Do you teach them skills?

What about ball mastery?

These questions seem to be on the rise recently.

We think it is down to parents seeing more of those ‘Insta kids’ doing all kinds of flicks & tricks on social media.

They then assume that is what a good footballer looks like - most of the time they are wrong.

Ball mastery has been around for 20+ years but it has only recently started to creep more into grassroots team football.

For some, it is seen as revolutionary.

For those in the know (i.e. those who do their research 😉), it is pretty dated and there are much better things that kids can be doing to improve.

We’ve spent time at pro-academies recently who have also moved away from it.

We were big believers of individual ball mastery and very much used it at our sessions when we first started.

But then we realised there was a better way. That’s when we changed to the more street football style approach.

In this short episode we discuss:

What is ball mastery

What it good and bad about it

Why we stopped doing it

What your child should actually be doing instead