This is our ninth post in the Possession Series here. This is a follow on from our Passing Angles installment. This installment is not really about your players' ability to look up with the ball. While that is a definite prerequisite, what we're actually covering here is the tactical side of how you leverage the technical skill of being [...]
This is our eighth post in the Possession Series here. This is a follow on from our Width and Spacing installment. Back in Movement Off Ball our focus was on getting players moving to space to support the ball carrier. As your players get better this you can start to sprinkle in some more specific advice on [...]
This is our seventh post in the Possession Series here. This is a follow on from our Movement off Ball installment. In our previous post we defined some ground rules for what constituted acceptable off-ball movement. As your players get very good at the keep away style drills and you move into more realistic game scenarios, you'll [...]
This is our sixth post in the Possession Series here. This is a follow on from our Playing from the Spot installment. A popular coaches' mantra you might have heard is: "Who is the most important player on the field? The player withOUT the ball." If you want to play a possession style of soccer, movement off ball will [...]
This is our fourth post in the Possession Series here. This is a follow on from our Receiving the Ball installment. This continues our theme so far of perfecting some tactics around 1v1 before we move on to group scenarios. I'm a believer in that the better able the players are able to cope with and respond [...]
This is a very valuable read for our EXTRA coaches that need to evaluate players for selection into the program. Tom Turner put together a fantastic paper on the best way to evaluate potential players. It has very little to do with technical skills demonstrated in drill scenarios and focuses on a whole-player evaluation approach under game-like [...]
This is our third post in the Possession Series here. We are picking up after our Shielding the Ball exercises and still focusing on the individual technical skills that will help enable our possession style of soccer when we move into teaming situations. In this case we want players thinking about their next move as they receive [...]
This is our second post in the Possession Series here. If you followed our first session here then you are set up perfectly to move into a session on shielding the ball. When you start a shielding drill, most players' natural instinct is to dribble the ball away from pressure, but that's dribbling and not shielding. We [...]
This is our first post in the Possession Series here. A possession style of soccer requires buy-in from your entire team. If even one of your players is not committed, either they will give the ball away or teammates will stop playing to them--ultimately leading to a lack of success either way. In order for anyone [...]
This page will serve as a landing page to build out content related to teaching both Core and EXTRA teams to play a possession style of soccer. UPDATE: If you wish to view/print/export the entire series from a single page, go here. What is a "possession style"? Possession-based soccer is characterized by: Methodically moving the ball [...]