If your players struggle to keep the ball when they receive it under pressure, you have probably seen this picture. Your center back plays a firm pass into your central midfielder. Your central midfielder receives facing their own goal, takes a touch, and the opposition central midfielder arrives from behind and wins the ball. Ten yards away, your right winger was standing in space with a hand in the air.
So you say what most of us say: look up, check your shoulder. Your central midfielder nods. The following Saturday you see the same picture again.
If your players struggle to find the pass when they receive the ball, it could be a problem at the team level or individual level. For example there may be a misunderstanding of the overall Team Intention or team tactical principle, or a misunderstanding of the player’s Individual Intention or role within it. Before you correct a player, it helps to know which of those you are looking at, and that is where a soccer tactics board earns its place among your youth soccer coaching tools and the player development tools soccer coaches rely on. A football tactics board holds the picture still long enough for you to ask what your player could actually see.
Start at the Team Level: Do Your Players Know What the Team Is Looking For?
Spatial awareness in football is often coached as a habit: scan, check your shoulder, look around. But a player who scans without knowing what the team is trying to do has nothing to look for. So the first question is a team-level one.
Some teams organize their attacking around Team Intentions. Some organize it around team tactical principles. Whichever your team uses, your players need to share it.
If your team works from Team Intentions, the Team Task when your team has the ball is to create chances to score, and the first Team Intention is to exploit space behind the opposition back line. If that is not available, your team looks to exploit space behind the opposition midfield line, then space behind the opposition front line, and finally space in front of the opposition front line. A central midfielder who knows that order knows what to look for before the ball arrives.
If your team works from team tactical principles, you might use an attacking principle such as “play forward when possible.” A central midfielder who shares that principle is checking, before the pass is played, whether forward is possible.
Here is a simple way to check. Ask three of your players what the team is trying to do when your center back has the ball. If you hear three different answers, you may be looking at a team-level problem, and telling one player to check their shoulder is unlikely to fix it.
Then Look at the Individual Level: A Communication Problem or a Game Insight Problem?
If your players give you the same answer and your central midfielder still loses the ball, the problem may sit at the individual level. A player in possession who does not play the pass has two possible problems. Either they could not see it, or they saw it and decided otherwise. The first is a communication problem, a problem with reading the game. The second is a game insight problem. From the touchline the two tend to look identical, which is why “look up” gets said to both.
Go back to the opening picture. Your central midfielder received facing their own goal, and your right winger was behind their shoulder. If your central midfielder had no picture of the right winger, there was no decision to get wrong. That points toward communication.
It is also worth noticing who did nothing wrong. Your right winger read the situation and moved into space. You may be tempted to ask the winger to come closer, because the winger is the player you can see waiting. But correcting a player for a read that was right tends to make them hesitate on the next one. The more useful conversation is with the player in possession.
A Youth Soccer Tactics Board That Helps With Player Development: Show The Picture Before The Ball Arrives
Players who read the game well tend to scan in front, behind and to both sides, so a picture exists before the ball arrives. They judge the distance to their teammates, to the opposition players, to the lines of the pitch and to both goals. And they often arrive with an intention already formed. A player who only reacts once the ball is at their feet has skipped all of that.
In reading the game, four things work together, and you will rarely fix one of them alone:
- Position: as open as possible, as closed as necessary. This is your central midfielder’s body orientation, but they also have to move into a position where an open body is possible.
- Moment: as early as possible, as late as necessary. That movement comes early enough for your center back to read it, and late enough that the opposition central midfielder has less time to follow.
- Direction: as direct as possible, as indirect as necessary.
- Speed: as fast as possible, as slow as necessary.
Position is what the other three are built on. A central midfielder who receives closed, with their back to the game, cannot read when, where or how fast the next action should be. They are guessing. And in reading the game, space is time: a central midfielder who has moved into space and opened their body has time to take in the right winger, the opposition player closing in, and the next pass.
If your central midfielder scans well in training and far less in a decisive match, that is worth noticing too. A high level of pressure tends to narrow what a player takes in. The picture got smaller. It is still a reading the game problem, and it can be trained.
Your language matters here. In 11v11, with older players, you might ask your central midfielder to receive on the half-turn in the half-space. With 7v7 and 9v9 players that phrasing is too much. The same idea is a question: “Can you see both goals when the ball comes to you?”
A Coaching Tip When Using A Soccer Tactics Board With Magnets: Freeze The Picture One Pass Earlier
When you review a lost ball with your team, you may be freezing the picture the second possession was lost. Try freezing it one pass earlier, with the ball still at your center back’s feet.
Set the magnets where your players and the opposition players actually stood. Use however many magnets match the shape you actually play. The 23 numbered positional magnets that come with the Vizzionboard cover both teams. Then take the dry-erase marker and draw a small arrow from your central midfielder’s magnet to show which way that player was facing.
Ask three questions, in this order, and let the answers come first:
- To the group: what is the team trying to do here? This is your team-level check.
- To your central midfielder: facing this way, which of these players could you see? This is your individual-level check.
- Then wipe the arrow and redraw it with the body open: who can you see now?
The magnets hold the picture while the arrow gets wiped and redrawn. If your central midfielder names the right winger only once the arrow is turned, they have found the communication problem themselves, and that usually lands harder than hearing it from you. If they could see the right winger all along and chose another pass, you are in a game insight conversation instead. That is a different conversation, and the other pass was not necessarily wrong. It was a decision. On a soccer tactics board with magnets, the whole exchange takes about two minutes.
Why a Soccer Tactics Board at Proportional Scale Helps Players Judge Distance
Judging distance is a large part of reading the game, so the picture you show your players has to be honest about distance. The Vizzionboard is a dual sided soccer tactics board built to true proportional scale, with the horizontal thirds, half-spaces, central spaces and wide spaces drawn to exact proportional measurements. When your right winger’s magnet sits ten yards from your central midfielder’s magnet, that distance looks the same on the board, relative to the pitch, as it did on Saturday.
The front side is a full 11v11 pitch, which suits the opening picture in this post. The back side is a half-pitch, where a whole penalty area fits at true proportional scale. That surface is useful for set piece routines, because a corner kick is one of the few situations where the ball is still and your players have time to scan before it is played. You can show each player what to look at before the kick is taken: the magnets hold the routine while you wipe and redraw the lines for each variation. Both sides are magnetic and dry-erase.
The board is never a replacement for the work that needs to be done out on the field. The board recreates situational moments that can be displayed to give that same picture to players.
Soccer Club Coaching Equipment: One Language for Reading the Game Across Your Club
If you are a director of coaching, you may hear three versions of this on three neighboring pitches: “check your shoulder,” “scan,” and “open up.” Players moving up an age group often have to learn the same idea again in new words. When your coaches teach it from the same picture, with the same questions, more of your players arrive at the next age group already knowing what to look for and why. If you are equipping several teams, you can see club pricing for ten boards or more.
If you are searching for the best soccer tactics board for coaches, the question underneath is usually simpler: will my players see what I see? For spatial awareness, that comes down to whether the board can hold the picture your player had before the ball arrived.
Find Out What Your Player Could See Before You Correct the Pass
The next time your central midfielder loses the ball, hold off on “look up.” Reset the picture one pass earlier, ask your players what the team was trying to do, then ask the player in possession what they could see. You may find the problem was not where it first appeared.
If you want a tactics board that is dual-sided, breaks the field into horizontal and vertical spaces, and fits into your backpack take a look at the Vizzionboard. Built to Develop Champions.
