Essien is not the only face familiar to Premier League fans who has worked under the Right to Dream umbrella.
Djimi Traore, a Champions League winner with Liverpool in 2005, coached at the academy’s base in Ghana before taking charge of AS Monaco’s youth team this year. Developing coaches comes a close second in the hierarchy of priorities within the academy’s multi-club set-up.
“We are happy when coaches leave us,” says Flemming Pedersen, Right to Dream’s technical director, who previously served as Brentford’s B team manager.
“It’s the same with our players. Then we hope our best coaches will one day come back home again.
“I was away for a year and a half at Brentford. You always learn something new when you meet a new culture. That’s important for us.
“We will be stronger if some of our coaches leave for big clubs in other countries. Our philosophy is: when we help each other, we will get a lot of good things back.
“Success for us is the integration of players from our academies. If we don’t get that, we will never get results.
“We are measuring the development of our style of play. That will give us better results. We are also measuring our coaches and how we educate our coaches.”
For now, though, Essien has no plans to flee the Nordsjaelland nest in search of managerial opportunities.
“I’m not thinking about being a head coach. Not yet,” he says.
“But when I get there, I will develop my style of play around the FCN model of what we’re doing here. I have a few more years to go. Let’s see. Maybe I will get there.
“When I was playing, I never thought I would jump into this journey. But coming to the end of my career, I was thinking one day, ‘I’ve done football my whole life and I think that’s what I do best. I should start doing something just to keep my routine going.’
“I also wanted to get the ideas and strategies of how to be a coach, to learn how to be a coach. That’s how it all came about.
“And also because I love the game. I’m always going to be in and around the game.
“I try and do my best to help the young boys coming up so they can do something with their careers.
“This generation, sometimes they can be quite difficult. Sometimes they think they know the world, but actually they don’t know anything.
“To have me around, it’s easy for them to come and ask me a few questions and I give them a few guidelines and some advice.”
As much as he protests, however, it seems Essien is preparing for a shot at management. Just as he once mastered the art of midfield play, he’s now loading up on ideas for how to crack coaching.
“I’ve just finished one football management course,” he says. “It’s given me some ideas on how football clubs are run, the organisation and everything.
“I’m just collecting some knowledge about the game because football goes beyond the pitch.”
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