EasyCoach featured in FCBusiness Magazine, Issue 173
FCBusiness Magazine, the business publication for the football industry since 2004, features EasyCoach in its June 2026 issue. CEO Gabby Barzilay on the structural problem in player development, the four AI Assistants launching this summer, and the infrastructure federations like Croatia and Kazakhstan now run on.
FCBUSINESS · ISSUE 173 · JUNE 2026
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What the feature covers
- Why player development at clubs is a structural problem, not a talent problem
- How EasyCoach connects national team operations, coach education, licensing records and competition management for federations
- The four AI Assistants launching this summer, and why they are built into existing workflows
- The new partnership with Sport Session Planner, expanding the platform’s drill library
- Why technology adoption fails when it adds steps without returning value
Player development is a structural problem
Asked what most clubs still get wrong about player development, Gabby Barzilay’s answer was direct. It is not a talent problem. It is a structural one. A club with twenty teams can have twenty good coaches doing twenty different things. The director of coaching has no visibility into what is actually being taught. No record of what a player worked on six months ago. No flag when an injury concern shows up across age groups.
That gap is not a coaching failure. It is an infrastructure failure. And as the FCBusiness piece argues, you cannot develop players systematically without the infrastructure to support it. That is the operational reality EasyCoach was built to address.
“It isn’t a talent problem. It’s a structural one.”
Gabby Barzilay, CEO, EasyCoach. Featured in FCBusiness Magazine, Issue 173, June 2026.
Building infrastructure for federations
The same pattern shows up at the federation level, only larger. A coach completes a licensing course, and that record sits separately from their assignment history, which sits separately from their work with a national team age group. Knowledge does not travel. Decisions get made without context.
EasyCoach was built to close that gap. The Kazakhstan Football Federation runs all four of the platform’s federation products under one contract: National Teams, Coaches Education, Hub, and Competition Management. Croatia, Israel, and Fiji each entered through a subset and expanded. Now a technical director can actually see the full picture of how their country develops football.
AI Assistants built into existing workflows
The four AI Assistants featured in the piece, launching this summer, are designed around the four areas where clubs lose time and clarity: coaching operations, administration, communication, and player development. Each one is built into existing workflows rather than bolted on top. Clubs can add AI support without changing the way they already work.
The conversation in the FCBusiness piece returned to a principle that matters more than the technology itself. Resistance to new tools at clubs is not about technology. It is about complexity. People are not opposed to tools that make their jobs easier. They are opposed to tools that add steps without returning value. The conversation changes once the tool is visibly faster than the alternative.
About FCBusiness
FCBusiness has been the business publication for the football industry since 2004. Each issue is distributed on a named basis to every football club registered with the FA, IFA, FAW, SFA and FAI, plus all member clubs of the European Club Association. Coverage in FCBusiness signals that EasyCoach is being followed as a meaningful operational and technology decision by the decision-makers who run football.
Read more
- FCBusiness Magazine, Issue 173 (digital edition): read the issue
- EasyCoach for Federations: solutions/federations
- EasyCoach for Clubs and Academies: solutions/clubs
- Press and announcements from EasyCoach: press
See EasyCoach in action.
A 20-minute walkthrough of the platform Villarreal and Shakhtar run on. Pricing on the call.
