License the standard you’ve been working without.
A five-pillar diagnostic standard, licensed to individual football coaches. You earn it over three days at Lee Valley and hold the licence for twelve months.
What a T.A.P.E.S.™ licence is.
What we license is the T.A.P.E.S.™ operating standard: a five-pillar system for assessing and developing athletes that Dr Michael Bruce-de-Rouche has been building since 1992. It is a complete diagnostic standard: protocols, rubrics, scoring, data rules, report format and the language to explain a result to a parent.
One intake a year, at one event, with a fixed capacity. There is no evergreen enrolment, and we have deliberately not built one.
The argument
The case for licensing the standard.
A badge proves you’re allowed to work. It doesn’t prove anything is happening.
A UEFA B costs around £1,250 and the A licence pathway runs to roughly £5,000. Both are worth having. Neither tells a parent whether their child is actually improving, and neither separates you from the four other coaches working the same postcode.
Your income is bolted to the clock.
Private coaching runs at £30 to £70 an hour. Once the diary is full, the only direction left is more evenings. There is nothing wrong with that model. It just has a ceiling, and you can see it from where you are standing.
The families are already spending.
Private academies charge £100 to £500 a month, and the parents paying it increasingly want evidence and a pathway rather than a promise. A coach who can hand over a five-pillar, colour-coded, benchmarked assessment with a written development plan is not competing with the coach down the road. In most towns that coach does not exist.
The standard tells you what to do next, and when.
Every assessment produces named development priorities. Those priorities become a structured programme, and the standard puts a retest date in the diary before anyone has to think about what happens next. Whether families take up those programmes is a matter for you and them. Nobody can promise you that part, including us.
It is a whole-athlete standard, not a narrower one.
Five pillars: technical, athletic, psychological, educational and social. The curriculum franchises assess what a player does with the ball. The strength-and-conditioning certifications assess the body. As far as we can find, nobody licenses an individual coach a complete diagnostic standard.
No figures on this page describe what you might earn. We have no licensees yet, so we have no data, and an illustration built on assumptions is not evidence. We would rather tell you that than show you a chart.
What you get
What you leave with.
The operating standard
Manual v2.0 in full: the five pillars, every test protocol, the scoring rubrics, the data-entry rules and the report standards.
The assessor toolkit
The complete assessor toolkit, plus a published equipment list so nobody is surprised later by the £150 to £500 of field kit the test battery requires. You buy that separately; we tell you what it is before you commit, not after.
The marks and the materials
A twelve-month licence covering the T.A.P.E.S.™ marks and materials for use in your own practice, with the report templates and the parent-facing language that goes with them.
The pre-work
An online study track covering the manual’s foundations, safeguarding and data standards, completed before you travel, so the three days at Lee Valley are spent on your feet.
A directory listing
A listing in the licensed-coach directory. In development. The first cohort has not yet been certified, so the directory does not yet exist. It is part of the licence, not a live service.
The certification
Three days at Lee Valley.
Led by Dr Bruce-de-Rouche with the assessor faculty, in pods of roughly ten coaches to one faculty assessor, rotating through stations. He takes the plenary sessions and moves between pods as chief assessor.
Venue: Lee Valley Athletic Centre. Dates are not yet fixed. The centre’s calendar decides the exact three days.To be confirmed
Day one: See it done
Live athlete assessment demonstrations against the standard. Every protocol, run properly, with the reasoning explained as it happens.
Day two: Do it under supervision
Supervised practical delivery and scoring calibration. You run the protocols; the faculty watch how you run them and how you score what you see.
Day three: Deliver it, and sell it
Assessment against the standard, plus a working session on the commercial side: what to charge, how to run the conversation with a parent, and how to prescribe a programme from a result.
Certification is earned at the event, not conferred by attending it. Assessment is practical and inter-rater. Most candidates finish during the three days; a coach who is not yet at the standard leaves with a defined route to complete it, not with a certificate. We would rather fail a few people than hand out something that stops meaning anything by year three.
Investment
What it costs.
- £5,000
The licence, first year
Covers the pre-work, the three days at Lee Valley, the complete operating standard and assessor toolkit, and a twelve-month licence for the T.A.P.E.S.™ marks and materials.
- £999
Annual renewal
Continues the licence, the marks and the directory listing, and includes a Recalibration Day at the following event: you come back, re-calibrate against the standard and meet the incoming class. Renewal and the Recalibration Day begin from the second year.
- £1,500
Deposit
Confirms your place. Payment terms are flexible: instalments complete before the event. The price itself is fixed.
Field equipment is not included. Budget £150 to £500 for the kit the test battery needs; the list is published before you commit.
Organisation licences for academies, federations and sports schools are planned from the second year, priced on application in the £15,000 to £50,000 range and delivered on the organisation’s own site. They are not available yet.
VAT treatment, whether travel and accommodation are included, the deposit refund position on withdrawal, and what happens commercially if a candidate does not reach the standard at the event:To be confirmed
Who this is for, and who it isn’t.
It fits if you:
- Coach football and already have a working book of athletes and families
- Want to sell an assessment and a programme, not just an hour
- Are willing to be assessed yourself, in front of other coaches, and to be told you are not there yet
- Can commit to three consecutive days at Lee Valley and the online pre-work beforehand
It doesn’t fit if you:
- Are starting from no athletes, because the maths will not work for you in twelve months, and we would rather say so on the call than take your deposit
- Want a badge for a website rather than a standard to work to
- Are looking for a guaranteed return. There isn’t one, and we don’t offer one.
Apply for a place.
Applications are read by a person, not scored by a form. If it looks like a fit we will book a thirty-minute call; if it doesn’t, we will tell you why.
Nothing on this page is an earnings claim. We have no licensees yet.