Street Football …….

Love this from Rooney (whenever you say his name don’t you just want to shout ROOOOOOOOOOOOONEY! ).

Possibly the last true British ‘street’ footballer.

Society & technology (the rise of gaming etc) has changed things, so children aren’t out as much simply playing football in the street.

So much development happened in those environments.

I think back to when I played. No one coached me how to do tricks, turns or how to control the ball.

Grassroots coaching back then involved a huge line of kids taking it in turns to shoot before running to the back of the line to wait another 10 minutes for a turn. We might then dribble around a few cones and play a match at the end 

…worst thing is we still see this happening in some places

On the street is where it all happened.

Those varied surfaces, playing with odd-numbers like 3v2 or 2v1 or playing things like Wembley Doubles 2v2 or singles 1v1v1v1v1v1 etc.

Training now is a lot more formal. A lot more controlled.

Parents and coaches like to see a nice looking drill with lines of children, maybe a few poles and mannequins all looking neat & tidy.

Believe us when we say that those types of drills don’t maximise the learning/development potential of young players.

They also make it very easy for a coach to look like they know what they are doing.

There is a change coming in youth football coaching and it will link back to the street-style approach.

Average to poor coaches will not embrace it because coaching in this ‘new’ way is much harder and requires a very different approach to the ‘stop, stand-still and let me show the kids how much I know about football by telling them what they’ve done wrong’ approach.

Thankfully for our members we are always looking to improve the sessions for the benefit of our players.

We’ve been busy implementing a few changes to our curriculum which will help them all massively.

All will be revealed soon…