Developing Soccer Players

"Author Horst Wein provides more than 150 games, corrective exercises and competitions for players aged 7 to 14. Based on the internationally renowned Football Development Model, training and coaching methods are divided into four levels, resulting in the best age-appropriate coaching resource available. From fundamental skills and goal-keeping to tactics and game intelligence, Developing Youth Football Players covers it all with clear writing and colourful illustrations, making it easy to incorporate each lesson into your programme."--Jacket.

A soccer match is an ever-changing environment. Because most players rely almost exclusively on their dominant foot, their reportoire of movement is limited. This book presents a training method that focuses on developing physically balanced players who are comfortable playing the ball with either foot to any direction of play, thus giving them the full 360 degree range of playing options.--From backcover.

There is no greater power on the soccer field than the game intelligence of the players. With a great variety of attractive and effective simplified games, specially designed to simulate the most important game situations that may occur on the pitch, Horst Wein shows how to stimulate most of the aspects which are involved in game intelligence in young soccer players as well as professionals. Remember, Playing soccer without thinking is like shooting without aiming.

Player Development: The Holistic Method provides the first holistic, evidence-based performance development method in sport. Focusing on the world’s largest sport, soccer, this book weaves together the interconnected layers driving player performance development to define a novel training method. In performance sport, narratives defining success or failure are steeped with stories of chance. The reality is that player performance and athlete development leading to career success is the byproduct of optimizing interconnected experiences toward maximizing the likelihood of individual success. It is the application of a holistic method that reduces the influence of luck and increases the likelihood of individual and team success. This book is the pathway to understanding and facilitating individual player development leading to elite performance success. This book reveals not only a holistic method, but also a universal method breaking down perceived and real barriers to provide a method transcending domains and specializations – a unified approach. The book introduces an evidence-based method toward performance development in soccer. It is key reading for students of coaching, talent development, sport performance and ancillary specializations, and practicing professionals in the field of player and performance development and coaching.

Soccer Brain - from Dan Abrahams - teaches coaches to train players to compete with confidence, with commitment, with intelligence, and as part of a team.

This is a book about learning. Learning can often be forgotten or fringe in the pursuit of other fruits. When these fruits are practice books, formal & standardised education and easy to digest, saccharine infused niceties there is a risk that we overlook one of the fundamental human needs; to develop, change, grow and learn to master crafts. The mastery of crafts such as coaching takes time, earnest commitment and many challenging, chastening experiences that leave us feeling a little less than skilful. However we overcome these challenges, they are likely to be enablers that support our learning and growth towards becoming a better coach than we were yesterday. This book is intended to support that exploration; generate and guide your thinking whilst ensuring the gestation of those seeds of thought. We will encourage and enable a deeper understanding of the people or players in our care and provide some illumination on how to guide our decisions in designing environments that are responsive to both you and your players. There will be no coaching prescriptions, simply because the general nature of a constraints-led approach is at odds with prescription focussed approaches to coaching. A constraints-led approach encourages us to take account of, better understand and integrate what we understand about the player (person), the game of football (task) and the specific conditions on any given day (environment) into every interaction, coaching session, game-day, tournament and any other activity we might engage in within player development. There will, however, be some probing into alternative ways for coaches to eschew the traditional practice book or formal curriculum and scaffold player and coach development towards a unique, bespoke, responsive eco-system that keeps rhythm with the beating heart of our own football club. Taken together, this can support the experiences we are exposed to and build to be unique, individual and reflective of what collectively we have agreed and understand to be important in our world. The characteristics of our context should be coupled to our commitments. The backdrop to the way of thinking expressed in this book has been supported by a generation spent within coaching and development; fortune has favoured the opportunity for me to support in a sustained fashion the development of players who have been top scorers at The World Cup, multiple Premier League winners and coaches who coach and manage across some of Europe's top leagues. However, these perceived successes must be allied to the players within those same development programmes whose opportunity has been curtailed by serious injury and coaches who have fallen foul of some of the vagaries that the industry can perpetuate. As such, no development system is universally successful or unsuccessful and we should be careful, thoughtful and willing to as readily 'research' the graveyard as we do the top table. That mirror may be unpleasant to stare into at times, yet it is an important reflection of our own fallibilities and an important reminder to ensure that whatever outcomes our coaching and development programmes facilitate; supporting them to be as humanly supportive yet challenging as is consciously achievable is a worthy and important goal. The aspiration for this book is that it provides a map of some of the landscape that coaches may wish to explore in developing their own constraints-led approach to development, both for the players in their care and for themselves as a coach. Illuminating this fertile land sufficiently to support discoveries that are purposeful, personal and personable.

An Amazon #1 Best-Seller! Named the #1 Soccer Book by Football.com. Named a Top 5 Book of the Year by the NSCAA Soccer Journal! Soccer iQ is the first book for soccer PLAYERS! In a world saturated with books about how to coach soccer, Dan Blank finally gives players a book on how to think it. Standing on two decades of collegiate coaching experience, Blank has catalogued soccer's most common mistakes and provides simple, connect-the-dots solutions to help players solve their soccer problems. Soccer IQ is soccer's first text book for players; an almanac of smarter soccer decisions intended to flatten out the learning curve. It covers everything from hunting rebounds to the value of the toe-ball; from playing in the rain to the world's dumbest foul. Blank tells his story from the familiar and humorous voice of a coach who has endured years of stress at the hands of his players. Written in plain-spoken language, Soccer IQ is an easy read and a quick-fix to the most common yet critically important soccer problems. Includes a bonus chapter on the college recruiting process. " Finally someone wrote this book! If every soccer player read Soccer IQ, every coach would be a lot happier." Mark Francis - Head Coach University of Kansas "Dan Blank has just written soccer's first definitive text book." Colin Carmichael - Head Coach Oklahoma State University "This book has immediately become required reading for my team. I'll take 30 copies." Steve Nugent - Head Coach UNC-Greensboro "Soccer IQ may the best practical soccer book I have ever read. There's no fluff. Just nuts and bolts principles that we teach every day. It'll solve a lot of your soccer problems." Steve Holeman - Head Coach University of Georgia

Full of innovative drills designed to teach players skills and tactics while building the necessary physical conditioning level required in the modern game of soccer, "Innovative Soccer Drills" is suitable for the player, parent and coach at the junior league and junior high school level.

The identification and development of talented young players has become a central concern of football clubs at all levels of the professional game, as well as for national and international governing bodies. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey and assessment of youth development programmes in football around the world, to highlight best practice, and to offer clear recommendations for improvement. The book draws on original, in-depth research at eight elite professional football clubs, including Barcelona, Ajax and Bayern Munich, as well as the French national football academy at Clairefontaine. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, including psychology, coaching and management studies, and covers every key topic from organisational structures, talent recruitment and performance analysis to player education and welfare. Written by two authors with extensive experience in English professional football, including five Premiership clubs, this book is important reading for any student, researcher, coach, administrator or academy director with an interest in football, youth sport, sports development, sports coaching or sport management.