Smith, the Scottish FA's Goalkeeping Performance and Coach Education Manager discussed his work to push Scottish goalkeeping forward.
Graeme Smith enjoyed an accomplished playing career, plying his trade for the likes of Rangers, Kilmarnock and St Mirren among others. After retiring in 2018, Smith joined the Gers as the Head of Academy Goalkeeping – working there for six years before taking his current role at the Scottish FA as the Goalkeeping Performance and Coach Education Manager in March 2024.
Since the arrival of Steve Clarke in 2019, Scotland have qualified for two major tournaments – UEFA Euro 2020 and UEFA Euro 2024. Both campaigns ended in a group stage exit, but it is clear that the direction of travel for Scottish football is a positive one.
So, how has Scottish goalkeeping improved in the last few years and now since Smith started his role? His position involves overseeing the development of goalkeepers and improving the standard of goalkeeper coaching across the governing body. Smith said:
“From a goalkeeping coach perspective, it’s improving - the standard of courses and needing to be licenced as well. There are clubs that do well with that and there’s clubs that don’t do so well with that.
“It’s about us raising the standards and raising the bar because it’s the only way you’re going to improve the standard of coaching. If you improve the standard of coaching, it has a knock-on effect, even at a part-time level or a full-time level, it can improve the goalkeepers because they’ve got more knowledge, more experience and more reality-based stuff.
“It means that if you've got young goalkeepers going out on loan, they're not only getting a good provision at their parent club, but they're also getting a good provision at their loan club as well. I think you need a bit of both.”
Smith is keen to keep improving goalkeeper coaching education in Scotland, and sits at the forefront of the Scottish FA’s push to put on more goalkeeping-specific continuous professional development (CPD) events and programmes to ensure that the standard of coaching across the board in Scottish.
A CPD is a requirement from UEFA that licence holders must complete a minimum of 15 hours of accredited CPD every three years. On the goalkeeper coaching pathway, these 15 hours can be made up of ten hours of generic coaching modules and five hours of goalkeeping-related training. This year, the UEFA convention for CPD courses is changing, though, with coaches now required to spend 50 per cent of the 15 hours doing goalkeeping-related training (7.5 hours each).
The new convention will help increase the amount of time on the grass for up-and-coming goalkeeper coaches, which is why Smith is pushing forward with putting on more CPD courses in the next couple of years.
Obtaining an entry-level licence can be completed online, so putting on more CPD courses and increasing the amount of time goalkeeper coaches at the lower end of the Scottish football pyramid spend organising their own sessions on the pitch is central to Smith’s future ambitions.
He said: “Because they’re online, I think it’s important to compound online Level 1 courses with lots of experience on the pitch.
“I'm trying to raise the bar and going forward up until 2027, I want to make sure that anybody in the SPFL (top four leagues) has to hold a goalkeeping B licence. It’s fine in theory because I want to improve the standard but I have to make sure that there are enough courses getting run out. That’s one of my aims.”
So, how many new courses have been run out during Smith’s time in his current role? In 2024, the Scottish FA delivered 16 online introductory courses – Levels 1.2 and 1.3. This year, that number has already increased to 18, along with UEFA Goalkeeping B and A Licence courses and a number of CPD events and programmes.
In February, the Scottish FA also hosted a UEFA share visit for the first time since 2023 – an event that saw 12 associations, including delegates from Denmark, Italy, Serbia and Switzerland attend. The event involved a range of workshops, a practical with Kilmarnock’s Under-18s and speakers such as Packie Bonner, as well as Jim Stewart and Frans Hoek who work on the UEFA Goalkeeping Advisory Group.
In terms of Smith’s wider vision, he believes that the depth of Scottish goalkeeping has a long way to go. To improve goalkeeping in Scotland, Smith believes that collaborating with the coaches at domestic clubs will ensure that young shot-stoppers are given the best chance of success. He said:
“It’s about building the relationships with the clubs, building the relationships with the goalkeeper coaches at the clubs so that we’re both helping goalkeepers maximise their potential rather than working as a separate entity.
“When it comes to the coaching education, it’s about trying to make sure that we’re upscaling the coaching, we’re demanding more of the coaches and raising the bar in terms of the standard because again, the goalkeepers that then come through their pathway, hopefully they've got more chance with the theory and the practical competencies that we’re asking goalkeeper coaches to enact.
“We want young Scottish goalkeepers to play regular competitive football because if they’re exposed to that at the bottom end of the pyramid from an early age, then it means in five years’ time or ten years’ time, Steve Clarke will have a plethora of goalkeepers with competitive match experience to choose from. At this moment in time, there is a selection to choose from that meets this criteria, but we aim to produce more.
Smith stressed that for Scottish goalkeeper coaches, mistakes and experimentation in training environments are where the most valuable lessons are learned. From his time at Rangers as Head of Academy Goalkeeping, he found that direct feedback from players and other coaches on the quality of his sessions helped to improve their overall quality in the future, and in turn, helped improve the goalkeeper’s development.
Smith said: “You may have a session that you think was the best session in the world in your head but then you get feedback from the goalkeepers or feedback from fellow coaches, who say ‘I don’t think that was very good’. On the flip of that, there were a couple of ones where you think I would change 80 per cent of that session for the next time and actually, you’d reflect back on it and think I wouldn’t change that much, or a staff member might say, ‘yeah, I really like that’.
“I think the most important thing as a coach is wherever you gain your experience, it’s on the pitch. If that's not playing, that could be from coaching, and I think that's the most important part.
“Being courageous enough to make mistakes and to understand that it’s not always going to be perfect, you're not always going to get the outcomes that you want, but as you start to do more and more, you start to evolve and start to refine your own methods, delivery, and feedback.
“Being okay with making mistakes and being okay with asking the questions, being okay with not knowing everything. I think that's probably the biggest thing I would say as a coach.”
After a year in his current role, Smith has clear ambitions for the future of Scottish goalkeeping. The benefits of improved coaching education across the country are something that he wants to keep pushing forward with and the availability of CPD programmes is central to this.
His efforts to ‘raise the bar’ and grow the talent pool of young Scottish goalkeepers ready for first-team action will take time, but the early signs are that he is already making steps in the right direction.
