With youth soccer players, movement off the ball is the most challenging skill to teach. They don’t know where to go, what to do once they get there, and why to continue making runs if there’s no immediate reward. Instead of attacking a dangerous space where they COULD be, many will instinctively settle for the structured space where they ARE.
Most coaches know some form of the 4 Coactives of player preparation and development, breaking down an athlete’s abilities in four intersecting elements:
- Physical
- Technical
- Tactical
- Psychological/Mindset
The physical and the technical? We love to target those on the training ground. Sprinting, change of direction, dribbling skills, passing patterns—even if those cone dribbling drills and partner volleys aren’t transferring to the pitch, at least the drills look like they could.
Movement off the ball? That’s mostly rooted in the tactical and the mindset side of the sport—it requires understanding how to manipulate open space and the distance between objects, it requires being “a willing runner” (being unselfish enough to put in high effort sprints that offer no direct or immediate personal benefit), and it requires the will to disrupt an opponent’s organized structure.
Use Your Movement to Disorganize the Defense
In an ongoing effort to teach better tactical understanding, during water breaks in our training sessions I’ve been breaking down pro game clips that exemplify key concepts and patterns of the sport. Sometimes the players have to see examples to understand what you are talking about.
“Pull the Cover” is a simple enough directive. On the defensive side of the ball, players are taught pressure-cover-balance and “get compact/stay compact” as key principles…and “pulling the cover” is one strategy to unlock the defense, forcing the cover player to make a decision: stay in their cover position or track a run that appears to be even more dangerous.
5 Lessons from the clip:
- Disorganize the defense with your movement
- Be a ‘Willing Runner’
- The player in the most athletic posture will win most duels
- Split a soft double team with the dribble
- The Cutback Cross is ruthless
A few key coaching points from the session:
- In the 3v2s, my players initially had an instinct to isolate one defender with a quick give & go…which is a perfectly good way to approach a 2v1. Without creating a constraint or rule, I consistently encouraged them to use their movement to disrupt the defense vs. using 1-touch passing to do the same.
- In the 4v3s…once the defending side knows the skill or tactic you want to emphasize, they will overplay to snuff out that moment (that’s defending!). So, while wanting to create the conditions for the attacking side to make runs that pull the cover player to allow a drive to the endline for the cutback cross…I gave the attacking side the freedom to attack the defense as they saw fit in the moment.
Teaching Game Concepts: Tactical Outcomes
So, now all of my players understand how to be a willing runner and pull the cover defender, right? Well, we ran this session 6 weeks ago and chances are, a sizable percentage of the players will have forgotten it entirely.
You cannot teach a thing once and expect it to stick, whether the Pythagorean Theorem, the three branches of US government, or onomatopoeia in poetry. Same with concepts in soccer, learning occurs with exposure, repetition, and reward (if it works, they’ll keep doing it!).
That means bringing this same session back again soon, maybe even re-watching the entire clip as a refresher.