About Saul Isaksson-Hurst | Individual Development Coach

get £100 off from june 16 – june 30

days

hours

minutes

seconds

ABOUT

Saul Isaksson-Hurst.

One of the world’s leading individual development coaches, with over 20 years inside the professional game. UEFA A Licence, Advanced Youth Award, BA (Hons), MA and a PGCE. Former academy coach at Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur, now the specialist professional clubs bring in to design and deliver their individual development programmes.

He has worked one to one with Noni Madueke, Antoine Semenyo, Folarin Balogun and Max Aarons, and with thousands of players nobody will ever read about. The method is the same method. Only the level changes.

GET THE MPFC APP See the Success Stories

THE BACKGROUND

He qualified as a teacher before

he qualified as a coach.

A BA, then an MA, then a PGCE, which is the qualification you take to stand in front of a class and be accountable for
whether anyone actually learned anything. The UEFA A Licence and the Advanced Youth Award came alongside it.

It is an unusual route into professional football, and it shaped everything that followed. A lesson that keeps thirty
people busy for an hour is not a lesson. It needs an objective, a way of checking whether it landed, and a next one that
builds on it. Saul plans football sessions the same way.

INSIDE THE ACADEMY

Chelsea and Tottenham, and
the gap in the badges.

Saul coached in the academies at Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur. Academy football is the best environment in the country for developing a young player, and it is still built around the group. The session serves the squad, the shape and the way the team wants to play.

What he kept running into was a gap in the qualifications themselves, and he has been blunt about it ever since.

There was no badge for the individual player. That gap became the work.

PDA FOOTBALL 1ON1

One player, one coach,
one hour.

Before My Personal Football Coach there was PDA Football 1on1, and the name describes it exactly. Saul assessed a player, built a programme around their position and the specific thing holding them back, and then coached it. Parents of academy players came for the extra work. Parents of grassroots players came to find out whether their child had a chance.

The Technical Excellence Cycle was already running in those sessions. Players went on to Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal, Barnet and Leyton Orient. Faiq Bolkiah earned a trial at Chelsea in April 2013 and signed a two-year scholarship. Kodi Lyons-Foster came through to Tottenham Hotspur, then England, and is now a professional at Aston Villa.

"Kodi developed to academy standards after being coached through PDA. The coaching he received from Saul resulted in him being a Tottenham Hotspur FC and eventually England player. He is now a Professional Footballer at Aston Villa all thanks to the coaching staff at PDA."

Steve Foster

Father of Kodi Lyons-Foster

2013

One coach cannot stand on
every pitch.

The limit of 1-to-1 coaching is arithmetic. However good the sessions are, they only ever reach the players who can physically get to them. Every other player with the same hunger gets nothing.

My Personal Football Coach was founded in 2013 to carry the method further than one diary could. It became programmes a player could follow on their own, then an app, then full courses that teach a coach the whole thing from assessment to long-term planning. The app has now been downloaded more than 89,000 times and is used inside professional academies as well as in back gardens.

2013

Founded

App downloads

2026

New app launched

THE PROS

“I’ve had to force him to
have a day off.”

That is Saul on Noni Madueke. The two have worked together for more than four years, including pre-season in Marbella, where most players that age are at the beach clubs and Madueke is on the grass every morning. Saul calls him a mentality monster. Madueke credited the 1-to-1 work publicly at an England press conference.

Antoine Semenyo played in every division of the English Football League on his way to Manchester City, and still does individual work in the off-season. Folarin Balogun’s valuation moved from five million euros to forty. Madueke and Semenyo have since transferred for a combined £117M. Max Aarons started with Saul at 14, then spent two years with no club and no academy, training one to one throughout, and came out of it with a scholarship, a Premier League career and a place on the Golden Boy shortlist.

ON THE ROAD

Arsenal. Leipzig. Chicago.
Hong Kong. Old Trafford.

Academies rarely bring in an outside coach to teach their own staff. Saul’s consultancy does exactly that, designing and delivering individual development programmes inside professional clubs and national federations.

The Method

Three phases. One direction.

The Technical Excellence Cycle is Saul's own model, created from over ten years of teaching hundreds of players of every standard across several countries. Ball Mastery, then Movement Development, then Functional Practices, in that order, every time. Behind each player sits an Individual Development Plan, the document that decides what gets coached first and what gets left alone for now.

Read The Full Philosophy

WHERE TO START

Three doors into the same method.

A player, a coach and a club each need something different
from Saul. What sits underneath all three does not change.

The MPFC App

Daily sessions for players and coaches, from
£9.99 a month.

Get The App

The Courses

Full courses by position, age group and senior
coaching level.

Explore The Courses

Clubs And Academies

Programmes and staff delivery inside clubs and
academies worldwide today.

Talk To Saul's Team

Master The Ball…Master The Game.

Twenty years, thousands of players, and one belief underneath all of it. Technical
excellence is where a footballer’s development starts, and it is built one player at a time.

GET THE MPFC APP Explore the Courses