Playing Out From The Back

Developing your team to be capable of playing out from the back involves ongoing work to ensure your players are comfortable enough on the ball to handle playing from the back under pressure and aware of their positional roles off the ball. In mini soccer, the retreat to half way rule means that on goal kicks you have a great opportunity to practice this in matches with a bit less pressure than you would find in the older age groups.

Playing From the Back - Why and When

Why do we encourage our players to play out from the back and when do they try and do it? Depending on your overall footballing philosophy you may have very different views on this. Are you a Pep Guardiola or a slightly more "direct" coach... whatever camp you fall into, having players understanding how, why and when you might play from the back can only be a good thing.

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Foundation Practices - Being Comfortable on the Ball

When playing from the back, the players involved in the initial phase of play are generally going to be our goalkeeper, defensive players and defensive midfielders. If these players aren't comfortable receiving the ball and passing accurately, you will struggle to get anywhere with effectively playing from the back. We've put together some warm ups and basic practices that will help you develop your players in terms of how comfortable they are with the key skills required to keep possession effectively.

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Player Positioning and Setup When Playing From the Back

To allow us to effectively play from the back, the various players need to understand their individual roles and the positions we want them to take up when our goalkeeper has the ball. If the goalkeeper doesn't have good options, the whole thing breaks down and he or she is forced to go long or play to a player under pressure. This section gives you some basic information on ways to set your team up to play from the back effectively.

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Practicing Actually Playing From the Back - Game Realism

Once our players are comfortable enough on the ball, both receiving and passing, that we feel they could effectively play from the back, we want to move into practices that firstly allow them to do this without pressure (to give them an idea of the movement off the ball and positioning required) and then with pressure in a more game-realistic practice. Finally, we want to see them try to execute playing from the back in a game scenario.

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