Cork native Mark O’Sullivan has a job title that many might envy, as associate professor of football at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo.
“It’s a great card to play in a pub watching a match,” he says, laughing.
While he works in Norway, O’Sullivan lives in Stockholm and his career has been a love affair with both sport and music, from busking in Cork city and gigging all over the world to researching the science of sports coaching.
O’Sullivan grew up in Ballinlough on the southside of Cork city, and studied computer science and economics in UCC.
“Study in inverted commas. I always feel guilty with my students about putting demands on them when I don’t think I ever made a deadline in the years I was in university, but I got through it anyway,” he says.
Having spent his college years busking and playing in bands, by the time he turned 27 in the mid-1990s, a trip to visit friends in Sweden turned into a longer stay.
“Three weeks turned into six weeks, then a few months. A friend owned a restaurant and bar and was looking for somebody to play music, so I was doing that to make a living,” he says.
He would go on to start his own record label and recording studio in Stockholm, working with bands such as Leftfield as well as producing his own electronic music, and gigging everywhere from Japan to Europe, including Berghain nightclub in Berlin.
At the same time, he kept up a love of sport, playing football and founding a new club in Stockholm 20 years ago, Langholmen FC. His co-founders included Sultans of Ping drummer Morty McCarthy.
Although O’Sullivan never found a conflict between his twin loves of music and sport – “I just saw them both as forms of creativity and expression” – he eventually left his music career behind after six years to focus on coaching young players in Stockholm, getting an A-grade coaching licence from Uefa.
“I think if I was more pragmatic and sensible, I would have stayed with music, but my emotions and my heart were dragging me somewhere else. I was more interested in coaching and learning how humans learn,” he says.
O’Sullivan started to research sports science, and started his own blog on the subject, before starting a PhD in 2017 on the theory of sports coaching and how organisations should develop coaching models.
“The hopeless academic from Cork is a published scientist and a doctor,” he says with a smile, as he now works full time for the Norwegian School of Sports Science, lecturing and researching.
O’Sullivan says the best thing about his current role is what he learns from his own students.
“I would be responsible for coach education with all the bachelor students and some master’s students. Some would be football students, and some could be students in long distance skiing, biathlon, handball, volleyball, long jump, and I have some students competing or coaching at Olympic level.
“All of my students are involved in some sport in some way, at many different levels, so it’s a really good cross-section. I’m learning so much about sports I never really would have been involved in. I think that’s what I’m enjoying most, is the learning I’m getting out of it,” he says.
O’Sullivan divides his time between Stockholm, where he lives with his family, and Oslo, where he lectures at certain times of year.
“I love Stockholm. I think it’s a really nice place to live. And I’m in Oslo, where I work, so my time is split there, it’s a lot of fun.” He still tries to fit in the odd game of indoor football.
“I’ve lived in Sweden longer than in Ireland, which is kind of weird and only dawned on me recently. But when people ask me is Cork home or is Stockholm home, I say home is where my kids are,” he says.
While O’Sullivan qualifies that he has followed a “very, very, very non-linear” career path, his advice is to remain curious and focus on the journey rather than the end goal.
“I just followed two things I loved, sport and music. I think it’s my curiosity and interest: I was always interested in people, it’s just an ongoing curiosity,” he says.
“I look at it this way. Not many people in the world can get up in the morning and think, ‘I could learn something today’. With music, I put a lot of pressure on myself to create and write and release, but with my PhD I did the opposite. I took my time and never stressed, and saw it as a great opportunity to learn something, and never ever look at the end goal.”
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