Lab leaders should follow football’s lead and have coaching qualifications

Consultant Sarah Blackford entertainingly maps research careers onto professional football (see Nature 655, 809–810; 2026). She notes the irony that promotion in both fields demands a “new set of skills”: managing people, money and expectations. Yet the analogy should embarrass academia.

Football stopped assuming that its best players make the best managers. To manage in the Premier League, even a World-Cup-winning player must hold a UEFA Pro Licence — which requires years of assessed coursework in leadership, communication and people management. A glittering scoring record does not exempt footballers from the classroom.

Science has no such prerequisite. The main qualification for running a laboratory — overseeing grants and the well-being of researchers — is a strong publication record. This is the equivalent of handing over the dugout to last season’s top scorer and hoping for the best.

The consequences are predictable: graduate surveys repeatedly rank supervision among doctoral students’ chief frustrations. Excellent lab-leadership courses exist but are rarely mandatory.

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