Coaching Build Up: Youth Development Phase

Build-ups are arguably one of the most in-vogue topics to coach nowadays, especially within youth football. With an increased spotlight on possession-heavy coaches with aesthetically pleasing build-up routines, such as; Pep Guardiola, Roberto De Zerbi and Ruben Amorim – an in possession/build-up philosophy is one of the most notable highlights of coaches at the highest level.

As a consequence the build-up phase has become one of the most coached game moments, especially in youth football – taking a scroll through coaching twitter (X) will support this assumption. Whilst build-up should not be taken in isolation, but as an equal part of the puzzle that is the game of football – there are a lot of observable positives that come from an increased focus on this game moment, especially when developing young footballers.

It's worth saying that, like a lot of things in football, these opinions that follows are individualistic and subjective, it isn’t one size fits all, the beauty of football is that it can be interpreted in different ways. However, in build-up the shared goal across every coach is to get into a goalscoring position. How you get to this point relates back to a coaches philosophy or beliefs in the ‘right way’ to do this. A coaches belief that being more direct with longer more forward passes, holds no less value than a belief in a more patient style, with an allowance for sideways or backwards passes to retain the ball and progress after more passes.

CONTEXT

Moving back to the focus area of this article – coaching a build-up session with players in the youth development phase. To give you context about ‘us’ and how we work. I currently head coach the U15 girls team at Oslo-based club Røa, in Norway. We are a club with a strong girls set-up, with both U15 and U17 playing in ‘Regional Series’ the best possible league available to them, alongside a first division U19 team and a Toppserien first-team – Røa Dynamite Girls, playing in the highest professional league in Norway, with the reserve team (Røa 2) playing in second division (third tier).

Our aim is to promote as many ‘Røa girls’ as possible through our youth pathway, helping them acquire the necessary skills to go on to play elite football for our first-team, but also hopefully further on from there.

My U15 team currently have four sessions per week; 1x Active Recovery session/Role Training, 2x Unit/Team Tactical Session (1x attacking focus + 1x defending focus), 1x Match Preparation session (focus on established phases + Set-Pieces) , alongside one league game per week (Sometimes two depending on cup participation/fixture congestion)

MY PHILOSOPHY

To add some further context, it’s important to consider my own personal philosophy when it comes to developing youth footballers, but also how I see the game. I’d like to again reiterate that there is no right or wrong, my way holds no more or no less value than another. The best lesson I have learnt whilst coaching is to be a sponge. Whilst my core beliefs/philosophy has largely stayed the same, some of the principles/methods have changed over the course of the last three years.

Here are a few things that resonate with me when coaching my team:

DIRECT BUT CONTROLLED

In a more football-style specific example, I want my teams to be direct when building-out. In terms of a build-out shape we always look to have a +1 minimum on the opposition in build-up which isn’t our GK but an outfield player. When we find this free player, I want my team to play forward as quickly as possible, essentially changing the tempo after we’ve broken the first line of pressure to find our free player. In recent matches, our free player has been a number six, number ten or a wing-back. I will delve further into our set-up as we progress.

BRAVERY

When asking players to be willing to receive wrong-turned under 100% pressure from behind, sometimes in an underloaded situation – we must encourage bravery from players. In build-up moments it’s easy to see which players are brave and which are not, if we see players moving out of a cover shadow, changing the intensity of their movements whilst dropping in, playing one touch bounce passes close to goal – these are the examples of brave players. I encourage all of my players to be brave in these moments where it’s high-risk, high-reward.

MAKING MISTAKES

Being brave and making mistakes go hand in hand, if we want our players to be brave, we must ask them to make mistakes, and normalise these mistakes. When we build-up, if we ask our players to receive under extremely high-pressure we must acknowledge that mistakes will happen – we might lose the ball, we might concede a goal, we might make the wrong pass decision after breaking the first line – all examples of mistakes, either technically or in decision making. Even at the highest level, mistakes happen – we as coaches should normalise these, nobody means to make a mistake after all.

FREEDOM/PROBLEM SOLVING

It’s important that whilst we give the help and tools required to the players, we don’t want  to make robots. Freedom to be creative in these moments is also important, when they step onto the field in matches – we as coaches can’t guide them through every action they make. We have to try to make training as realistic as possible to matches, so we should give players creative freedom to problem solve in the training arena as well, even if we have the ‘ideal’ picture in our minds. I can count a number of times, I have walked off of a training field having seen something I had not thought of before, due to players having individual freedom to problem solve.

PROBLEM – ACTION - SOLUTION

With my U15 team, we work in six-week blocks. We spend two sessions over this six-week block working on a specific game phase; 2x Build Phase, 2x Create Phase, 2x Finishing Phase for in possession. 2x Pressing Zone, 2x Mid-Block, 2x Emergency Defending Zone. Below is some on the principles we focus on in each area.

The build-up session in question happened to land on a week where we had focus on our build-phase, specifically about how we make progressions through wide-areas.

We had just played our first league match of the season, and had lost 7-0, conceding two goals from our build-up. Naturally, kids will make mistakes, especially if we ask them to take risks and be brave in those moments, so was in a problem? Yes and No. Yes, because we struggled in an area that we had worked on a lot before, No, because making these mistakes allows key learning moments to take place.

Our biggest problem in build-up during this match was our failure to find our free-player. Due to the opposition pressing with a narrow front three, it often meant that wing-back was the free player, we had problems accessing this player often.

Problem one – Not having quick enough actions with the ball at feet to play vs a high-press

Problem two – Not having low-enough wing-backs to be playable from goalkeeper or centre-backs

Problem three – Lack of intensity in ‘dropping in’ actions from the two number 6’s, or ‘shying away’ after a few sketchy moments in build-up.

See below: match clip one

 The Wednesday session:

Our biggest focus from that day was to use the key learning moments from the previous match day to present different solutions in certain moments. We sat together before the session and analysed our performance from the previous game, sitting in a room of around 20 teenage girls, watching ‘mistakes’ requires a lot of careful thinking – ‘How can we turn this negative into a positive’. Firstly, we were honest before that there will be some parts in this video meeting that will not be nice to watch, but we all take these as ‘learning moments’ not mistakes. Normalising mistakes is also important, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel so, the players we coach look up to us for inspiration, but most importantly, reassurance. By reassuring my players that mistakes are normal and a great chance to learn, alongside naming times I had made mistakes, in the previous session, and also in the presentation I was showing them – the tone of the room became a lot more relaxed.

With the learning moments in mind, from using video analysis as a pedagogical tool to aid player development, we went out to the field to run (alongside other sessions with a focus on build-up) 2x ‘Phase of Play’ sessions, where we spit the field in half and looked at building up down a side

See below:

Key Coaching Points

·      Finding the free player based on the opposition press

·      Efficient touches in ‘red zone’ more or less?

·      Actions to take the ball inside if Wing-Back receives (Is a turn of the game possible?)

·      Actions to take away players to create space to exploit

Throughout the session itself, we found a lot of success at finding the free player based on the press – as you can see in Clip One, we looked at the 6’s receiving actions in the ‘red zone’, under extreme pressure from the opposition player, we looked at a one-touch ‘round the corner’ action to play into the Wing-Back, in doing this, it drew in opposition players towards the ball to free up space on the side.

CLIP ONE -

We also talked about moving away to create space, you will notice in the session design, we places a mini-goal central on a diagonal angle, this is to replicate an opposite 10 and a turn of the game. Here you can see a good rotation from our ball side number 10 (Highlighted) to take away the defender from middle space.

CLIP TWO -

We also asked out centre-back to assess the opposition press as they had the ball at their feet – in this example, we see that the defending team are compact enough to open up the pass into wing-back straight away – an area that we struggled in, in the previous game. Through this, we was able to create a 2v1 situation (wing-back and 10 vs pressing full-back)

CLIP THREE-

In the last clip – we looked at how we can move away from the touchline when we play into wing-back. Our team principle is that we want to attack direct and vertically. For us, playing into wing-back off of the first or second pass in build-up is a ‘last resort’ in this clip, we demonstrate a good one-two between wing-back and number six to open up a forward facing number six. Despite, a poor decision after an initial good action, the players do extremely well to play out of the opposition press trigger, which we find most game days (Forcing wide + Using touchline as an extra defender)

CLIP FOUR -

SESSION REFLECTIONS:

The session itself presented a lot of positive moments, firstly, by splitting the group into two phases of play meant that we was able to get more repetitions of play and more engagements with the ball for each player, as opposed to running a normal phase of play with more numbers.

In terms of the weekly physical periodisation, the intensity was maybe a little bit too low to be considered a ‘high-intensity’ session, especially given there was a lot of coaching involved within the session.

A further progression or difficulty I would have added going forward is to manipulate the pressing team a little more, to defend in different ways. For example, it became very player-oriented in the pressing structure, I could have asked the players to take out the space, or even not press until the ball was played out to wing-back.

RESULTS:

This is an area that is very subjective, what is a good result when you look to work on and improve a build-up? The ultimate objective when being in possession is to go and score a goal, in such a low scoring game as football, it becomes very dangerous to measure success by the goals you score, especially when working with young footballers. When measuring success I like to use a layered system, or a process/checklist to determine the success we have. For example in build-up the layers we have:

·      Do we have the right set-up/system?

·      Can we find the free player?

·      Can we combine/play a forward pass after the first breakthrough?

·      Can we outplay 1v1?

·      Can we access the space behind the defensive line?

·      Can we create a goalscoring opportunity (Cross/Shot)

·      Can we score?

In match clip two we was able to find the free player more, but struggled to play forward after we found the free player. In match clip three, you will see that we ticked off five of the seven on the checklist, and missed the bottom two. Compare both of these clips to match clip one you can see an improvement, in our quality and effectiveness in building up.

MATCH CLIP TWO -

MATCH CLIP THREE -

When working with my team, we always speak about trusting the process, this is the most important thing over tangible success such as goals/wins. Of course, winning is important – nobody steps onto a football field looking to lose. But like previously said, if we only look at tangible success, we sometimes miss the development or lack of development being made. Did we manage to tick off all seven parts of the build-up checklist? No. But did we tick off more match after match? Yes. Is this success, if we trust the process then we can say that we have had success, with more room to build on.

Russell Pope

Top Player Developer + First-Team Coach @ Røa Fotball Elite

U15 Head Coach