Over the last few years, attack-building has become increasingly direct and aggressive. The job of defenders is now to get behind the forwards right away and keep them from turning around with the ball to face the goal. In this article, we’ll focus on defensive tactics for defenders who are behind attackers facing away from the goal.

Having a broad repertoire of dribbling techniques and fakes lays the foundation for creative solo play. In this session, players work on their dribbling, complete with sudden starts and stops, changes of speed, changes of direction and fakes. The main part of the session focuses on applying dribbling skills to a variety of 1 v. 1 situations. The concluding 4 v. 4 game gives them an additional choice: solo run or pass to a teammate?

Effective finishing and fast transitions are two important components of indoor play that should be immediately beneficial to your players when you move outdoors in the spring. In this session, we’ll work on those two concepts with teams of various sizes in small-sided games built around shooting.

Games with partners can be a great way to gently introduce the idea of team sports to young children. In this play session, in which players pretend to be a group of dolphins in the ocean, partners work together on their agility, speed, dribbling and shooting. The session concludes with a 2 v. 2 tournament.

Children have incredible imaginations. We coaches can use this creative power as a way to instill a lasting love of the game in our players. One way to do this is by drawing connections between training equipment, such a vests and cones, and objects from players' everyday lives. For example, you might introduce the play session below like this: "Pretend your vest is your teddy bear, and you never go anywhere without it!" In these exercises, the vest is a training tool that players have to carry with them. They're not allowed to drop it - a task that requires them to stay constantly to stay focused. These games also improve agility and train speed, dribbling and shooting.

The ability to quickly and confidently control a pass from the front depends on a number of factors: On one hand, the pass has to be well-aimed and well-timed; on the other, the receiver has to be able to receive and control it without letting it bounce too far from his feet. To train these factors, we use several different pass combinations with touch limitations in these exercises. To provide the necessary time and opposition pressure, each exercise also includes follow-up plays on the goal.

One of the marks of a good soccer player is the ability to instantly make the right decision in any game situation. “Decision training” is an integral part of the exercises in this article, alongside a number of technical/tactical coaching concepts. In each of the games and exercises that make up this session, players have to make decisions, and all of these decision situations involve weighing one risk against another. As a result, not only is this session a lot of fun for players, it also gives the coach valuable insight into his players’ self-confidence and willingness to take risks.

In this training session, we’ll simulate receiving situations as they actually occur in front of the goal. The object for attackers is to safely control the ball and turn to face the goal as quickly as possible. The session’s true focus, though, is on teaching defenders how to deal with this situation. It’s especially important for them to be able to attack 1 v. 1 without fouling, since free kicks in front of the goal are always excellent scoring opportunities.

In this practice session, your field players train the keeper. All the games and exercises are built around the problems and challenges of goalkeeping and every play is keeper-oriented, with a special focus on catching flighted balls and blocking angled shots. Not that the field players are getting left out: They’ll be practicing passing and shooting techniques, with plenty of repetitions.

Spring provides all kinds of opportunities to try out new ideas or continue practicing and polishing the old ones. The agenda for this practice session includes outnumbering opponents, winning the ball and switching immediately to offense. The object is to move the ball forward as fast as possible and take your opponents by surprise while they’re still moving back into their positions.

Players need to receive and control the ball in all sorts of game situations. Always train with passes on the ground and in the air, and always combine the technique with a follow-up play. A good way to accomplish these objectives is to integrate the technique into complex games and exercises involving dribbling, shooting and 1 v. 1 play—that way players can judge their receiving and controlling skills for themselves.

Winter break is drawing to a close, and soon practice will be in full swing again. What better way to motivate your players for cold-weather training than shooting contests? Taking shots at the goal is always fun for kids, and when it’s combined with small competitions, the motivational effect is even bigger.

Outplaying opponents requires self-confidence and willpower, qualities that you can start training at a very young age. This play session introduces players to the 1 v. 1 situation with five games that all share the same basic setup: Children play the roles of pizza bakers in their own pizzeria. In addition to 1 v. 1 play, this session also trains speed, dribbling and shooting skills.

The first touch is critical. You already know how true that is for receiving and controlling the ball, but it’s true for heading too, just in a different way: A child’s first experience of heading should never be painful! A coach who expects his young players to bravely go after every cross with eyes wide open needs to lay the proper foundations first. If you’re teaching heading to beginners, always use lightweight balls and make sure all techniques are correctly executed.

The most important objective in children's soccer is for everyone to have fun playing. Competitions structured around the ball or an interesting physical challenge are especially fun. The key is to choose age-appropriate games and exercises that meet children's needs. In this article, DFB coach Paul Schomann presents exercises that will get your players excited about practice while teaching them basic motor skills at the same time.

Teams that can move the ball forward with purposeful combination play are more likely to take their opponents by surprise. Fast finishing can be a great way to score goals! This practice session is all about improving the accuracy of your team’s passing. Players pass according to a set sequence and then finish on the goal. To keep the tempo up and the players focused, these passing sequences are intentionally kept simple, as they need to be when playing fast combinations in the middle.

Speed is an essential component of attacking play, and it’s a prerequisite for getting past well-organized defense formations to set up goal chances. It depends on good basic running speed, solid technique and the ability to assess game situations in an instant. After discussing the relative importance of these factors, Thomas Nörenberg presents a selection of extremely challenging speed exercises. By pushing your players to their limits, these exercises will help you truly understand what your team is capable of.

In this session, the focus is on an essential youth soccer training activity: shooting games. But whereas many shooting sessions simulate numbers-up situations, the object of this one is to help players get used to opposition pressure while shooting. As in all shooting situations, it’s important to make the right decision as quickly as possible and take advantage of the opportunity to score.

An athlete’s ratio of body fat to muscle mass is related to performance. Research has shown that having the correct proportion of muscle mass increases strength, power and agility. However, gaining lean muscle is not just about choosing the right exercise protocol; it’s also a matter of nutritional intake and timing.

The most famous cheat sheet in soccer—the one that helped Jens Lehmann defend the German goal at the 2006 World Cup—was written by Andreas Köpke. Somehow Lehmann seemed to know exactly which corners his opponents were planning to shoot at, which of course was totally unnerving for them. And that, according to our authors, is what it's all about.

Without proper pregame nutrition, you won't get very far. However, it's important to keep your body supplied with plenty of energy during the game as well, and nutrition expert Andre Albrecht explains how to do it in the second and final installment in our series.

Sport-specific nutrition is a never-ending discussion---after all, eating and drinking are essential to life! Most people underestimate the importance of eating well before matches. In this article, we lay out the seven basic building blocks of nutrition and their significance for the game of soccer, then provide some tips for proper pregame nutrition.

Speed in soccer is considerably more complex than running speed. Game action speed and speed of play are especially important, demanding mental, technical and tactical abilities in addition to physical qualities. In this article, Greg Maas gives us plenty of ideas for improving speed of play, with a complete practice session from warm-up to cool-down.

When planning their practices, many coaches only plan the main part of the session and fall back on standard drills for warm-up. This wastes valuable practice time, because a warm-up consisting of drills can never achieve the proper effect. Fortunately, Paul Schomann is here to show us a better way, with passing exercises that prepare players for practice.

Coaches of very young players do more than just organize matches and practice sessions. By joining in the fun, they share their enthusiasm for the game. The activities they plan must be age-appropriate: movement training, unstructured play packaged in exciting stories---these are the tools of the children's coach.

Lots of kids --- and adults --- don't get proper strength training, which puts unnecessary strain on their joints. That's why players should start focused strength training at a young age. Remember, kids want training to be fun, and that includes strength training. When the ball is in play, these exercises become fun games.

This article shows you how to help very young players get more comfortable with the ball. Some of the exercises intentionally deviate from what we ordinarily think of as soccer training, allowing players to use their hands as well as their feet. All exercises are structured to give players plenty of repetitions without becoming boring.

To keep club soccer interesting and motivational, youth coaches have to fill every single practice session with age-appropriate objectives, activities and methods based on their own individual philosophies of youth soccer. In this article, Heike Volker addresses these questions and shows us some simple ways to make shooting training age-appropriate.

Soccer is a player's game, not a coach's game. Youth soccer must always be about player development and enjoyment. It must never be (just) about winning and losing. Our youth players should never play a match afraid of making mistakes. The guidelines in this article will insure that your coaching helps your players.

In this article, the author presents games that train players to fake. Instead of focusing on one particular fake, however, these games teach players how to execute the basic moves of dribbling and observing other players. Match character is provided by active opponents who must be closely watched.

In the previous installments of this series, Hermann Bomers gave us exercises on selected skills (dribbling, ball handling) or abilities (game action speed). This article deals with an aspect of group and team tactics: the wing attack. As you might expect, we don't teach this type of concept to very young players; instead we start with activities appropriate for ages 10 to 14.

A basic prerequisite for winning soccer is the ability to instantly make decisions that move your team closer to its objective. This ability is known as game action speed. In this article, Hermann Bomers focuses on game action speed and presents two practice games for each age level (basic, intermediate and advanced).

This article focuses on two related aspects of practice and match play: training players to maintain possession and teaching them to dribble close to the foot. For both concepts Hermann Bomers provides specialized practice games for each age and ability level.

In this article, Hermann Bomers draws our attention to a common problem in youth soccer training and argues that a good training program must be fundamentally play-oriented. Taking dribbling as his example, he shows us how practice games with special rules can be used at any age level to promote and develop desired skills.