A player plays the ball while it is in the air.

Session

Passing and receiving session: festival week

Session

England Football Learning

2 mins - May 19, 2025

Session intentions

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

This session will help players:

create and exploit space to connect with teammates
decide whether to pass into space or feet
decide whether to receive to turn or receive to pass.

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.

80x50-yard pitch

18 players

Goals

Flat cones

Spots/flat markers

Bibs

Festival week

Create three 30x20-yard pitches for 3v3 games. On pitch one, put a goal in each corner. On pitch two, put a goal at each end with a diamond in the middle. Players can play around the diamond or one can go in to play a pass unopposed. On pitch three, put a goal at each end. Rotate after five minutes.

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:

make the pitches bigger to create more space to exploit
overload a team if they need to experience more success.

Make it harder

To make this session harder, you could:

make the pitches smaller to create tight spaces
underload a team if they need to be challenged more.

Coaching points

Encourage players to think about using height, width and depth to create space – and where they need to pass to best support their teammates.

Try using drive-by coaching interactions. Take opportunities to move in and out of the games to give information to individuals with minimal disruption to ball-rolling time. Waiting for the ball to go out of play is an ideal opportunity.