Soccer coaching tips to get attackers and defenders using space
Use these soccer coaching tips to get your young soccer players using space well to maximise their team's success.
Key soccer coaching tips
Coach your attackers to make space by moving wide or deep and get your defenders to shrink space by moving up or moving in.
In your soccer drills, focus on:
- Teaching your players good habits while they’re young.
- Most strikers do far too little running off the ball. This skill is needed to unsettle the opposition defence.
- Many strikers expend far too little energy in harrying the opposition defenders when they have the ball.
- By contrast, your own defenders can find themselves isolated, trying to deal with one or more of their strikers.
- That problem occurs far less often in a defence that has been coached in how to control its space.
What to say to your players- “If you run wide as a striker, and the opposition defence runs with you, what have you done?”
- “You have opened up a space for your attacking midfielders to exploit, simply by dragging their defence out of the middle of the pitch.”
- “But if you’re a defender, try to do the opposite. Stay tight. Stay together.”
- “Give the opposition attackers little or no space to turn in or to work in.”
Click here for a 1v1 soccer drill to get attackers finding space.
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Soccer coaching tips
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