Soccer strategies

I don’t know if this belongs here or in IMHO, but I’ll start here…

I played soccer for about 3 years as a youth and have watched maybe 10 games in my life. I know some fundamentals about the game, such as the rules, but I know nothing about strategy. I’m coaching a U12 soccer team and I just don’t know how to teach them real soccer strategy. They are advanced enough that pure kicking drills aren’t what they really need. I drill into them the idea of playing position and find the open spot and to think “triangles” for give and go type stuff, but beyond that I have nothing.

To put this in baseball terms, if you only read the rules on baseball you’d know that you can overrun 1st base without penalty. Without knowing strategy, you might not realize that means to run your ass off until you get past the base. You probably won’t know about “keeping the force” or how to perform a well executed rundown or a hundred other fundamentals that separates good teams from bad.

What types of things should I be teaching them? The things I stress are this:

  1. Get rid of the ball before a defender gets on you.
  2. Get open for your teammate. Standing there yelling, “I’m open” doesn’t help.
  3. Spread out!
  4. Don’t every defender attack the attacker. Pick up the trailers.
  5. Never cross the ball in front of our own goal - I can actually get my U10 team to abide by this better than the U12 team. At U12 they think they are better than they are.
  6. Stay in your own position.
  7. Talk to each other.
    Any tips from other coaches??

This is a recreational team?

Try to get them to understand through balls. You don’t have to pass a ball to a player’s feet. Lead them and have them run onto it. Make sure your forwards aren’t afraid to take shots. Tell them to pick a corner rather than just hit it as hard as they can.

A pretty easy basic strategy is to have a goal of getting the ball out to the wings a lot and whip in crosses. You could work on them timing their runs into the box, defending a good cross, etc. If it’s casual I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for sophistication. Try to make sure they get a ton of touches on the ball in practice. Not a lot of watching or waiting. Developing a decent touch will help more than anything else.

Movement is what the game is all about - but getting U12s to take this on board whilst maintaining some semblance of structure and formation to the team is, I guess, the challenge. I think at that level you really need to emphasise positions to the kids - you don’t want your centre forward defending corners, and you don’t want your centre half regularly legging it up the field to attack - basic things like that.

At the same time, football is a passing game should be your mantra, and encouraging the players to always be looking to give the ball player an option, an angle, will allow them to develop confidence in their play. A lot of talking, communication that you mention in yr OP is absolutely integral to this confidence issue.

The other thing to make a point of is contesting the ball in the tackle - hard but fair. You don’t really want to tolerate any mincing about from these young sons of America, winning the 50-50s is essential.

Couple of other things, At U12 age, most kids can’t head the ball, so that’s something to maybe leave for now. Maybe introduce as a drill when you’re looking at individual skills, but the aerial contest is not generally a big part of U12 football. The other thing is the goalkeeper - it can be hard to get an effective keeper at that age. The team can be playing well but is 3 down due to lame speculative shots beating the lad in goal. Do you play on full size pitches / goals? If you have a weak keeper I guess you just have to do your best to keep his confidence up.

important things I was always taught are:

  1. Don’t wait for the ball, RUN TO IT. When someone passes the ball to you, don’t top and wait, go collect it.
  2. Everyone defends. If your forwards lose the ball they need to try and get it back in the offensive 1/3
  3. control the ball. There are times to rush and time to sit on it and look for the open man
  4. communication. Have your kids talk to each other all the time, yelling “man on” and whatnot
  5. Play the ball, not the man. Go in hard but go in clean. Try not to hit the person unless it’s as a side effect. My dad always used to say that every second I was on the ground (I slid tackled a lot) was a second my team was playing a man down (if I missed my tackle)
  6. It’s a game, have fun. No matter what happens be a good sport, play as a team, and enjoy the game.

As for actual strategies, you should run set plays for corner kicks, throw ins, that sort of thing. There are two main strategies for bringing the ball downfield. Either bring it up under control, passing it around, or have a mid/def dump it into a corner if you have fast forwards and have them beat the defenders in a foot race. I’m sure you can find lots of videos online for set plays and drills to have your kids run during practice.

Hmmmm.

Make runs, don’t be afraid to swap with someone - if the right defender has a good lane, have right mid drop back to cover.

Defender positioning. Between the guy you’re on and the goal, don’t be afraid of contact.

Run some plays/routes on throwins and free kicks.
And run them for stamina - they won’t enjoy it, but a long lap around the park/place you practice at the end of practice will be good for em - just do it with em.

Like said before, talk about movement without the ball. You can make space fior your self or others. If you have the possibility, take some examples from preoffesional games and show them. Most times when an attacking midfielder advances and is able to shoot at goal, it is because the forwards drag the defenders with them (while they move away from the ball)

You are coaching an U-12 team. You do not say if this is a skilled team, or an unskilled team, but I’m assuming it’s some sort of house league team, with a blend of some skilled and mostly unskilled players.

You also ask about strategies, but do not mention tactics. Are you interested in strategy (overall methodology for play of the game, such as using passing control play v. using kick and run), or are you interested in tactics you can teach (how to successfully advance the ball in a 2-on-1 situation, for example)?

I would generally coach such a team by building up from the ground tactically. Start with 1-on-1 drills, which serve to teach the players two things (hopefully): that a defender will get beaten in such a situation if they “stab” at the ball to take it away, and that an attacker will be unsuccessful in getting past a defender who is skilled at simply delaying forward progress by the attacker. Then, you can start with 2-on-1 drills, such as wall passes, give-and-gos, overlapping runs, etc., to show the players how to overcome a 1 v 1 stalemate. When they are successful at a few of these tactics, start adding in a supporting defender, converting the situation to 2 v 2. This then is followed by 3 v 2 tactics.

Having gotten this far, you can now start introducing small-sided games that reinforce the drills you have run. Thus, for example, 3 v 3 with scoring done by completing 5 passes, 5 v 5 where each successful give and go is a score, etc. At the same time, you can start to work on larger-scale operations, such as drills on switching the field to encourage promotion of “width”. Keep in mind, though, that large-scale operations have to take into account the skills of the players. It does no good to drill crosses if your players can’t kick a ball in the air more than 15 yards.

As for generalized bromides about how to play the game, useful in almost all situations, I would say many have been already mentioned. I always emphasize that it’s what you do when you don’t have the ball that wins the game. And it is a good idea not to wait for the ball, but rather go and get it, before the other team does. But such bromides can be taken to far, or put to unfocused use. You can often tell when a team has been told to make runs off the ball by watching the people without the ball running aimlessly around the pitch, all upset because the person with the ball doesn’t pass it to them, never thinking about the fact that they are not in a place, or headed to a place, to which the ball can actually be passed without being intercepted. :smiley:
One last one: you say “6) Stay in your own position.” I cannot think of worse advice to give a football player. Much of what makes football so wonderful is that it isn’t played with static positions. Brazil have been famous for decades for the overlapping runs their outside fullbacks make up the wings, for example. A better statement is: make sure all positions are covered. That is, if the center fullback is up to engage in a scoring attack off a corner kick, someone (such as one of the center mids) had best be covering for him. :slight_smile:

Offense:

Crossing ball tactics. Instead of direct person-to-person play, have players on the wings cross balls ahead into the middle for runs.

Have forwards and mids run switches (i.e. left player runs to right side, and left to right, while ball gets played through). It confuses the hell out of young defenders who aren’t experienced with it.

Defense:

Offside traps.

Have designated “ball attackers” with designated “pass lane” stoppers who can communicate and switch roles with each other on the fly.

Practice defenders feeding balls to the mids, instead of just booting it out of danger.

In the USA, at this level, an offside trap is less than worthless. Most of the linesmen are next to worthless. And in some places and games there is only one referee (my daughter’s middle school games, for example).

Don’t mean to call you out on it, just wouldn’t waste my time on it. And with the changes in offside rules it’s not the best tactic anymore, anyway.

As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t try to run a flat-back defense unless I had sophisticated players. And a trap takes a LOT of proper coordination, which is rare to find in an U-14 team…

One of the things I like about the film of ‘Fever Pitch’ is the bit when Colin Firth’s girlfriend comes to speak to him on the school playing fields. For a moment before he comes over to her you see that he is coaching the kids in the offside trap, which is a subtle dig at the way Arsenal played at the time the story was set.