A player moves with the ball and is challenged by the opposition.

Session

Passing and receiving session: eliminate the opposition

Session

England Football Learning

2 mins - May 12, 2025

Session intentions

This is week five of the passing and receiving session programme. Check out the whole six-week programme here.

This session will help players:

combine to play forward
explore ways to combine passes to eliminate opponents.

If you're short on time, this structured training programme can be used as it is. Pitch sizes in this programme are shown as how long the pitch is x how wide it is, but these are just suggestions.

To make the programme more effective, adapt it to suit your players, your numbers and the space you have. If you want to skip, repeat or amend these sessions – that's fine. It’s up to you how you use this resource.

If you like this idea, download the session plan and give it a go. And don't forget to share your experience on the England Football Community. We'd love to know how you got on.

Session setup

In our example, this is what we’ve used to set up this session. But adapt it to suit your team and the space available to you.

Half a pitch

12 players

Goals

Flat cones

Spots/flat markers

Bibs

Eliminate the opposition

Set up parallel pitches. Create a 40x20-yard pitch with a goal at the centre of each end. And create a 30x30-yard pitch with two goals out wide at each end. Have a 3v3 on each pitch.
Create a 50x60-yard pitch with end zones and put a goal in each corner. Have a 6v6 in the middle. Players combine with teammates to play through the opposition and into the end zone to set someone up to score. Defenders can’t enter here while attackers can only enter after the pass has been made.
Use the same area but remove a goal and the end zone at one end. Place the other goal in the centre. The team attacking the wide goals focus on creating height, width and depth in their play, while the team attacking the single goal play more centrally and into feet. After a while, swap ends.

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Tactics board

Looking for a bit more detail? Check out Megan's tactics board video for this session.

Make it easier

Using the STEP framework (Youth Sports Trust, 2002) can help keep things fun, engaging, and appropriate.

To make this session easier, you could:

have one player as a ‘floater’ to assist the team in-possession by creating an overload in their favour in the second drill
make the pitch wider in the final practice.

Make it harder

To make this session harder, you could:

allow defenders to enter the end zones in the second drill
include a three-touch limit to encourage players to move the ball quicker
overload one team in the final practice if one side are having a lot more success than the other.

Coaching points

Encourage players to create space through using width, depth and height with your teammates. For instance, if using width wisely in the first activity, it could open up space for the next pass – or for target players to pass to each other.

Look for movement into space to receive and the timing of it.

Observe if players are identifying spaces to exploit and using a varied range of passes to do so.

Get players thinking about two-player and three-player core moves to help them combine with teammates successfully.