Noel Dempsey is a University Teacher in Sports Coaching and Pedagogy at Loughborough University. He completed his PhD from Liverpool John Moores University in 2023, exploring the coach education policy in grassroots football. This work, which was supported by the English Football Association, took on the theoretical lens of Basil Bernstein to explore how policy was created, disseminated and reproduced in practice.
Noel completed his PGCE back in 2011 and has taught across a range of Further Education (FE) settings in London and Manchester. More recently, Noel was a Senior Lecturer at UCFB, delivering across football specific undergraduate degree and postgraduate degree programmes.
Alongside his academic work, Noel has been an active football coach for the past twenty years, achieving his UEFA A License and AYA Licence with the English Football Association. He has worked abroad in Australia and in several academy settings in England, including spending the last seven years at Manchester City FC in their junior academy department. Noel has also worked for the English Football Association as a coach developer and coach mentor in the North-West of England.
Noel’s current research interests centre around coach education and development provisions, including their creation and construction, dissemination, and practice. This extends to understanding the critical sociology of such construction and how this impacts coach learning and development.
- Member of the Cluster for Research into Coaching (CRiC)
- League Coaches Association Member
- External Examiner
Featured publications
- Dempsey, N., & Cronin, C. (2026). Reorientating grassroots coach education – the selection-box metaphor for curriculum design. Sport, Education and Society, 1–15. DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2025.2610224
- Dempsey, N., & Carlisle, R. (2025). Coaching in the Youth Development Phase. In Wild. C. (ed.) Football Coaching: Putting the Theory into Practice. Routledge, pp. 84-97.
- O’Riordan, D., & Dempsey, N. (2025). A cautionary tale of policy development and enactment in sport coach education: counting the cost. Sports Coaching Review, 1–12. DOI: 10.1080/21640629.2025.2558447
- Dempsey, N., Cope, E., Richardson, D. J., Littlewood, M. A., & Cronin, C. (2024). An examination of content knowledge in formal coach education curriculum. Sport, Education and Society, 29(2), 221–239. DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2022.2131761
- Dempsey, N., Wood, S., Chapman, R., Roberts, S. J., & Cronin, C. (2024). The challenges of navigating different spaces and contexts in collaborative doctoral research in sport coaching. Sports Coaching Review, 13(2), 167–178. DOI: 10.1080/21640629.2024.2343575
- Dempsey, N., Chapman, R., & Cronin, C. (2024). Assessment in Coach Education: A Disjointed Piece of the Curriculum Puzzle? In McCarthy, L. (ed.) Sport Coach Education, Development, and Assessment. Routledge, pp. 49-61.
- Leeder, T. M., Dempsey, N. M., & Chapman, R. (2022). Understanding grassroots football coach education in England through creative fiction: connecting the past to the present. In Leeder, T. M. (ed.) Coach Education in Football: Contemporary Issues and Global Perspectives. Routledge, pp. 73-85.
- Dempsey, N., Cope, E., Richardson, D. J., Littlewood, M. A., & Cronin, C. J. (2021). Less may be more: how do coach developers reproduce “learner-centred” policy in practice? Sports Coaching Review, 10(2), 203–224. DOI: 10.1080/21640629.2020.1866851
- Dempsey, N. M., Richardson, D. J., Cope, E., & Cronin, C. J. (2021). Creating and disseminating coach education policy: a case of formal coach education in grassroots football. Sport, Education and Society, 26(8), 917–930. DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2020.1802711