Article

How to design a coaching session around an international tournament

International tournaments create a buzz like nothing else. Why not use the excitement to inspire and engage your players at training?

England Football Learning

0-3mins - Jul 25, 2022

Game management at international tournaments

Finding different ways to win plays a crucial role in every international tournament. With various styles of play on show, teams must adapt their approach – often within games – to be successful.

This type of flexible thinking is a skill that grassroots coaches and players need, too.

You can use scenarios from tournaments to challenge your team to:

plan and set problems
strategise within games
identify the strengths and weaknesses
use the information gathered to gain advantages
be successful and win.

Substitute Ella Toone scores against Spain at UEFA Women's EURO 2022 to send the game to extra-time

Practice match scenarios

Get your teams to play as a country and give them a scenario that can happen in a tournament. For example, “You’re one-nil down with ten minutes to go. Can you take the game to extra-time?”. Then, add in computer-game-inspired elements and allow players to ‘pause’ the match to discuss their tactics. This promotes the idea of planning their next move.

When using pauses, allocate a set number per game (e.g. four). This limitation helps your team pay attention to what’s happening. It encourages them to observe the opposition and identify their strengths and weaknesses.

During pauses, you could also offer special rules that your players can introduce. Here are some examples:

Cheat: use VAR to cancel out a goal scored by the opposition.
Challenge: accept a challenge, such as playing in a smaller space.
Clue: ask the coach to help you.
Change: change an aspect of the practice design to your advantage.

For visibility, write these options on a whiteboard. Once a team has used a rule, they can’t use it again, and they can only use one per pause. This means the players must strategise and discuss what to use and when.

It’s worth remembering that winning at a grassroots level isn’t the be-all and end-all. Coaches have a role in helping players think strategically to be successful – and this is an approach that can help.

Play a tournament in your session

Players love games, so tap into the excitement that international tournaments can bring by playing one at training.

You could even make it last a number of sessions to create the feeling of a real international tournament.

Here’s a creative spin on how you could play a tournament in your training sessions:

Split your group into small teams – for instance, teams of three or four.
Set up some small-sided pitches with everyone starting in the ‘group stage’ of the tournament.
Introduce the idea of levels. Level one is the group stage, level two is the quarter-final, level three is the semi-final, and level four is the final.
Each time a team wins a game, they move up a level. They move down a level if they lose.
The teams who reach the final have the challenge of staying there as long as possible.
Let your players decide how a team can win the tournament. For example, the team that has won the most ‘finals’ and been at that stage the longest, or the team that is winning in the final when the tournament ends, wins it.

If you play the tournament over multiple sessions, teams pick up where they left off the week before. This way, each team can consider their strategy before the next training session.

This is a principle borrowed from computer game design, where you can save your progress and pick it up the next time you play.