Positional Play’s Need for Ball Handlers
“Make the ball happy.”
One of the best minds in football when it comes to youth coaching is Horst Wein.
Horst Wein was a world-renowned hockey player and coach who turned to football only after the legendary F.C. Barcelona player and coach, Carles Rexach, saw him working with F.C. Barcelona’s hockey academy and was intrigued by his methodology. Rexach invited Wein for a coffee to get to know him better and over the course of several weeks Rexach had invited Wein to work within the famed Barça footballing academy. This was the start of Wein’s career in football coaching.
What sets Horst Wein apart from other coaches is his methodology is based entirely around the young player and their foundations. He understands the importance of having the best and most knowledgable coaches working with young players. In his book Developing Youth Football Players, he states, “Sadly, the best coaches do not work at the grassroots level because coaching young players rarely reaps them any economic gain. Coaches with greater knowledge and experience are attracted instead to senior teams that can afford to provide them higher salaries.”
Wein points out three specific problems with our current youth coaching models.
Introducing Complex Activities Too Soon
In several of his works, he points out the difficulty young players have when they are learning the game with a statistic. He states, “Generally speaking, research has shown that the younger the player, the higher the percentage of failure in competition. Fewer than 50% of actions are successfully completed between the ages of eight and nine years old when competing during a 7v7 match.”
A 7v7 match is a simplified game of football, and even in this pared-down version of the sport children find it difficult to succeed. Imagine, what this might feel like for a child when every other time they attempt an action they fail. If I did my job knowing every other time I’d fail, I don’t know how long I would do it. It’s a tough pill to swallow knowing failure is right around the corner. Especially, when someone who you look up to is constantly putting you in situations of failure.
Wein emphasises the importance of bringing up players to the task gradually and progressively. They need to be prepared for the task both physically and mentally. He says, “ Subjecting children to excessively complex activities before they are ready only reinforces failure and frustration.”
Demanding Too Much of Young Players
Wein makes a case that the current system of “teaching or learning football, as well as competing in the traditional way” leaves much talented undiscovered. We cannot expect players to compete, learn, explore, test their abilities, experiment, fail, succeed, all within the limited time resources available to coaches and players. Players are expected, and sometimes even pressured, to perform at the highest level. This kind of demand is unrealistic and eventually will lead to further frustration and burnout.
Using Inefficient Coaching Methods
Coaches are rarely asked to rethink their own methods. They successfully gain the required licenses to coach the level of their team and are never asked to later reexamine how their learned skills in coaching courses have been applied.
Wein says, “The major obstacle to progress in football coaching is the strength of ease and comfort by coaches. Because of their own inertia or sluggishness, coaches tend to continue with old habits rather than continually rethinking what has to be done and how. Few coaches look beyond their specialty and combine, mix or synthesise the knowledge from diverse but related sports sciences with their own teaching and learning process.”
Wein is simply stating as a general point that as whole the coaching industry tends to stay within the comfort of what has been done in the past and I would agree with him. I don’t believe many coaches of young players truly understand the processes required of skills acquisition.
Wein describes the process, “Before teaching a specific sport like football, coaches should fully understand how a child, adolescent or adult learns best and then analyse the mechanisms that intervene or influence learning in each of the evolutionary stages of the student.”
Too Complex Too Soon
Having added some context, I can now say the following statement with some backing; our players are not prepared for the tactical game we pretend they are ready for. We throw them into play a game that requires certain skills and they are overwhelmed. We ask them execute actions which we glossed over when they needed to acquire them. We disregard the process of a child’s development.
We watch videos of Barcelona, Manchester City, Liverpool, Real Madrid etc and we analyse every tactical movement. The 8 moving into a role of the 7 creating space for the 3 moving into an advanced position. The 9 dropping down to the space of the 10 creating space between their 4 and 5. Yes, the beautiful game of football chess. Don’t get me wrong. I love the tactics, but there is a time and a place for it, and when an 8 year old is looking up at you with perplexity, it’s definitely not the right time.
We are skipping an entire section of a young player’s development. When they should be developing interest and love for the sport and basic skills and abilities, we are asking them to play like players three or four years older than them. It would be easy to point fingers and fault those we see out there but the reality is this is a byproduct of a society that doesn’t have to wait for anything anymore.
In our modern era, we have everything we could ever dream of at our fingertips. It’s all there for the taking. In the footballing world, every coach has access to every session ever made, including our most elite footballing teams in the world. Coaches and parents alike are able to see how the best young players in the world are training, even though those children may be developmentally different, which is why we see their videos on social media pages. In a world where the customer is always right and the product is the result, young players are expected to magically become the players we see on our social media feeds, or the players from the club from the other side of town. We compare and contrast the quality of 8, 9, or 10 year old players. We don’t want to wait for true skills acquisition but instead, we simply want to see some kind of improvement now.
We are mesmerised by the passing and off the ball movement of the best teams in the world, yet we never stop and think what those players are individually capable of. Let me be the first to tell you; those players you see every weekend working the ball around with one and two touch passing are all incredibly talented on the ball. They are all able to dribble out of any situation without a doubt. They are able to manipulate the ball without a conscious thought. From goalkeepers to strikers and every position in between, every player at the highest level is able to move the ball as they see fit. They have built up their dexterity with their feet and they did this when they were young.
What’s most baffling is many coaches know this inherently but do not specifically develop the relationship between ball and player. This is the relationship that cannot be skipped if we truly want to help players get better.
Football 1-2-3
In the past several years, I have come to view football player development within a positional play model using a three-step process: Football 1-2-3.
Football 1 - When a player, no matter what age begins to play football, the first relationship they must discover is their relationship with the ball. A novice player must explore what it means to manipulate the ball. This means being capable to manoeuvre the ball in any which way. Just like when you are beginning to write, there are movements with your hand that do not feel comfortable, the same concept applies with your feet (this is an oversimplification to make my point). You need to practice moving your feet in relation to the ball to achieve ball carrying abilities when there are obstacles in the way. This is the first step to player development.
Football 2 - Not far along the player development pathway, players are introduced a crucial element of the game; their teammate. This is when players begin to learn that there are teammates that are there to help them in their pursuit of success. And before we get ahead of ourselves, in Football 2 I am referring to the direct teammate of the ball carrier. The teammate who is one simple pass away. These scenarios within Football 2 are played out in 2v1s and 2v2s.
Football 3 - Even further along the player development pathway is the final element of football tactics and necessary skills. This is when we introduced a different kind of teammate; an indirect teammate. This is a player who is at least two passes away from the ball carrier. This essentially means that this player is helping the ball carrier in an indirect way (e.g. providing depth, width, movement for a future pass like a third man run, movement for creation of space, etc). This is the final step the player development pathway.
Football 1
Having explained our necessity to rethink football coaching from the ages of 7-10, let’s jump into the missing piece. We now understand why we need to nurture the relationship between ball and player, but how do we do that while staying faithful to the development of children and the reality of a complex positional play game model later on?
More Games, Fewer Analytical Skills
One option many coaches use when wanting develop players’ capabilities on the ball are unopposed technical exercises. It’s very common to see coaches of all ages, including young children, using activities that mimic the repetitive nature of an army drill. Several lines of young players being instructed by a commanding figure to perform precise actions in a specific way. Although there may be a time and a place for this kind of activity, especially in settings with many children where this would be used as a player management tool as well, in most settings with 8-10 players this does not need to be used.
What this kind of activity lacks is game context. Again, in a setting where coaches have a manageable number of players, players should be exposed to situations which mimic game scenarios. In a game, there will always be a defender around trying to steal the ball, so the more activities that involve this dynamic, the better.
I often hear the argument that most novice players need to master the ball without defenders first in order to move on to opposed settings. While I feel there is some truth to this, opposed activities do not necessarily need to have 1 defender per ball. For example, in any simple dribbling game where the attacker is attempting to maintain possession of the ball, there doesn’t need to be one defender per ball. If there are eight ball carriers and one defender, it means the majority of the time the ball carriers will not be threatened by the sole defender. However, they will still need to dribble with the defender in mind. They will innately dribble with a basic understanding of space. Simultaneously, they will develop basic skills on the ball while engaging their newly formed understanding of abstract spaces.
If one must absolutely use unopposed activities for whatever reason, coach should strive for them to be games with objectives, even without the defenders. We must remember humans, and especially young children, are inquisitive playing machines. Football is a game and when they come to practice they expect to engage in some form of play. This is the art of the coach. How can you make this analytical exercise a game? Creative coaches lead to creative players. Dress up every exercise, regardless of what it is, as a game. Players will enjoy it more thoroughly, therefore, enjoying football more.
CREATIVE COACHES, CREATIVE PLAYERS
Simplified dribbling games are not only more fun for players but when created in a way that is open to the players’ judgment they practice divergent thinking, something which all creatives are capable of. A shift towards ‘open’ tasks has been seen in education as well because they encourage young children to be creative and to find a solution on their own when given a problem.
Instead of being the sole agent in the learning process of a young player, coaches should attempt to transfer the responsibility of the situation to the young player. The coach becomes a guide through the problem-solving process through systematic questioning. A coach becomes a true master when they are able to create well-structured, simplified games never giving answers to the problem set forth by the game but rather they help players find and discover the answer on their own leading to more self-esteem and enjoyment when practicing football.
GIVE UP COACHING CONTROL
As a whole, the football environment most players are placed in is not conducive to creativity. As Horst Wein directly states, “On most football fields young players are dominated by an instructor, who allow relatively little freedom of movement and decision making: The opinions of young players are not taken into account. For the coach, it is important to have everything under control.” Paco Seirul·lo is perplexed why we compare football to war, and sometimes the way sessions are run, it’s not hard to see why he’d say this.
This couldn’t be truer when it comes to incessant need for young players to pass the ball. As discussed earlier this comes from the need to have the outcome of player development look perfect. Young players should not be pressured to quickly pass the ball in order to allow for better team play. Instead, we should teach players how to dribble and make the ball their best friend first (within a game context). Along the way, we also teach them when and where to dribble. We show them what dribbling does for the team. I have a sense that many youth coaches feel dribbling is inherently bad. Perhaps my judgment is off the mark.
The best players in the world are tremendous dribblers of the ball. On top of that, they also know when, where and why to dribble. When a young player begins to understand that dribbling will attract defenders towards the ball, which leaves teammates open in space. When they begin to observe this, they will start to understand how to manipulate defenders using the ball. We all want these players on our teams. However, none of this would be possible if we simply told every young player they had to pass the ball. We cannot skip any of these steps.
We want players who will dare to risk the ball in the attempt to perfect their manipulation of the ball. When we as coaches and parents can allow for players to be imperfect and lose the ball, even if it means a missed opportunity or a goal against. When this happens, coaches will truly value the development over winning or style.
Dribbling Games
At the end of the day, we achieve all of this through simplified dribbling games, and the beauty of these kinds of games is that they are limited only by the creativity of the coach. They can be created by anyone willing to sit down for a few minutes and play with the variables of football. Your tools are spaces, opponents, goals, teams, balls, time limits, etc. They are endless.
Additionally, these types of games can be found anywhere. Over the course of my many years of coaching on different continents and with a myriad of different coaches, I have gathered my favourites. You will find all of them in a training exercise pack available here.
Joga Bonito
When I was a kid, Nike put out an advertising campaign called Joga Bonito where it idealised the Brazilian sentiments towards football. There were several ads which showed greats of the time enjoying themselves playing football, reminding us that football is game meant to relish in. There was one ad in particular which showed a young Ronaldinho playing futsal with a recreation of him as an adult playing as well. Eric Cantona, the narrator of the ad, says “When you are a kid it’s easy. You are not afraid to try… to dare. You do it just because you like it.” I sometimes wonder if we have taken this sentiment away from young players. Maybe we got too caught up in what it should look like that we forgot what it was always about.
Maybe we need that child spirit as coaches as well. We need to view coaching as a game as well. We need that child-like wonder to imagine up the best games for our young ones. The best games for them to play. A shift from a warlike approach to the lovely game that it is. Cantona’s last words in the ad couldn’t ring truer, “So my advice to you is: Never grow up, my friends.”
“To develop game intelligence you need to simplify the game.”
