Stern discusses lessons and learnings from coaching in the top flight with his boyhood club Brighton.
Photos by permission of Jack Stern
Most young goalkeepers dream of stepping between the sticks for the clubs they’ve supported all their lives. Following in the footsteps of the icons that wore the shirt before them. Writing their names into the history books of where they came from.
Many young goalkeepers will also never get the opportunity to do that.
But opportunities come in different forms. Pathways are winding roads that can take you to similar places through different means.
37-year-old Jack Stern never got the chance to play a match in goal for Brighton - the club he supported as a youngster - but he did get to spend four seasons making a difference in and around the penalty box at the Amex Stadium.
Inspired by Peter Schmeichel, Neville Southall, and the “endless” hours spent watching VHS tapes of the pair training and playing, Stern spent time in AFC Wimbledon’s youth set up before being released at the age of 16 in the mid-2000s.
Just over a decade later, he’d take a role first assisting Ben Roberts in Brighton’s Premier League goalkeeper department, before leading the group under Graham Potter, Roberto De Zerbi, and Fabian Hürzeler over three years at the club. The journey to get there took him to the other side of the world and back. Goalkeeping was a bug he couldn’t shake.
“I wanted my life to be about goalkeeping and working in football”, Stern recalls thinking, following his return from a scholarship programme in America after his release from Wimbledon.
“I loved training. But when we got to games, I found the pressure more difficult to deal with, so my performance was never quite where it should have been. But I thought, ‘you know what, I want a career in this’. And the best way that I could do that is to switch lanes and focus on something else. So I focused on coaching from a really young age.”
Stern’s path went via the University of Worcester, where a sports coaching degree helped him build the “toolbox” that he believed would help him compete with the ex-professional players entering the coaching game. Some of the most defining education came beyond the course. “The amount of theory you can learn about coaching from people outside of a coaching background…how you interact with people…the methods you can use” were equally as important as time on the pitch was.
Between the cold mornings coaching West Brom’s academy, and eight years across Montreal and Cincinnati in Canada and the U.S. to sharpen his first team CV that came next, it’s clear that Stern has always held the interpersonal element of the profession in high regard.
Speaking of his formative days at West Brom, the 37-year-old acknowledges that there was little glamour in the freezing cold mornings in the West Midlands, but knew “that I had to be in the right place around the right people, learning the right things and having the right attitude, and if I did all of those things, that probably opportunities would open up.”
When, over a decade later, Stern helped Brighton recruit highly rated Netherlands international Bart Verbruggen, the same principles of character remained paramount.
“One of the key focuses of my role at Brighton was recruitment”, he explains.
“Bart was probably the main recruitment deal that I was involved in when I was there at first team level. Making sure that you get the personality right is so important. That starts off with trying to get character references from as many people as you can. And then towards the end of that recruitment process, being able to speak to the people around that player (within the rules of what you’re allowed to do), meet that player face to face, and really get a feel for whether they're the right fit.
“I guess the thing that Bart really impressed me with from a young age was that he's an incredible professional. He's someone that is ruthless in his approach to reaching the top of the game. He will do everything right in terms of eating, sleeping, training, psychological help as well. He's just a 24/7 professional, and we got that feel very early on from him.
“Bart also had a really good support network around him. So, you know, and this is a level that some people might not get into, but even the people advising him, his family…it all ticked all of the boxes. We felt that they were in it for the right reason, that Bart was in it for the right reason.”
Stern joined Brighton’s goalkeeper department in 2022 after working in first team environments at CF Montreal and FC Cincinnati. At the time of his arrival, Robert Sanchez held the number one shirt. Within a year, the goalkeeper position had undergone total overhaul. By the summer of 2023, Brighton had sold Sanchez to Chelsea, Jason Steele had become first choice, and Verbruggen was signed.
“The summer that we recruited Bart, we'd been watching him for a year or so. We sold Rob Sanchez to Chelsea, but at that time, Jason Steele was the number one, Roberto De Zerbi was the manager and was really happy with Jason”, recalls Stern.
Steele had undoubtedly undergone something of a footballing rebirth by the time Verbruggen was signed. He made his Premier League debut at the age of 31 in Brighton’s away fixture at Aston Villa on 20 November, after a series of impressive cup showings, nearly four years after signing for Brighton.
Once again, Stern identifies - amongst several factors - the interpersonal element in the revitalisation of Steele’s career. He describes the Englishman’s move to Brighton as a “fresh start…something that can’t be underestimated.”
From a human perspective, Stern explains how “a lot of credit needs to go to Brighton for that, and the environment that Brighton has as a club in terms of making players feel valued and making them feel part of a project and what's going on.
“I think he came into a club that had a lot of good people that he felt cared about him and had a plan for him and wanted him to be there. The psychological effect that something like that can have on someone is huge. It can totally change the confidence that a player has, how they feel about themselves, and how they feel about the game.
Stern credits Ben Roberts for the “massive effect” his coaching had on Steele, but recognises, overarchingly, for all the positives in the environment the ex-Middlesbrough, Blackburn, and Sunderland entered when he moved south, that “unless you're the right personality to embrace that environment, you're not going to go so far.”
It wasn’t only the goalkeeper department that supported Steele’s rebirth. Stern puts it bluntly: “Jason and Roberto [de Zerzbi] had an incredible relationship. In terms of what Roberto wanted to do, especially in possession, I believe Jason was the best goalkeeper in the world for that.”
“It’s one of the best stories in goalkeeping. Jason was in the right mindset and the right period of his career to grab that opportunity with both hands and create success. He went from where he was when he joined Brighton in his career, to being a regular Premier League goalkeeper playing in European football. I feel very blessed to have been part of Jason's journey at Brighton.”
The working environment in the goalkeeper department that Stern speaks so highly of was partly a product of longstanding Head of Goalkeeping Ben Roberts, who followed Graham Potter to Chelsea in 2022 and remains there to this day.
Stern remained on the south coast after Roberts’ departure, and admits that “it was very clear to me, right, what I had to do was continue Ben's work. The goalkeeping was in such a healthy state, and it was my job to make sure it stays like that.
Roberto De Zerbi brought Spaniard Ricardo Segarra into the coaching set up to work alongside Stern, who had to make sure that the club’s pathways were maintained and balanced with the demands of the new regime.
“The new goalkeeper coach who came with Roberto was very much to make sure that Roberto's ideas were implemented. And that fitted really well, because I led more on a club side of things, making sure that we had continuity, whilst the new coaches brought in new ideas, and we mixed that together. By the end of Roberto's time, I felt like I was one of Roberto's goalkeeper coaches.
“If you are a club appointment, you need to look after all the important things that the club are doing in terms of recruitment, development pathways, things like that, but also support the manager that comes in, because it only works when everyone's aligned and on the same page.
“We were prepared to go into that next season (2023/24) with Jason Steele as the number one, but we also had to find a replacement for Robert Sanchez - a really high level goalkeeper - that could challenge automatically for the number one spot, but also had a lot of potential.
“We tracked Bart Verbruggen, and I clipped up a lot of video for Roberto to see as well so he could understand why I think he works for us as a club, but also for Roberto as a coach. And then once Roberto was on board. As well as his personality, technically and tactically he fitted what we wanted to do as a club and what we wanted to do with Roberto. Bart was very, very good in possession. He was very calm, and very good in terms of his tactical awareness of the game. So being able to find the right pass, to recognise overloads, to read the situation of the game in possession, and then just all the attributes out of possession as well.
“His physicality - he had such a good physique, strong, lean, tall, and was just able to do pretty much everything. And his age - at 21 when we signed him, he had to improve in every area, but we felt that he had the potential to improve to the point that he could be one of the best young goalkeepers in the world. And I think he's progressed every season.”
The type of role Stern played in signing Verbruggen is becoming more common at elite clubs, where goalkeeper coaches often now take on a wider remit. For some it’s set pieces, and for others attacking preparation to exploit opposition goalkeeping weaknesses. For the English coach, it's the analysis side of the job that helped bring Verbruggen to Brighton.
“As a coach it started in the MLS, when there was a very small staff. I had to do everything at the beginning. I had to be my own analyst. I began looking at data and trying to see how we can help the goalkeepers and the team with that. I’d also look a lot at the attacking players.
“So one part of that was showing my findings to the outfield players - the forwards, the midfielders, the wingers - in a video presentation as a group or individually. But then also when we worked on the final phase in training, whether that was finishing the day before a game, or attacking phases throughout the week, in some ways it was just as important that I was working with those attacking players talking about what the opposition goalkeeper would do, as the information I was giving to the goalkeepers!”
At the moment, Stern is in between jobs and waiting for the right next opportunity to come along. Now looking for the fourth first team post of his career, the 37-year-old’s advice to coaches earlier in their career on the job search is clear: "opportunities come out of the blue and you’ve got to be prepared within a day or two to go and present your ideas. You can’t be overprepared in those situations.
“So, when you’re out of work, it’s a really good opportunity to nail down what's important to you in terms of how you train, your principles about training, how you want a goalkeeper, how you believe a goalkeeper should play the game in and out of possession, and so on.
“Write it down. Show it. You’ve got to be able to translate those ideas to someone who might not even understand goalkeeping that well. So head coaches, the technical directors, and other roles in the club. Make sure that you're really clear on what you want and what you believe in, and how you work.”
As our conversation comes to a close, it’s clear to see that Jack Stern is a coach who places a lot of emphasis on values - whether from a human perspective, in the way he’s looked at recruiting new goalkeepers, or on the pitch in building and maintaining a long-term club philosophy.
In a game now so saturated with commercial apparatus and constant tinkering by executives, the phrase “the right reasons” has come up several times in our chat and strikes a chord. As exemplified by his recollections of an important foundational role in his career at West Brom’s academy, “there’s nothing glamorous and sexy about getting up at 6:30AM on a Saturday morning to drive to a freezing pitch in the West Midlands - you have to do it for the right reasons”.
For the many goalkeeper coaches who are still on those early morning and late night age group grinds across the world, hoping to make it to the top, Jack Stern admits that his rise has “been a mix of some good fortune, working really hard, and meeting the right people at the right time”. There’s no correct route or journey to the top, only preparation to take advantage of what you find.
Put simply, “It’s just been a really cool journey, eventually taking me to the Premier League and working for a club I supported as a kid”, he concludes.
