Who is Lee Wood?

Profile

Player Care in Modern Academy Football

Lee Wood is a Player Care Manager whose work sits at the heart of one of the most important areas of modern academy football: helping young players and their families navigate the emotional, educational, and personal demands of the pathway.

Currently working at Wigan Athletic, Wood provides independent advice, welfare support, and transition guidance for academy players and their families. His role spans induction, wellbeing, education, parent communication, release support, and aftercare, with a clear focus on helping young people develop not only as footballers, but as individuals capable of building fulfilling lives beyond the game. His CV highlights support for more than 120 academy players and families, delivery of over 25 wellbeing and education workshops annually, and extensive work around transition and progression planning.

Lee Wood is a Player Care Manager whose work sits at the heart of one of the most important areas of modern academy football: helping young players and their families navigate the emotional, educational, and personal demands of the pathway.

Education, Player Support and Academy Football

What makes Wood’s profile particularly valuable is the way his career has developed across education, player support, and academy football. Before moving into player care, he worked as a BTEC Tutor and Head of Education at Bolton Wanderers, where he led education provision for full-time players aged 16 to 21 and supported young people through progression, exit planning, and personal development. That background gives him a deep understanding of the pressures that sit around performance, especially for young players trying to build an identity inside a system where decisions can feel life-defining.

His passion for sport began early, shaped by family, childhood experiences, and the influence of teachers and mentors. Yet his real sense of purpose in player care came from noticing what happened when players left the academy environment. For Wood, release is not simply an administrative moment. It is a human transition that requires preparation, relationship, and continued care.

Presence, Consistency and Support

At Wigan, that philosophy shows up in the detail of his day-to-day work. Player care is not only formal meetings or structured programmes. It is corridor conversations, informal check-ins, time spent watching players in different environments, and maintaining relationships with parents so support can continue beyond the club building. Wood’s approach is grounded in presence, consistency, and a genuine interest in the person behind the player.

Wood’s approach is grounded in presence, consistency, and a genuine interest in the person behind the player.

A major part of his work also involves parents. He recognises that parents are often the gatekeepers for younger academy players, and that strong relationships with families allow clubs to understand the wider context of a young person’s life. This matters not only when things are going well, but especially during selection challenges, injuries, release decisions, and transitions into host family environments.

The Future of Player Care

Wood’s perspective is particularly relevant at a time when player care is becoming more visible across football, while still developing as a profession. He understands both the promise and the challenge of the role: the importance of individualised care, the need for clearer support systems, and the responsibility clubs carry when young people are facing complex emotional, educational, and identity-based transitions.

What defines Lee Wood is his belief that football development should not end with the footballer. It should support the whole person, prepare them for change, and help them leave the environment, whenever that moment comes, with options, confidence, and a stronger sense of who they are.

What defines Lee Wood is his belief that football development should not end with the footballer.

Key Insights

• Lee Wood’s work focuses on supporting academy players and families through the emotional, educational, and personal demands of the pathway.
• His background in education and player care gives him a strong understanding of transition, release support, and life beyond football.
• His approach places importance on parents, communication, presence, and understanding the person behind the player.

Our Exclusive Interview with Lee Wood

Looking back, what shaped your passion for this work?

There’s probably a lot of things people can question on people. Passion isn’t one of them.

I suppose we’re all a product of our environment, aren’t we? My dad watched sport pretty much daily, whether that was cricket, snooker, darts, football, or motor racing. All the inspirational people in my life have always been sport-related.

I realised pretty early on in my life that I wasn’t ever going to make it, in inverted commas, and then it’s like, right, what can you do to be as close to that as possible?

Was there a moment that really shaped the direction you went in?

The tipping point for where I am now was my first cohort with an academy.

It wasn’t until the last three or four lads were in the classroom and they were like, ‘Oh, this is it, we won’t see you again, Lee.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you’re not going back next season?’ And they said, ‘No, I’ve not got a contract.’

Something inside, it didn’t feel right. Hopefully I had a small part in their journey, and it just didn’t feel right. That disconnection.

From that day on, I made it a point of principle that that wasn’t going to be repeated.

What does Player Care look like day to day?

It’s very much person-focused.

The environment allows Player Care to be proactive rather than reactive.

It would be personal check-ins with the players that you’re focusing on that day, formally and informally. Being around the building, chatting, playing table tennis, pool, or just passing conversations in the corridor.

It’s about being present as much as you can in some of the other disciplines, whether that’s training, in the gym, in the classroom, analysis, whatever it may be, so that you’re getting a bit of a flavour of how they are doing.

Our academy places real importance on developing good young people alongside good footballers.

A lot of the job is very administrative, which is totally opposite of that. It’s about being selective with timings, where can I get that done in my day that’s not going to have an impact on me not being able to have a conversation with someone?

That administration is important because it allows us to record concerns, coordinate support and communicate effectively across departments.

What are some of the main challenges you support players with?

At this moment in time, it’s the transition part of it, retained and released, and both ways. It’s not just all about the release, all about the negatives.

With the release, it’s having regular contact with players. For our younger age groups, it’s normally through the parents, so maintaining that relationship with the parents to be able to support them and their son moving forward, whether that’s in football or outside of football.

You genuinely want to know, how’s he doing? How’s school going? Did you go anywhere? Did you go away for half term? If not, what did you do during half term?

It’s not just a box-ticking exercise.

How do you support players through transition?

It’s literally that support. It’s not something we can do for them.

I had contact with one of the under-21s this morning. He wants to go and do an education course, so it’s me doing a bit of research, reaching out to contacts that I’ve got to see what the best pathway is for him, and then giving him the options.

It’s not me saying, right, you should be doing this A-level at this college these nights of the week. He’s a grown adult. It’s about me supporting him.

What do you think parents sometimes underestimate about the academy journey?

I probably say one around expectations.

I think the game has become much better at preparing families for the realities of academy football, and there’s still room for us all to keep improving.

The reality is that the vast majority of young players won’t progress all the way through an academy system.

That sounds very harsh, but the reality is, as someone who has been in academy football for 12 seasons coming up, and my fifth as player care manager, that’s the reality.

It’s not the be all and end all. Yes, it can be a very emotive time, it can be a life-changing time at such a critical young age, but it doesn’t always have to be that way.

What support do you provide for parents?

We do our parent programme. We did five sessions over two nights last season. We’re going to expand that for next season.

It is very much parent focused.

At the end of each of those sessions, they do have a live voting system, a live digital voice, to feed back on how well those sessions were, because we need to know quickly, so that we can tweak any future sessions.

There’s a digital form that goes out, then there’s an in-person drop-in. I ring-fence nights during a certain block within the season where parents can openly book a time slot with myself and sit down over a cup of coffee or a cup of tea.

We would like to think that our parents don’t need those time zones within the season, or to wait until their parent programme to bring something up.

Why is open communication with parents so important?

With the nines to sixteens, the parents are the gatekeepers.

If I don’t have that, I’m disconnected. It makes it almost impossible to do the job that I do.

You won’t find out what’s going on in that young person’s life, good, bad, or anywhere in between.

If that lad’s just won an award at school, I want to know that. I want to be able to seek him out the next time I see him, to congratulate him on it.

That’s the danger of not truly knowing who the individual is. If I don’t know the individual as truthfully as I should do, then it’s like operating with one hand tied behind your back.

How do relationships with parents help the wider academy environment?

To have a relationship with parents is almost as important as having that relationship with the players, because they are an extension of the parents, they’re a product of that environment.

When you’re doing the host family meet and greets, you get to see the tears, because the parents realise that their little boy is now moving out.

You want to empathise and almost tell them it’s going to be okay. It’s okay to be upset. It’s okay that your little lad is not your little lad anymore.

Looking ahead, what excites you about the future of Player Care?

I’m excited about where it’s going to go.

It’s still relatively new, but kind of not, if that makes sense. I think it’s been done in different guises with different people.

I think what it looks like now is very diverse. No two clubs will do it the same, but I think there’s a beauty in that.

I’d be interested to see where it goes. Do we all stay relatively individualised, but with common crossovers, or is there going to be an audit-driven set of rules?

What are the biggest challenges in Player Care?

The challenges are coming from that diverse part, so I see it as a blessing, but also sometimes as a hindrance.

Player Care isn’t about being the expert in every area. It’s about recognising when specialist support is needed and making sure players access the right people at the right time.

Do we need to educate player care people to a certain level, or is it a triage service where player care is the central piece that then signposts to experts?

Ultimately all we’re bothered about is that player getting the support that they need.

FAQ

Who is Lee Wood?

Lee Wood is a Player Care Manager currently working at Wigan Athletic, supporting academy players and families through welfare, education, transition guidance and aftercare.

What does Lee Wood’s player care work focus on?

Lee Wood’s player care work focuses on induction, wellbeing, education, parent communication, release support, aftercare, transition and progression planning.

Why are parents important in Lee Wood’s approach to player care?

Lee Wood recognises that parents are often the gatekeepers for younger academy players, and that strong relationships with families allow clubs to understand the wider context of a young person’s life.