I was introduced to David Copeland Smith at a moment when we were deciding what this show actually is and the messages we wanted to get across. Which is not just another sports podcast, but centering every conversation around the individual to talk about the real business of sport, such as contracts, negotiations, representation, governance, long-term career strategy and how people think about value and identity beyond the game itself.

On paper David is the founder of Beast Mode Soccer and one of the most in demand one to one technical coaches in football, but specifically women’s football. In reality he is an Englishman who built a global brand from a seven a side pitch at Robbie Williams’ house, a handful of players who would not stop working and a refusal to compromise on standards.

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We started in Plymouth, where his mum coached swimming, his dad had boxed and sport sat in the background of everything. He tells the story in that disarming way that sounds casual until you realise how much it shaped him. His parents coached without screaming, without the drill sergeant act, with a simple contract. Give your best today and that is enough.

That delivery style is still baked into Beast Mode. He cannot stand coaches who tear into kids and he is acutely aware that he never really knows what kind of day a player has had before they arrive at training. His line is that the player’s one hundred percent on a bad day might look very different to their one hundred percent on a good day and his job is to respect that while still asking for effort. The phrase humans first, football second is not just a neat Instagram caption. It is how he evaluates whether his own behaviour is in check.

His American story begins in 2002, with a Camp America stint he initially hated. After eight weeks in New York he stayed for the visa and then came back properly in 2003 with Major League Soccer Camps in Florida. That is where the idea of individual training moved from side hustle to obsession. Parents began asking for private sessions, initially he told them to use a ball and a wall, then he noticed that the kids who worked with him one-to-one were improving faster than anyone else.

A relationship took him to Southern California and he followed his gut there with almost comic faith. No network, no plan, just a feeling he was supposed to be in LA. He mass emailed high schools, landed at Harvard Westlake and on his first day ended up taking the girls first team. One of those players was Ali Riley.

She was fast, powerful and raw. In his words a speedboat with no driver. She asked him to help her prepare for a New Zealand under 20’s opportunity and then went to work. Sessions stacked on sessions, confidence climbed, and within a few years she was at Stanford and eventually at five World Cups and four Olympics.

Ali is the first player he talks about when I ask him where the big ‘wow’ moments sit in his career. The first moment where he thought this is not just extra training, this is a genuine development engine.

Then there is the Hollywood chapter, which feels almost too LA to be real. He signs up through a shady website to play for a local team and suddenly he is facing actors and musicians at a club called Hollywood United. Vinnie Jones, Def Leppard, Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols, Anthony LaPaglia in goal. It sounds like a casting call, not a Sunday league match.

The real pivot comes when he starts playing at Robbie Williams’ private field. It is a converted tennis court on Mulholland Drive, caged and turfed, with Beverly Hills on one side and the Valley on the other. Field space in LA is scarce and expensive, so this little 7v7 cauldron is not just a flex. It becomes his laboratory.

At first he plays there once a week, conscious that he is on someone else’s mountain top. Robbie is away on tour. Then one day the singer returns, the guest list swells, and David finally meets the man who he followed from a distance, making mixtapes after he left Take That titled ‘Where’s Your Robbie Gone?’

He is candid about how much that relationship surprised him. He expected a standoffish celebrity and got kindness. At a time when David was grieving a close friend who had died suddenly, Robbie invited him down for a cup of tea and quietly checked he was okay. It sounds small, but you can feel how much it mattered. Fame changes the air in a room, he tells me, and you learn quickly who is laughing because they actually think something is funny and who is laughing because they are standing next to a famous person.

The crucial part for Beast Mode is this. Robbie lets him use that 7v7 field as his base. In an LA market where clubs monopolise pitches and private space is gold, that decision effectively hands David a headquarters.

With that field in his pocket, the operation kicks on. He trains Ali Riley, Kelly O’Hara, Jill Oakes and a rotating cast of high level players who drift through Los Angeles every summer. Pop stars, rock stars and athletes collide on this little rectangle in the hills.

One night Kelly texts to ask if she can bring two friends. He warns her it is a high level, they had better be able to ‘hang’. The friends turn out to be Tobin Heath and Alex Morgan. Alex is already looking for a trainer for a group that includes around eighty percent of the US women’s national team at the time. Mia Hamm is running the main sessions and they want David to handle the off days.

He goes down to watch Mia work and his description of her is one of my favourite moments in the conversation. She is calm, not loud, yet when she speaks you can hear a pin drop. That is the type of respect he wants to command. Not volume, presence.

They call that cluster of stars the West Coast Power Group. It becomes the nucleus for Beast Mode’s reputation. Alex Morgan stays with him for twelve years. Rachel Daly builds the type of finishing range that makes her lethal in England and the NWSL. Word spreads, Beast Mode grows.

And yet inside that success story there is a running joke that bothers Ali. Around LA he is still just Dave the soccer guy. The coach you call if you need extra work, not a clearly defined business and she pushes him to do just that.

Ali is the one who keeps nudging him to get serious. Start a business, build a website, stop being ‘Peter Pan’ she says. He finally gives in, goes on GoDaddy and launches a site called The Soccer Guru. Players like it.

The name Beast Mode Soccer is born almost as a throwaway line. Ali smashes a shot into the top corner one day and says that was beast mode. He lies in bed at two in the morning wondering if the domain is available and buys it on the spot.

Parents and older adults hate the name. Players love it. He chooses the players. That decision says everything about his priorities.

From there the business slowly shifts from pure time for money to something more leveraged. Inspired partly by personal trainers, he moves to packages, with a twelve session minimum and a three month window so that development is real and income is predictable. He pays a company to help him design the model, forces himself to present it without hard selling, and watches the first parent write a cheque for forty eight sessions on the spot.

He reinvests heavily in his education, devouring books on skill acquisition, sports science, loading and injury prevention so that no club can ambush him with a lazy accusation about overworking their players. When federations and clubs try to shut him out or threaten legal action over photos, he holds his ground with data. You can hear both the frustration and the quiet pride when he talks about players choosing to hide sessions from their teams rather than stop working with him.

The digital side of Beast Mode begins very practically. A national team player driving up from San Diego admits she has no idea how to train on her own. If she is lost, he reasons, what hope does a fourteen year old have.

They film drills up at Robbie’s field. He learns iMovie from Ali. Nikki Washington’s mum is in the printing business and helps produce spiral bound training logs that include codes to access the online videos. He lists a hundred copies of the Better Soccer Blueprint at $99 and wakes up to $9500 in his PayPal account. For someone who has never seen that number in his life, it is a jolt. Proof that players and parents are hungry for quality guidance.

More programs follow, including the Soccer Vortex, which he still believes is one of the most detailed individual development plans on the market. Eventually everything condenses into an app, layered over the in person work and amplified by social media. What began on a 7v7 pitch on Mulholland is now a global ecosystem, tied to a Nike partnership and a personal brand that has featured in major outlets.

What I keep coming back to is how uncomfortable he still is with the word businessman. He will happily dive into discussions about pricing models or the problem of trading hours for dollars, but he instinctively frames everything in terms of service. Make players better, bring them genuine value, and let them do the talking.

He is honest about the darker side too. How social media has created visibility and also diluted standards. How suddenly every coach online markets themselves as a one to one specialist and how hard it is to scale integrity when attention is the main currency.

For me, that tension sits right at the heart of what this show is about. On one level David Copeland Smith is a case study in sports entrepreneurship. A coach who turned a niche into a global platform, found leverage in digital products and built a brand that players trust with their careers.

On another level he is just a human who once made mix tapes of Robbie Williams, who still gets quietly starstruck walking into a kitchen on Mulholland, and who measures his success in long term relationships rather than follower counts. That combination is why Beast Mode Soccer exists and why, if you really want to understand the business of sport, you cannot ignore the people who build things from a small patch of turf with nothing but a bag of balls and a very clear sense of what matters.