During his five years as Liverpool’s throw-in coach, Thomas Gronemark helped usher in a new period of success at Anfield. After leading the Reds to the 2019 Champions League title, the Dane helped Liverpool win their first league title in three decades in 2020. Now he hopes to do the same at Arsenal.
Gronemark, 50, has earned praise from numerous coaching analysts such as Glenn Crooks for his innovative tactical approach. He was the first throw-in coach and he was blazing a trail for other coaches to test themselves in this rapidly emerging field. EPL Index discussed a number of topics with Grønnemark, including:
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Good day Thomas, great talking to you. Can you tell us how you transitioned from soccer to track and field, and then from luge to soccer?
I’ll try to be brief because my background is a long story. I fell in love with throw-ins when I was a kid in the mid-80s because my cousins ​​Ben and Johnny were so good at them. I became a very good youth footballer myself and played in the best U19 league in Denmark with great players like Thomas Graveson, who later played for Celtic, Real Madrid, the Danish national team, etc. But I wasn’t good enough to be a professional football player, so I got into track and field in the mid-90s because as a football player, not only did I have a good long throw-in, but I was also super fast. I had never lost a running event, whether it was 10 meters or 50 meters, so I went straight into the Danish national team. I think I have a natural talent for running fast. I stayed there for six years and not only learned a lot about sprinting, but I also watched throwing athletes and did some throwing myself. Of course, it was just for fun, but I learned a lot about how the body works. Then in 2002 I joined the Danish national bobsled team, which I was a member of for four years from 2002 to 2006.
When did you realize you could be a throw-in coach?
We worked with the German Bobsled Federation, and as you probably know, the Germans are known for really structured and in-depth analysis. Now, you could say that football has caught up, but at that time the Germans were way ahead of all the other countries, so as a Danish bobsled team, having this collaboration made us better. We also gained a lot of knowledge that other countries didn’t have. Then in the middle of the 2004 bobsled event, we played a futbol game with a German team we were training with as a warm-up for that day’s conditioning session. I threw a long foul ball from one end of the indoor facility to the other. They were all impressed, and then they asked me, “How did you do that?” I said myself when I was playing that I was good at throw-ins, and then I had an idea: maybe I could become a throw-in coach. So I told my teammates, I want to be a throw-in coach. And then they said, ‘Can you be a throw-in coach?’ Then I said, I don’t know.
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Finally, you were derided by many pundits including Richard Case and Andy Gray as the world’s first throw-in coach. Fast forward ten years, do you feel like you’ve proven them wrong?
First of all, it didn’t affect me negatively in any way. Of course, when I heard the segment with Andy Gray and Richard Case on beIN Sports. I was a little shocked, but if you ask me, I think it was more about the unprofessionalism. It’s OK that they laugh, because people often laugh when they hear I’m a throw-in coach. I also use humor in my speeches, so I can speak with them at beIN and we can laugh together and I can give them some information and knowledge, but that’s not the case. They choose just to make fun of it. But for me, this is not a problem. In fact, when people criticized me without any real arguments as to why engaged coaching was bad, they just said it was ridiculous or crazy… it actually gave me more followers and more attention. The other thing is, if you’re innovative, if you’re forward-thinking, you blaze new trails that no one else has gone before.
If no one laughs at you, then you’re not a real innovator. I’m not saying having people laugh at you is a goal in itself, but I’m just saying it’s a natural thing when you’re doing something completely new. The most important thing for me is to have some important people, not because I have to take credit from important people, but because people who know a lot about football are actually thinking, ‘Okay, this is exciting, this is new, this can help us’, or they are just asking questions because asking questions is also curiosity. Again, there are still people who regularly laugh at my work on social media, which is fine. It’s not a problem for me: I’ve won 15 international football titles and I’ve won almost everything there is to win in club football. I live my life, I get paid a decent salary, and sometimes I just think people are like, ‘Is there such a thing as a throw-in coach?’ And then I sometimes think, ‘Okay, where have they lived for the last five or seven years?’ But overall, it’s not a problem for people to laugh these days.
