The One They Call
Coach Marlay has spent years building Ghana’s young footballers away from the spotlight. For many of them, he is the first person they ring when the game gets hard.
By Derrick Otabil · ROOTS by After90, Episode 3
In sport, success tends to be measured by what glitters: trophies, fame, the roar of a full stadium. Beneath every spectacle, though, sits a mechanism, a quieter system of people and decisions on which the whole show depends.
Football makes the point more clearly than most. The game is judged by what the cameras capture: the goals, the celebrations, the names in the headlines. Behind every player who reaches centre stage lies a less visible network of mentors, sacrifices and formative moments, much of it unfolding long before a professional debut and some of it far from the pitch altogether.
For Ernest Siaw Nartey Malay, known to the players he trains as Coach Marlay, that is where the real work begins.
Marlay’s path into coaching was anything but straight. Before football became his full-time pursuit, he worked as an IT specialist, and during the COVID-19 pandemic he served as a COVID operations officer at Terminal 3 of Kotoka International Airport, all while keeping one foot in the game. He had played himself, but injury ended that road early. “I didn’t play at the highest level,” he says. “I didn’t play even to a level where I was seen.”
Rather than walk away, he chose to give back. He began gathering boys in his community to train, playing small-sided games and taking them to neighbouring communities for 11-a-side matches. “That was how I fell in love with coaching,” he says.
He went on to Future Star Academy, then Top Ten Academy, where he has worked since 2019. From there he joined Accra Lions for three years, then spent a season at Kowa Naso, while steadily building a parallel practice in personal training and one-on-one work with athletes. Eventually he put IT behind him for good. “For me, it wasn’t difficult,” he says. “I am a go-getter, fortunately for me. And whatever my instincts tell me, I drive to it.”
He is clear-eyed about the cost. Football, in his view, is a vast ecosystem with room for coaches, players, PR people and more, but none of it pays off overnight. “I don’t see the sacrifice as a wasted sacrifice,” he says. “It takes time.”
What drives him is what he sees in the young players who come to him. Most, he says, are naive about the game, not for want of ability but because they lack access to information and experience. They do not yet understand what football demands on the pitch and off it, and he sees his job as bridging that gap.
That gap has shaped the role he plays. He does not see himself merely as the man who designs drills or corrects a player’s positioning. “Every footballer I come in contact with, not even necessarily young talent, even the pros, the amateurs, the kids now coming up, I try to be a father figure in their life, a brother figure, the coach figure,” he explains. Players tell him things, he says, that they cannot tell their parents or the coaches working directly with them.
His players see it too. “He’s very calm,” says one, who has trained with him for almost four years, since his time at Accra Lions. “I like him. I love him. He’s a very lovely guy.”
The clearest example of what that trust means came from a young player Marlay had worked with who moved abroad and found life there harder than anyone had promised. “It’s not as people say, that when you travel outside Ghana to see greener pastures in the area of football, you are certainly going to make it,” Marlay says. The player spoke to his parents first, and nothing came of it. Then he called his coach.
Marlay told him that if things did not work out in one country, they could in another. “If you don’t make it in Spain, you can make it in Sweden,” he says. “If you don’t make it in Sweden, you can make it in Germany.”
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A year later, the same player was injured, recovered, and was injured again. This time he called to say he was ready to give up, come back to Ghana and find a new life. “And I said to him, no,” Marlay recalls. “All these things are battles you need to fight, because the game needs fighters.” An injury can be treated, he told him, and whether recovery took six months or a year, he would come out of it.
The player stayed. “Trust me, he is playing like never before,” Marlay says. “Whenever we go back to talk about these things, I see the light in the way he speaks.” The conversation took place nowhere near a pitch, but to Marlay it was coaching all the same.
If access is one problem, talent is not. “Locally, we have all the talents,” he says. “I’ll tell you for a fact, we have all the talents.” What Ghana lacks, he argues, is infrastructure: the facilities and systems to develop that talent, and to teach young players how to handle what the game throws at them.
“Football goes way beyond 90 minutes,” he says. “What a player eats, who they hang out with… who they speak to, where they go to, where they sleep… their spiritual life, and all these things also play a role.” For a young Ghanaian who moves abroad, those pressures grow sharper still: a new country brings an unfamiliar culture, new people and often a language barrier. With the wrong people around him, Marlay says, a player’s form dips. With the right people, the right mentality and the right training routine, he improves.
Much of that support depends on how a coach speaks to his players, and it is here that Marlay’s philosophy is at its most striking. “The things that I say carry weight,” he says. He came up under coaches who routinely used insults as correction, and it is a culture he has refused to reproduce. “For me, insult does not correct mistakes,” he says. “The more you insult these young boys, the more you say negative things to them, it sticks with them, it goes a long way to eat them up.”
None of this means he avoids hard conversations. In one match he was managing, his winger was caught by a rough tackle and retaliated. Marlay let the first one go. The player did it again and the referee spoke to him; a third time, he was cautioned, and it boiled over into a heated argument. Marlay took him off, and his message was blunt: if that was how he wanted to play football, he would never make it.
After the game, the player was in tears. On a normal day, Marlay says, he would have gone to him to soften what he had said. This time he did not. The player called the next day to apologise, the two talked it through, and the lesson held. “Ever since, I don’t remember him doing anything in discipline on the pitch,” Marlay says. It remains the hardest thing he remembers ever saying to a player.
Discipline and compassion, for him, are not opposites. Caring about a player’s development sometimes means telling him exactly what he does not want to hear.
There is another side to his method that seems, at first glance, to sit uneasily with the discipline he demands: he wants his sessions to be fun. “Football is not supposed to be played when you are mad,” he says. “Even when you are sad, immediately the ball gets to your feet, there should be some form of joy coming from you.” Music often plays, players sing along and jokes fly, yet none of it dilutes the work. “When we need to hit, we hit, when we need to slow it down, we slow it down,” he says. “When we need to get going, we get going.”
The results show in his players’ bodies as well as their heads. One describes how pre-season used to bring a string of injuries. Since he began training with Marlay, “everything has been good.”
There is little hint of superiority in the way Marlay talks about his players. He acknowledges that he has helped shape many of them, but is just as quick to say they have shaped him. “Every single player I’ve ever worked with has taught me one way or the other,” he says.
It shows in a habit of reflection. Once the day’s work is done, he sits and asks himself what went well and what he could have done better, whether in how he communicated or how he coached. He does not look for fulfilment in results. “I make mistakes. These boys also make mistakes,” he says. “So when I cast my mind back and I do my reflections, that’s enough fulfilment for me.”
Coaching, for Marlay, is not a finished skill but one that keeps evolving through relationships, which may explain why human connection has become central to everything he does. Today’s young players, he argues, know what is right and wrong, what they want to hear and what will inspire them. The same words that lift one player may not land with another, so a coach has to know the individual. “You have to be mindful of what you say in a group and what you say to the individual, because it goes a long way,” he says. “It stays with them.”
Ask him what he would tell a 14-year-old dreaming of a professional career, and his answer is simple. Keep going, whatever obstacles come your way. Make mistakes, because 14 is the perfect age to make them, and when corrections come, take them on board. “Don’t make the game eat you up,” he says. “Enjoy the game. Keep playing. Love your teammates, love your coaches, even love your fans… and keep your head up.”
The most revealing moment in our conversation came when he considered how he hoped to be remembered. “The game should remember me for my human relations skill,” he says, “and playing a role as not just a football coach, not just a personal trainer, playing a role as a father in the lives of these young boys, playing a role as a brother, playing a role as a teacher… a counsellor in fact… someone they can go to with their worries, with their joys.”
Which brings us back to the mechanism beneath the spectacle. A footballer may score a winning goal in front of thousands, and the crowd will remember it. Somewhere behind that moment, though, there may be a coach who stayed late after training, a trainer who prepared the player’s body, a conversation that restored his belief, a correction that reshaped his behaviour, or simply someone who picked up the phone and told him not to give up.
Those moments rarely make the news, yet they are part of the machinery. Football is built not only under the floodlights but on community pitches and training grounds, through conversations, setbacks, recoveries and relationships. The spectacle is what we see. The mechanism is what makes it possible, and for a generation of young Ghanaian footballers, Coach Marlay is the one they call.
The One They Call is Episode 3 of ROOTS, an After90 documentary series. Watch the full episode on YouTube.
