16th January 2026
January 16 – Pep Guardiola changed the face of football and turned Manchester City into serial winners. Now the club has launched CityCoach, a digital coaching platform that does more than just share drills. It codifies the so-called ‘City Way’ and makes it usable, repeatable, and scalable for coaches beyond the confines of the Etihad Campus in Manchester.
Built on the Coachbetter app, which is already used daily by more than 10,000 coaches and embedded across City’s global football schools network, CityCoach turns internal academy knowledge into an easy-to-use tool for coaches across the football spectrum.
The app demonstrates how City actually coaches players, how sessions are built, and how ideas progress across age groups, before making their way onto the pitch.
By formalising academy principles into a digital framework, City can ensure its methodology is taught the same way, whether you are coaching eight-year-olds in Asia or teenagers in a City Football Schools programme in the US.
The platform also reflects how modern coaching education is changing. City can now distribute high-level content at scale, at a relatively low cost, without losing control of how its football identity is interpreted. Masterclasses from senior technical staff, including Academy Director Thomas Kruecken, add credibility and reinforce the message that this is not marketing fluff.
There is also a bigger play here. CityCoach sits neatly at the crossroads of football development and digital IP. It strengthens alignment across City’s global programmes, keeps coaches engaged in the long term, and quietly increases the value of the club’s academy knowledge. Revenue models may not be public, but subscriptions, licensing, and education partnerships are the obvious next steps.
The bigger question is not whether this works. It is how long before everyone else follows. If Manchester City can package its coaching identity this cleanly, how long before every major club floods the market with its own version of “the way we play”? And, are they really that different?
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