The North Carolina Courage on Wednesday added a new chief soccer officer who has had success as City Football Group’s head of coaching support during Manchester City‘s rise under manager Pep Guardiola.
Now, Dr. Ceri Bowley will take on his first role at the top of a technical staff pyramid for the NWSL club, which includes the title of sporting director, and shape the direction of the Courage.
“We always say that styles make fights, but I think that more and more now, across so many leagues, we see more and more teams trying to play the way that Pep plays and the way that City have played and maybe Barcelona,” Bowley told ESPN.
“I think the biggest challenge is, you just get copycat of it and unless you really know the detail of how he does it, then it’s very difficult to replicate it.”
Bowley worked primarily with outgoing Manchester City director of football Txiki Begiristain to implement a common methodology across CFG’s global portfolio of clubs.
More recently, Bowley held multiple roles with the performance analysis group Double Pass, the ECNL youth circuit in the U.S., and as senior coaching pathway manager for the Premier League.
The 37-year-old Bowley said becoming a sporting director in the U.S. was the goal he had been building toward.
He enters a Courage team that has a history of success on the field, having won 10 trophies in all competitions including the franchise’s prior history as the Western New York Flash.
North Carolina is already the most possession-dominant team in the NWSL under head coach Sean Nahas, a game style “kind of synonymous with what we were doing” at City Football Group, Bowley said.
The style is in vogue globally because it is both entertaining and effective: Guardiola is one of the most successful coaches in the modern era, including multiple league titles at Manchester City, Barcelona and Bayern Munich, and three Champions League triumphs.
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However, Bowley cautions that nobody can copy and paste a playing style without adapting it to their team environment.
He said his task in his new role with the Courage, which had been vacant since Curt Johnson departed at the end of 2024, is to challenge the technical staff to add depth to the style and continually evolve it.
“Unless you really know the detail of how [Pep] does it, then it’s very difficult to replicate, and you can even see that with people like Mikel Arteta, who’s been able to do it to a degree at Arsenal, but he worked alongside Pep for so long and still hasn’t been able to overturn what Pep was doing in the years that they were competing,” Bowley said.
Whether or not playing styles are effective “is a mindset thing more than anything else,” Bowley said, crediting Nahas and his staff for the foundation they have established.
“How do we develop good decision-makers in players as opposed to just focusing on isolated events or isolated technical practice? It wasn’t about that,” Bowley said.
“It was about, what does the game look like? What decisions do players need to make in the game? How do we help them be the best decision-makers they can be? Because the best players in the world are the ones who make the best decision the majority of the time.”
New Courage investor and advisor Lauren Holiday, a two-time World Cup winner with the United States women’s national team, “was instrumental” in the search that led to the hiring of Bowley, the team said in a statement.
Bowley holds a UEFA A License and is working towards his UEFA Pro license and postgraduate diploma in global football sports directorship from the PFA Business School.
He earned his PhD in Sport Psychology/Coaching Science from Cardiff Metropolitan University.
Bowley will work closely with Nahas and the technical staff to further develop the Courage brand.
North Carolina has not made it out of the first round of the playoffs since its historic run that included back-to-back doubles (NWSL Shield and Championship) in 2018 and 2019.
The Courage ended a winless start to the season with a late comeback victory over the league leaders, the Kansas City Current.
Bowley noted that few teams in the U.S. stay at the top for a sustained amount of time. “It’s about: How do we win, but how do we continue to win? That’s something that’s never easy to do, but it has to be something that we strive for as opposed to just trying to win once.”
