Impact Stories

Nathan Bowen, Director of Football at Worthing FC, reflects on a coaching career that started on a Brighton estate more than 20 years ago.

Nathan looks out onto the pitch at Woodside Road, where a couple of dozen Under-14s are training ahead of their fixtures that weekend. It’s a talented group, and Nathan has high hopes for them.

As Director of Football, he’s responsible for looking after every player who wears the Worthing FC badge – the men’s and women’s first teams, the youth academy, the community squads, and the disability-inclusive teams.

Becoming a respected figure in non-league football and leader at a football club with nearly 2,000 fans at every home game isn’t quite where Nathan thought he’d end up.

“I didn’t really do a lot when I was young,” Nathan says, “I’d play in the park, just try and stay out of trouble where I could.

“When you’re on an estate and you’re not doing something productive it’s quite easy to mix in with the wrong crowd. For anyone who’s grown up in an area like that, it’s normal.”

At 13, Nathan had his first chance to play at proper organised football sessions thanks to a free football programme in his local park.

The programme was run by the BHAFC Foundation – the charity of Brighton & Hove Albion – and it gave young people in one of Brighton’s most deprived neighbourhoods a chance to play football every week.

“They were free, so my mum was quite happy about that!”

“We didn’t have a lot of money, I couldn’t afford to go and play football at a local team, so it was great for me. I always loved football, and this programme allowed me to play every week and at tournaments, which is something I wouldn’t have been able to do.

Playing at these free sessions helped Nathan stay on the straight and narrow, and he played there every week for the next couple of years before an unexpected opportunity knocked.

“Every year the coaches would choose a few of us to study for their first coaching qualification, which you could only do once you were 15. The year I turned 15, my coaches chose me,” Nathan said.

The charity paid for Nathan and a few of his teammates to earn their first coaching qualifications, and gave them part-time coaching work at summer holiday football camps.

“That was the start of my coaching career,” Nathan said, “It was massive for me. I’m not sure what I’d be doing now if I didn’t do those coaching badges.

“I actually did my first coaching qualification alongside Russell Martin. He’s gone on to have a pretty decent career!”

Nathan threw himself into his work at the Foundation, taking on anything and everything he could.

“I worked with absolutely everyone while I was at the Foundation.

“Summer camps, Saturday morning clubs, development centres, the lot. I taught PE in schools, and I was part of a team helping to reduce childhood obesity in Brighton. I did everything from teaching sun safety to developing elite talent.

“There were so many really good moments over the 14 years I was there – probably loads I’ve forgotten too – and I got to have a lot of experiences I never thought I’d have.”

Nathan worked at the BHAFC Foundation for 14 years before getting a coaching job in the Brighton academy. After a spell working with a football academy in south London, Nathan joined Worthing Football Club.

“I’m fairly well known around Sussex these days, I’ve been lucky enough to be quite successful in the local football community,” Nathan said.

“All of that is down to the coaches at the Foundation seeing something in me and giving me the opportunity to grow.”

Despite his early coaching success, Nathan still faced some significant challenges.

“No one in the Foundation knew but I was living in hostels for a while,” Nathan said.

“A lot of people think that homeless people are all on the streets, but actually there are loads of kids in hostels who have moved out, whose parents passed away, and are homeless through no fault of their own.”

Homeless at 21 and living in hostels, Nathan was given an offer too good to refuse.

In 2007, organisers from the Homeless World Cup were visiting hostels in Brighton looking for people who might be interested in playing.

The Homeless World Cup is an international tournament that works with homelessness organisations across the globe, giving hundreds of homeless people the chance to represent their countries.

After organisers visited his hostel and met Nathan, he was offered the chance to try out for the England team.

Unsure at first, Nathan soon agreed to give it a go once he heard that the trials would be held at Manchester United’s Carrington training ground.

Nathan impressed at the trials and he was chosen to captain England at the Homeless World Cup in Copenhagen. They didn’t win the tournament, but the whole experience had a big impact on him.

“The Homeless World Cup is a fantastic initiative,” Nathan said, “they try to get people motivated by running trials and tournaments – it gives people something to focus on and look forward to. It definitely helped me.”

Seven years on, the BHAFC Foundation was one of the centres chosen to hold trials for the 2014 Homeless World Cup in Chile.

Hearing that the trials were happening on his doorstep, Nathan wanted to do his bit by helping out at the trial day. He was no longer living in hostels and wanted to support people who were in the same position he’d been in seven years earlier.

“I wanted to get involved and help out with the trials, to try and give something back after I benefitted so much from playing a few years before,” he said.

He ended up getting a bit more than he bargained for; after reconnecting with the tournament organisers, they asked Nathan to fly out to Chile to manage the England team.

“Going to Chile was an amazing experience, it was a privilege to represent my country. We met amazing people out there from all walks of life.

“Because of my background, it was nice to give back and help people in that same situation I was in.”

Now Director of Football at Worthing FC, Nathan has overseen a period of unprecedented success for the club.

The men’s first team won promotion to the National League South for the first time ever in 2022, and have qualified for the playoffs every season since. The women’s side have been promoted twice in recent years to climb to the fourth tier of women’s football, and the club’s academy teams have won a host of trophies over the past five years.

For Nathan, engaging the locals is just as important as the club’s success on the pitch.

“We want to give the town a club they can be proud of,” he says.

“And eventually, why can’t we have a Football League club in Worthing? It might take us 10 years, 20 years, but our vision is to push the club as far as we can go.”

The club’s 3G pitch on Woodside Road is constantly busy. Almost every day you’ll see people of all ages walking up to the ground dressed in full kit, ready to use one of the few available football pitches in the town.

Having a community pitch open seven days a week was part of the vision when Worthing built the 3G surface in 2015, and Nathan continues to try and make the pitch available to as many people as possible.

“The town has changed from somewhere old people go to retire to into a much younger place, and I think our club should reflect that. We want to be ambitious and positive about the future,” Nathan says.

“Male or female, old or young, we want our teams to represent the whole town. You can see that in our walking football teams, our disability-inclusive team, we want to represent as many different parts of the community as possible.

“We want to get people playing here whenever we can. Local youth teams use our pitch, we have 5-a-side leagues here, school tournaments, loads of charity games as well.

“It’s frustrating to only have the one pitch in a way – we feel that we have enough interest to fill up ten.”

Nathan started out life with limited opportunities, and he’s a big advocate for giving people the same chances that benefitted him along the way.

“For me, it’s all about opportunity,” he said, “the free programmes that the BHAFC Foundation runs, the kind I played at when I was 13, are important.

“They give people the opportunity to enjoy themselves and show what they can do. People just need a chance.”

Nathan has to go and help finish the Under-14s training session on the pitch below.

He walks down to set up a drill, and a couple of the boys start joking around with him. Nathan has left his mark on these young players, just as he has on so many young people over the past 20 years.

Many of those players will go on to have careers as players or coaches, and perhaps they’ll remember Nathan the same way he remembers his old coaches.

“We’ve got three or four players who we’re sponsoring to do their coaching badges, like I was supported back in the day. The cycle goes on.

“I had the opportunity to make a career out of this, and if we can help someone else do the same, then we’ve done our job.”