Ben Stokes may have walked away from international cricket just weeks ago, but anyone expecting him to spend his post-playing days on a sun lounger clearly hasn’t been paying attention. The 35-year-old has already mapped out his next chapter, and it leads right back to the England setup, this time with a coaching lanyard around his neck instead of a bat in his hand.
The Ambition Behind the Retirement
Stokes, who shocked the cricket world when he announced his retirement from international cricket in June 2026 during the third Test against New Zealand, is not the type to simply fade into the background. Speaking on the For the Love of Cricket podcast, the former captain laid out his intentions with the same directness that defined his playing career. He wants to coach England. Full stop.
“Would I love to be coach of England one day? Absolutely,” he said, and coming from a man who doesn’t deal in vague platitudes, you’d be foolish to dismiss it as idle chat.
What makes this more than just an ambition is the fact that Stokes is already doing something about it. He revealed he is currently working toward his Level 3 coaching qualification, doing so while he still has a playing career at county level. The calculation is simple and smart: get the paperwork sorted now, while there’s still time and mental bandwidth, so that when the playing days are fully behind him, he can walk straight into the next role without delay.
A Leader Who Never Really Stopped Leading
It would be hard to think of a more natural fit for a coaching role, at least on paper. Stokes captained England in 122 Tests, 114 one-day internationals, and 43 T20s across his playing career, accumulating not just runs and wickets but a reputation as one of the most tactically instinctive and emotionally intelligent leaders the game has produced in a generation. The Bazball era, that high-tempo, aggressive, result-chasing brand of Test cricket that reinvigorated English cricket from 2022 onward, had Stokes as its heartbeat.
His words on the podcast make clear that the leadership itch hasn’t gone away, it has just shifted shape. “I just really like the idea of being, again, like, in some form of leadership away from playing,” he said. For someone who built his identity so thoroughly around driving teams forward, a coaching role isn’t a consolation prize, it’s a natural evolution.
Stokes on Brook and Root: Honest as Ever
In keeping with his straight-talking reputation, Stokes also used the podcast to share his thoughts on what happened in the England setup after his departure. He said he was surprised that Harry Brook did not succeed him as Test captain, a choice that many observers had assumed was the obvious succession plan given Brook’s profile and form. Stokes also admitted he has concerns about Joe Root stepping into the captaincy role.
These are not the comments of a man quietly detaching from the world he spent over a decade dominating. They are the words of someone who remains deeply invested, someone watching closely and thinking critically about where English cricket is headed. That kind of engaged, long-view perspective is exactly what a future head coach needs to carry into the job.
The Road from Player to Coach Is Long, but Stokes Is Running It Early
Coaching at the highest level of international cricket is not something you stumble into. The path from retired player to national team coach typically takes years of grinding through county setups, assistant roles, and specialist coaching positions. England’s own history with the coach’s seat is littered with examples of brilliant players who struggled to translate their instincts into a coaching framework, and equally, coaches with modest playing careers who turned out to be transformative in the role.
What Stokes is doing by pursuing his Level 3 badge now is essentially compressing that timeline. He’s treating the coaching qualification not as a post-career afterthought but as a parallel project, something to develop alongside his remaining playing days. That kind of forward planning speaks to a maturity that goes well beyond cricket. It’s the thinking of someone who understands that the best time to prepare for the future is before you actually need to be ready for it.
What England Cricket Stands to Gain
The idea of Stokes eventually returning to lead England from the touchline rather than the crease is one that will resonate with fans who watched him transform the team’s fortunes after taking the captaincy in 2022. His tenure as skipper was defined by a willingness to throw conventional wisdom out the window, to trust his players, and to play cricket that was designed to win rather than simply avoid losing. Those are qualities that don’t vanish when the playing stops.
There are years to go before such a scenario becomes realistic. Coaching qualifications, county stints, assistant roles, the journey is long. But Stokes has already started walking it, and given what he’s achieved every other time he’s set his mind to something, betting against him reaching that destination feels like a very risky wager indeed.
So here’s the question worth sitting with: if Ben Stokes does eventually take the England coaching job, and if he brings the same fearlessness to that role as he did to batting in a final-day crisis, what kind of team does English cricket become? And more pressingly, is the current setup building toward something Stokes would be proud to inherit?
