John Thomas Nyakundi

Coach: John Thomas Nyakundi

Performance coaching, Right to Dream and the future of football in East Africa

Building a career as a football coach is often a long and difficult path. Initially finding his way as a performance coach, bringing modern sports science techniques to clubs around Kenya and Africa, John Thomas Nyakundi is a perfect example of someone who has embraced continuous learning and always being ready whenever a new opportunity arises - whether at the grassroots level or in the Champions League.

In this interview, JT shares his journey in football, from coaching his school team to working in elite youth and professional football with Right to Dream and Gor Mahia, Kenya’s most successful club. Along the way, he has helped shape the next generation of players while thriving in different environments.

With experience across multiple levels of the game, JT offers insights into the realities of football coaching, the evolving role of sports science, and his ambitious goals for his career and African football.

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for grammar and clarity. 

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[ Background ]

I was born and raised in Nairobi. I was active from a young age, some of my earliest memories are being outside in the street where I grew up until 9 or 10pm playing football or basketball with my friends. I started taking sports seriously when I joined a community rugby team. A lot of the guys were a lot older and taught me how to play.

I was okay at football and represented my school team but I wasn’t exceptional. I was really into rugby though and played for the national U20 team. In my mind, I was going to become a professional rugby player. Then, the year I was with the U20s, I had a shoulder injury - at the time it was tough getting the money for surgery and rehab, so I sort of let the game go.

When I was looking for something to study at university, my sister was in her last year and told me about a course where the students spend a lot of time out in the field. That felt right up my alley and so I chose to study sports science at Kenyatta University.

[ First coaching experience ]

In the middle of my first year of university, my high school coach called me and told me they were having a bit of trouble finding people to coach and asked if I’d come and coach the U14 basketball team.

I’d go to class in the mornings and then make my way across town to coach these kids. Looking back, that was 13 years ago now, I was a terrible coach! But it was also brilliant because I was allowed to grow into the role and the responsibility to these young men. Plus at the time, I was a university student without too many responsibilities and the 15,000 Shillings (~$115) a month was enough to sell me!

About a year and a half later, he asked me to take on the U15 football team as well and I did those all through university. I got really into it and started doing a ton of research. I started using this time to experiment and developed a lot as a coach.

[ First steps into sports science ]

After graduating, I continued coaching - and even tried a season coaching rugby (that didn’t go so well!) The school’s sports association had managed a deal with the federation where all the football coaches would do their first license - so I got my CAF D License as well.

I had a lot of time on my hands because it was just a few hours in the afternoon so I started writing a blog looking at performance and how sports science could be incorporated into football. It was just a small blog to keep me busy but I started to share them on social media and they started getting noticed.

One of the people who noticed was a guy I went to primary school with - he was now working for a new type of football academy that was putting together select teams for showcase matches, I started helping him out.

Around the same time, I remember tweeting angrily at the CEO of the federation at the time - like, I went on a whole barrage! I guess he looked at my profile and some of my blog posts because he called me in for a meeting. So, I went to speak with him. He saw I had my license and invited me to join a sort of knowledge exchange course they were doing with some coaches from Malmö who were coming down to talk about their process across coaching, administration and performance.

[ Sports science in practice ]

I met someone who was setting up what I’d describe as a ‘sports science collective’. I think a lot of people outside looked at us and weren’t quite sure what we were doing! Initially, I met him when he was recording one of our games during the showcases. After talking, I discovered he had a deep interest in sports science and was trying to find out how to offer services to athletes and teams.

They'd gotten a bit of traction in Rugby and were just starting to get into football. Then, at the end of 2018, we got an opportunity - a second division team wanted to contract us to provide some sports science services. We started running the fitness sessions and implementing a periodization strategy. We also did the nutrition plan for them and all kinds of monitoring. We had gotten a little bit of equipment, things like heart rate monitors and maybe 10 GPS’.

We ended up having some issues with the payment but I think we did a decent job - the team was promoted to the Premier League at the end of the season!

That was my first proper introduction to what a multidisciplinary team should look like. One of the characteristics of Kenyan football is teams come out flying at the start of the season (~August) but by January the players are dead. This was my first introduction to things like Verheijen periodization. Before, I’d been coaching high school football and writing about performance - I think I thought as long as we’re fitter than everyone else, we’re going to blow them away. But I didn’t actually know how to plan a week or a season until then.

—^interviewer’s note: Periodization is a cyclical method of planning and managing physical training throughout a season (vs. more traditional methods where the bulk of fitness training is done in a grueling preseason). Raymond Verheijen’s book ‘Condition for Soccer’ is one of the most influential football books in the world. Known mostly for helping bring periodization to the football mainstream, he’s worked with many of the world’s top clubs including Barcelona, Manchester City and Bayern Munich - has also been on staff at 3 World Cups and 3 European Championships.

When we finished that contract, we had an opportunity to go to Uganda to work with Vipers, one of the top in East Africa. For me, going to Vipers was very important because I saw what can be achieved here if we do things the right way. I think Vipers are the only club in East Africa with their own stadium! They have good facilities and everything is well structured.

So we went down for a week in preseason to do different fitness tests - again with different devices like the GPS and heart rate monitors. We ran a few conditioning sessions and collected a lot of data. We presented our reports to the club president and I think he was quite impressed because they bought all the equipment

[ Right to Dream ]

Just before I went to Uganda, I stumbled on a new Instagram page. I think they had like 3 posts at the time, and one of them was about a job in Ghana at an academy called Right to Dream. I googled them and just applied.

About a week before the trip, I got an email back and had a call with an Irish guy, Shane, who was head of the medical department. I think our views about performance aligned and he put me in contact with the head of the football department. Again it went well and they offered me the role as a strength and conditioning coach.

A month later, I was on my way to Ghana. That was my first time on a plane and my first time outside East Africa. I’d been to Uganda a couple of times but this was my first big, big trip - and to the other side of the continent. When I got there, I was welcomed really well and the academy, I’d never seen anything like it. The pitches were like a dream and the talent there, guys like Simon Adingra, Kamaldeen Sulemana, Mohamed Diomandé - watching those guys play ball, it was a different world! Even in the Premier League here, the level of talent is nowhere near that - those kids are 16, 17 bearing Ghanaian Premier League and Second Division teams 2-0 and 3-0.

After the first three months, I came back to Kenya for Christmas and then shortly after I went back, we went into COVID lockdown. The protocols were constantly changing but eventually, all the schools in Ghana were closed. For a little while, we were still able to train and have school because Right to Dream is a boarding school and we had become an isolated environment with no one going in or out. But eventually, no school meant no school and we had to stop football activities. The kids could still play by themselves but we weren’t allowed to coach or teach in class.

From March until August, my life consisted of waking up, going to the gym, going back to my room, having meals delivered and just chilling. I didn’t have Wi-Fi in my room but could go each evening to the office to call my family. Then around August, our embassy organized a flight back to Nairobi. The ride to Accra is about two hours and I had to go there the day before to get a COVID test. I stayed the night in an Airbnb in Accra, packed all my things, stopped by the university hospital to pick up my results - and they were positive!

I was like what?! I’ve been in the middle of the bush in Akosombo for months, there’s no way I got COVID there! Unfortunately, they couldn’t test again and get the results in time for the flight so I was stuck. I went back to the academy, figuring it was likely a false positive and I would just isolate in my room. At the gate though, I was told they can’t let me back in with the positive result!

I made my way back to Accra and eventually found another flight via the American Embassy via Addis Ababa the next week - and got a negative test. Then, back in Nairobi, there had been a death in the family and I extended my stay there. At the time there was a lot of uncertainty still and I decided to stay home and resigned from my position in Ghana.

[ Talent ID and football coaching ]

Back in Nairobi, I connected with a friend who had gotten into talent identification. We started a program where we organized trials in different communities around the city and picked the best 22 players, had a 2 week camp and a couple showcase games. We went around the city and discovered a couple of gems. One of the players is with me at Gor Mahia now - at the time he was playing in the 5th or 6th division and another player just signed for another Premier League team this year. I mean, we discovered 2 Premier League players within two weeks, that’s not bad, right?

That also switched me on to the amount of untapped potential in this region of the continent. It's just no one had ever done the work before. Now there are quite a lot of people working to uncover football talent in the region - this could actually be a whole other conversation!

One of the guys we worked with there ran a community club in Dandora, one of the low income areas in the city. There was no money but I was supposed to do my C License that year and started helping out as a way to stay sharp. But soon, he asked me whether I could take on a sporting director role for the club!

I’d learned a lot in my time at Right to Dream - even though I was on the performance side, I’d watch a lot of sessions, go to meetings with the coaches and observe and ask a lot of questions. They have probably some of the best coaches on the continent, the level of detail those guys get into and there’s proper analysis that the kids have access to. I hadn’t understood what it took to develop a professional footballer until then. Of course, we couldn’t replicate everything but were able to put a good structure in place.

I spent the year doing this alongside my C Licence and then moved to another academy where I became U21 head coach and a director of the program. So aside from coaching, I was budgeting, doing operations, procurement and communications with the parents. That was the first time I had a ‘staff’ too. Again, it was another opportunity to learn.

At the same time, it was very frustrating. My personal view is that running an elite program that is ‘pay for play’ is not the way to go and we had some clashes. For instance, we had rules about lateness and tried to implement certain standards but we got a lot of push back from parents and people arguing about playing time.

Even though I was starting to get a little frustrated, at least I was the head coach. I was actually coaching football and had enough control over the environment that I could try things out and build my own way of doing things.

[ Gor Mahia - first season ]

Then a friend - who had been the fitness coach at Gor Mahia but had gotten a new opportunity and was helping the club find a replacement - insisted I meet the head coach of Gor Mahia for a coffee. I was a little skeptical and honestly, had been trying to move away from fitness and performance coaching but he promised the coach was the real deal!

So I’m sitting down with this Irish guy (Johnathan McKinstry). I didn’t know much about him but my friend was really excited about him. He’d come into the club the previous season while the club was under a transfer ban. In the first weeks of training, he had 8 players in training and had to promote a bunch of youth players - and they won the league.

That season things had stabilized, sponsors were back on board and things were looking good. During our chat I realized, wow, we look at things very similarly in terms of philosophy, approach to training and my impression was, this is a guy who really cares about developing these guys, not just as players, but as people. He told me, ‘JT, if you join us, I’ll let you do your thing.’ When the offer came, I didn’t hesitate, let’s do this!

Last season was like a dream. The first competitive game I was there, we won the Charity Shield. So, one game, one cup - I could get used to that! And we continued going throughout the season. I think we lost our first game in February and won the league with games to spare, conceding only 11 goals or something!

The way Johnny structured the coaching staff was amazing - besides myself joining as fitness coach, my friend Jeremy from the scouting work around the city joined as an analyst alongside an assistant coach and a goalkeeper coach. Although we each had our specialty, Johnny would put each of us in charge of different parts of training. One day I might be in charge of the technical drills or the possession or tasked with creating a finishing drill, that sort of thing. I’ll tell you, spending a year with Johnathan was like doing a master’s degree. The way he planned and approached sessions was amazing. He’s always thinking about new ideas to improve the players and the team.

[ Gor Mahia - this season ]

After the season, Johnny left the club for an amazing opportunity with The Gambia national team. We got a Brazilian coach, Leonardo, his approach and how he saw the bench function was different. We got a second assistant as well and my coaching responsibilities were reduced but I was still in charge of the performance and fitness stuff.

It’s always tough stepping into someone's shoes who's been that successful and at the same time because we’d won the league, we had the Champions League as well. The league here finishes quite late so we had maybe a week and a half of holiday and the players were back in with the new coach. To make things even more difficult, there were some demonstrations around Nairobi at the time that really disrupted our training schedule.

Anyway, maybe a week after the new coach arrived, we went to Tanzania for the CECAFA Cup. That was a shocker for me. I’d gotten used to the level of the Kenyan Premier League but looking at champions from the other countries, I realized how far we still are from the top teams in the continent. We played teams from Zambia, Djibouti and Sudan and struggled in that tournament.

A few weeks after we came back from Tanzania, we had our first Champions League game in the first qualifying round against a South Sudanese team called El Merriekh Bentiu. Going into these games, we knew experience would be a problem. We were the 4th youngest team in the Kenyan Premier League and the last time we’d been in continental competition was 2021. Almost none of our players had any continental experience.

In Sudan, we struggled and lost 1-0 but in the return leg in Kenya, we won 5-1. This set us up to play Al Ahly (Egypt) in the second round. They hadn’t conceded continentally in the last 11 games - and we actually scored… but it was ruled offside! They beat us 3-0 in both legs. Still, we got some praise for our bravery in going toe to toe with them.

The difference at that level is experience and physically. We don’t have a culture in our football yet of good physical development. It’s partly a knowledge thing but also a resources thing - things like supplementation and gyms, it’s rare to find setups where that’s happening at a high level in Kenya. In the games with Al Ahli, our most talented players - guys who run circles around players in the league - couldn’t do anything because the space they are used to was gone in an instant! They were just superior athletically and that was the difference.

[ What do your future goals look like? ]

I usually tell people I want to win a Club World Cup with an African team. I want to help get to the point where we’re not always exporting the best we have as a continent, I want to have the best of us here. Now, even in Kenya, the best professionals are leaving and it’s sad because it’s like, ‘why can’t we make this place nice? Why can’t we make this continent nice?’

I know it’s a very Pan-African view of things but I really do believe that our responsibility as football coaches is to show people we can also have nice things. We can have amazing football here. We can have amazing facilities. We can have amazing matchday experiences. This shouldn't just be reserved for your Real Madrid's and Manchester United’s. When our best players see playing in Africa as a viable option, my dream is to take the best African team and go toe to toe with the Madrids of the world.

Working with Johnny last year, I realized there are still areas of football where I’m weak, things that I hadn’t been exposed to. Now I’m taking a bunch of analysis courses, looking at getting a master’s degree and just trying to collect as much knowledge as I can. I really believe coaches are teachers and creating the best environment for players to learn will develop the best players.

I’m hoping to do my A License this year and hopefully figure out a role here in East Africa and take it from there.

Follow JT on LinkedIn and let him know you enjoyed the interview!

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