Anita Asante: Ex-England defender on transitioning to Bristol City coaching role

Many footballers struggle with retirement, having known nothing but the structure and routine being a professional sportsperson offers.

For Asante, who joined Arsenal as a youth player and made her international debut aged 19, having plans to go into coaching helped ease the uncertainty of the transition.

“If you’re someone that’s been in the game as long as I have, when you have that structure in your life from the early ages – from 14 through to my 30s – then you really understand why transition can be so hard because that’s really made up so much of my identity,” Asante said.

“That’s the difficult thing to separate yourself from you the player.

“But once I knew that this was something I was going to step into, as well as all the media stuff I was doing, it helped me to see myself outside of the playing environment to work in other spaces with other people, in a different world and different work capacity.”

Asante completed her UEFA B coaching licence with the Football Association of Wales and it was there that she met Robins head coach Lauren Smith, who acted as her mentor on the programme.

It helped make Bristol City an obvious fit for her first role on the touchline.

As a former centre-back Asante predominantly works with the Robins defenders, but on the flipside also helps the strikers.

“We have a very young team, I think we have the second youngest team in the Championship, but now it’s also developing that leadership side of it where they can take initiative, they can be proactive, they can read danger earlier and organise the players in front of them,” she said.

“That’s been the part that I’ve enjoyed because that’s what I’ve experienced across the game as well.”