The Backroom Staff - Project Manager: Andrei Neacșu

Project Manager: Andrei Neacșu

Enabling football education for everyone

In this interview, Andrei Neacșu shares his journey away from and back to football, spanning experiences with startups, volunteering, and his current role leading football education for Romania at the FA. It’s an inspiring journey about following your passion.

One of my great personal interests is in non-linear careers - people who do different things and don’t follow a conventional path. Andrei is not just one of these people but is also enabling others to follow their passions and gain the skills required for a career in football.

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

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[ You started your career quite far from football - what did you do before working in football? ]

That’s true - I started off on a different track! I studied political science in French and spent a year in Toulouse. I was never thinking of football as a career then. My aim was to help others and I wasn’t sure yet what it would be but I saw politics as a way to do it. (now I find this really useful in today’s football governance and a lot of people in senior roles at FIFA or UEFA have studied politics too)

Next, I did a master’s in campaign communication and advertising. During my studies, my French skills helped me get a job at a large corporation. But I quickly became bored and decided maybe this isn’t for me!

I started to volunteer with a Romanian lobbying group called Romanian Business Leaders, they were helping companies work with the government and other stakeholders. They were running educational programs for startups and companies that wanted to scale their businesses. This really suited me, it was fun and much more active - I was always on the move, connecting with people and the start of what would become a common thing throughout my career: educational projects.

After a few years where I worked with hundreds of startups in Romania, some friends I’d met there proposed that I join them, opening a coworking space. Again I learned new things, took more responsibility and it was a really nice part of my career. Later I joined a Romanian urban gym aggregator (sort of like Gympass or Urban Sports Club) and worked with the CEO implementing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) systems in the company.

[ Getting started in football ]

During this time, I did lots of different things and it was fun. But at some point you always have a ‘crisis’ - it’s said that it’s sometime between 26 and 28 - and I had this crisis. My job was nice but I was not sure it’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

My biggest passion was sports - and especially football, that’s what all my friends knew about me! As a kid, I wanted to be a footballer, but I was living in a village and we didn’t have any youth clubs there. One time, when I was maybe 10 years old, I jumped on my bike with my friends and we went to the next city - 7 kilometers - because we heard there was a trial there. At the end of the trial, the coach picked two players and invited them to join the club. I was one of them!

I was really happy and told my parents about the trial when I got home. But they said, ‘No, you’re not going there - we want you to study and football will take you on another track.’ This wasn’t new, I heard this from many kids my age, at that time - in the ‘90s - times were not easy in Romania and my parents were thinking okay, education is the sure path to success. And, okay, they were right! I’m happy I followed this path but I’ve always had this thought that I should have been a footballer in the back of my mind.

So anyway, I was 26 and thought, ‘why not work in this field?’ I decided to give it a try but I didn’t know how to get started, I knew no one working in football. In the past, Romanian football had huge corruption scandals, a lot of the owners went to jail and a former president of the federation and president of the league faced lots of allegations. It was not seen as a ‘safe’ or ‘clean’ space to work in and I was a bit concerned at the beginning.

I remember telling my friends that I wanted to do this. At first, they started to laugh! They said, ‘Andrei, you’re a nice guy, we think you’re smart but you don’t know anyone in football!’

Well, I started from scratch with free online courses to understand more about the football industry. Then I started to volunteer - this has been my entry ticket everywhere, when I want to do something, I start as a volunteer. It's a way for me to understand more about the business and get to know people. I started volunteering at an NGO that was running a Real Madrid Foundation project in Bucharest. They were running football and education programs for young kids from rough neighborhoods in Bucharest. I volunteered there for a year, helping with the activities and assisting the coaches.

By then I’d met some people and started to understand more about how football works at this level. Euro 2020 was coming up and there were going to be games in Bucharest, this is maybe a once in a lifetime event and I wanted to be part of it. I signed up to volunteer and they assigned me the airport VIP services. I started the training and it was really nice but then COVID came and the Euros were delayed.

Still, I met the project manager for the Euros and got in touch with her team at the Romania FA. I was amazed because they were all my age! It was not the face I expected to see in football at this level. I expected older - and grumpier - people, but they were nice, young and had studied abroad, etc so we had a lot in common.

After the Euros were delayed, we stayed in touch. I hosted them in our coworking space for an event. We shared what we were working on. They were planning to do something similar to UEFA Academy - an educational branch for anyone working - or interested in working - in football. Not only for coaches or referees but the people working behind the scenes, the ones you don’t see.

They were searching for a project manager and knew I’d been running educational projects and managing communities and apparently, I ticked all the boxes and when they asked me, ‘do you want to join us?’ They were probably not aware that I was dreaming of this opportunity! It wasn’t even a question in my mind, I jumped at the opportunity. This was 4 years ago, in January 2021.

[ How would you describe your role now? How has it changed since you started? ]

It’s changed a lot. I started from scratch with my colleague Diana and we do everything from scrutinizing the needs of the clubs, doing surveys and focus groups and meeting all kinds of people involved in football. We try to understand really well what the needs for each year are and create a course schedule.

Then we create the curriculum and find speakers and teachers. Sometimes they are ‘in-house’ and sometimes, if we can’t find someone at the FA with expertise on a specific topic, we look abroad for specialists.

So we are doing everything for 30 courses per year. We reach about 1,000 people a year through webinars, courses and one night events.

We started with the basics while doing a lot of craft work in the beginning and by now we digitized and automated a lot of things. Now, we’re doing more on the community and alumni side - which is different from simply helping people register for courses. We also have more capacity to do tailored courses and education - if a topic is requested, for example.

[ What are some of the courses you offer? ]

Some of the most popular courses in the past years have been about scouting and performance analysis. I think this is the biggest entryway for newcomers in football, especially in Romania. We see a lot of young people passionate about playing EA FC or especially Football Manager, that want to try to enter the world of football. We deliver entry courses on how to do scouting and analysis in real life - these are the courses with the greatest demand.

Another focus is on courses for academy managers, where we deliver best practices from academies around the world. We ran a sporting director course last year with the help of an external company. I think roles like this are becoming much more popular around Europe so it’s important to offer something on the topic.

Other courses include everything from volunteer management and how to build a volunteer program to media training, social media for football, etc. There are lots of topics and we try to build our schedule based on demand.

[ How do you assess demand for each course when deciding which to create/schedule? ]

We ask our alumni community (previous course participants) what they think we should add to our calendar. We also speak to the clubs. We ask what they need from us and which topics are top of mind. We want to understand what might be missing from our offers.

After speaking and surveying stakeholders across every level, we review the results and, in the end, we have our priorities for the next year and deliver our course calendar.

[ How are the courses created? Do you borrow from existing courses (e.g. UEFA, other FAs, etc) or make all of the courses from scratch? ]

First, I should give a lot of credit here to UEFA and to the Portuguese FA because they were like our mentors. We learned a lot from them, especially the Portuguese Football School (PFS). It’s a great tool and in the beginning, we tried to actually replicate what they do. I had the chance to go to Portugal for a few days and learn from my counterpart from Portugal, Andre, and this helped us a lot.

Once we have the topics, it’s important to have this by June, so we have plenty of time in the summer - when there aren’t so many games - to research each topic. We do our own research and have a data and insights team here that supports us. We look at the rest of the market to see who is doing what, who’s the best, etc and look at their curriculums. Then, my colleague and I design an adapted curriculum.

Then we start to look for resources and people who can run the course. In the beginning, we mainly used our colleagues, people who have gone on courses and are among the best in Romania in what they do - e.g. marketing, communication, match organization and so on. By now, we are at another level and are looking abroad more often for people outside Romania who have the most updated knowledge and skills.

We started our own network with UEFA so we can easily access clubs from different countries like the UK or Germany. Still, it’s important in education to know your students and the specifics of the market. It happened a lot where we brought people from Premier League clubs, and everyone clapped but when it’s over, everyone said, ‘it’s not adaptable to our market’. We often look at Central and Eastern Europe, countries like the Czech Republic, Hungary and Croatia as well as in the lower divisions of the top 5 championships for best practices because these are more adaptable for our scale.

[ What are some of the biggest challenges facing Romanian football? ]

One of the biggest challenges nowadays is how we close the existing gap between us and the top of European football, both at club and national team level. I think we started later to do the right things in football, so if now we go on the conventional track, we will always be behind, so we need to innovate.

Second, we need to make everyone understand that there is a huge potential to be unlocked if we can start to develop talented young players for top European football markets, with a clear strategy behind it.

And maybe a last one, even though it is quite universal in football, we face it a lot in our courses: shifting the mindset from short-term results to long-term planning in football. I know it takes patience, and confidence in your plan (and sometimes owners & directors don’t have it), but it is essential for a correct process.

[ How does your role fit into the bigger picture of Romanian football? ]

We started this with the aim of becoming the most important educator in sports in Romania - for all the sports. Now we are in year 4 and we are still focusing on football, but our aim is bigger. We want to change all sports in Romania, to educate people in every sport.

In football, we want to keep Romanian football at the top European level with educational initiatives. We want to be among the top European nations in football results and we want to get there by innovating how we teach football topics, not just copying other countries!

After 4 years, all our football stakeholders are starting to speak a common language - it’s not perfect but it’s already something.

[ You’ve been in this role longer than all your other roles, how have your future goals changed? ]

This role is quite fulfilling for me because I want to ‘be good and do good’ - I like this quote and I get a lot of energy from doing good for others. With education, we can change the lives of people working in football or hoping to work in football, and we have a lot of success stories. So at night when I go home to sleep, maybe I don’t have energy after some busy weeks but I sleep really well because I know I’m changing the lives of others.

Besides my education project management work with the National Football Academy, I’m working with the General Secretary (of the FA) with two colleagues and we are managing various ‘special projects’ that aren’t easily assigned to a department. These projects involve other associations and federations - there’s a lot of unknown in the work, a lot of diversity and this is feeding me a lot!

So in the future, I want to impact more and more people here and help more people realize that their football results are also driven by education. We want to change the reality on the field with what we do off the field.

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