There has been a lot of material about small-sided games over the years, with a lot of research and many experts discussing the benefits of small-sided games.
This short blog will give my opinions on why I think they are so important, but also that I think we need to go even further with the use of games-based practices, at all ages.
For me, a small sided game is a practice that resembles a match, this will involve an invasion style game, with a set of rules and a scoring system. I like all of the small sided games that I do to be in an area with the same dimensions of a pitch, with the size adapted to the numbers of players playing, the intended outcome and the age group.
For anyone that has listed to my webinars or read my blogs, you will know I am a huge believer that we need to create good decision makers and regularly discuss how we can create them. You can see a video on this by clicking here.
I think that when we create practices that will allow players to make a lot of decisions, the practices must be as close to the game as possible to make the decisions they are making worthwhile. If they are challenged by a task and this involves them making decisions they wont have to make during a matchday, is it really worth it?
When designing small sided games, decisions remain the key word for me. Are the players allowed to decide? I always ask this to myself and coaches. If you say you must finish 1 touch, are they actually allowed to make a decision? I don’t think they are. Now if you change that and say “If you finish 1 touch then its worth double goals”, they are now allowed to make the decision. If a player in this game excels at dribbling and they take on the last defender when 1v1 and score, it is still a valuable goal. I see a lot of coaches complain about “greedy” players, say this player drives through beating 2 players and then getting 1v1 with the keeper, they can score. But, if they see the sideways pass to another forward who can finish 1 touch into an open goal for the bonus points, they may make a different decision? For me there isn’t a right or wrong way of doing this in a game as long as they score, but here they have the decision-making power.
So, for me the SSG’s always need to allow the players to make these decisions in realistic scenarios to a game. Another example:
Instead of – You must get the ball to the wide channel before you can score.
Try – If you get the ball out to the wide channel before your team scores it is worth double.
This encourages switching play, but doesn’t mean you can only score from crosses, by switching play and attempting to go out wide, it may open central gaps for you to play through?
I believe the best players in adult football are the ones who tend to make the best decisions. I remember being in my 20’s and full of energy and playing against some ex-pros on a coaching course. The ex pro’s were in their mid 40s and were more in the enjoyment stage of life and not at their peak fitness. I run around full of energy and could not get near them. When they moved into space and I looked away for a split second, they were gone. This was a real lesson to me in watching experienced players and the decisions they were making.
To make small sided games more effective I think that as coaches we need to park our ego and stand back and let players play and learn. Let them make decisions, your skill as a coach is to help them look at the other decisions they could of made and then let them experiment with different solutions. It is more powerful if they come up with the solution themselves.
The area I believe we need to do more is to allow them to make more decisions, get more touches and have more involvement in attacking, defending, scoring, dribbling and everything they would do at the weekend.
I do this using 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 games, throughout training and for all age groups, including adults.
For younger age groups this allows more touches and more decisions, as well as more enjoyment as they are constantly involved. I have already said that foundation phase players should have thousands of touches per session (You can see a video on this by clicking here) , this can be in SSG type 2v2’s.
For older players you can teach all the tactics you need as well as principles of play through using 4v4 small-sided games, you will need to be creative with your design and rules you put on the games, but players like to play and this increases their engagement.
If you take a photo from above a football pitch, it doesn’t matter if it is a 5v5 game or a 11v11 game, you will just see a wide variety of 1v1,1v2,2v2,3v2 games going on. This is why I stick to using the smaller versions of the games for all age groups as I believe that it makes them more effective when it comes to their game at the weekend.
