Football/Soccer Session (Beginner): Passing and Receiving - Technical focus, types of passes

Passing and Receiving Warm-up

We need our players to be comfortable playing different types of passes, with different surfaces of the foot. The three most common in order are Inside of the foot, outside of the foot, and laces (for a driven or lofted pass)

For these we can use passing patterns to help, but getting the players moving is best for introducing the types of passes and then later in the season we can focus more on the passes with other patterns. So here is an exercise where we will provide that movement.

In this exercise we will have three teams of 4 players. Each team has one ball and will look to play these different types of passes.

Spend one minute each playing passes with:

- the inside of the foot

- the outside of the foot

- longer passes on the ground with laces

This exercise should last no longer than 10 minutes and will have color recognition to it as well.

2nd progression, red plays to blue, blue to black and black to red

3rd progression, mix it up as you like

so three rounds of three minutes to add variety and changing the exercise.

Ball Retrieval Game

Technical passing exercises with pressure are tricky as you need to provide enough pressure that they can improve and have it be realistic, but not so much pressure that they do not improve the technique.

This ball retrieval game helps to do that.

The game is played 6v2 in a relatively big space.

One team of 6 looks to keep possession of the ball through good technical execution of passes. The team that is playing the possession game will look to complete a number of passes (I tend to do it 2 times the number advantage so this game would be 8 - 2 times 4 passes - but the number is up to you and can be fewer or greater depending on the level of the team)

While this game is happening the resting players who are not pressuring will pass a ball amongst themselves to focus on hitting good passes and hopefully building rhythm that will allow for them to play the game as soon as the other ball is done either by the 8 passes being achieved, or the ball being lost)