You don’t have to take my word for it. I spend hours watching training sessions with professional players. In that time there may be one small thing I can use with my team or turn into something I can give to my coaches to help them make their team play better.

Watching a session with Manchester United players training the night before a match it was very interesting to note the number of balls that are being constantly used so that players are getting one and two touches as they do their fitness training. There was nothing complicated about it.

The players were constantly moving – I didn’t see anyone waiting around for their turn, the exercises were designed so that the players are on the move as they are being coached. The repetitive one and two touch movement is very controlled and done at a slow pace.

You can watch part of the session in the clip below – watch how the goalkeepers train on the ground where they can only use their hands to catch or block the ball. All of these exercises are designed to maximise a player’s ability to react to the ball in the air or on the ground.

Watch it carefully and you can see all sorts of training going on, most of which is simple ball work:

Everyone talks about the strikers who can light up the game with one change of pace and in an instant give their team the advantage, but the special players I would like in my team play in midfield and come from Spain. Xavi and Andres Iniesta of Barcelona are outstanding hard working skilful players, but the one I see most of all is Cesc Fabregas.

Fabregas can run a game for the full 90 minutes. At the age of 22 he already has the ability to orchestrate the play of his team-mates. He can force them to change the direction of a run by his own clever pass that exploits space his team mates didn’t even see.

In the same way that Liverpool’s Steven Gerrard runs around doing everything better than anyone else in the team through sheer determination, Fabregas does it with his outstanding understanding of geometrical space.

And I want him in every single one of my teams because that is how I want my teams to play.

Space and vision is something you can coach your team to understand better. They may not be players who impose their own sense of space on their team mates but you can give them a better understanding of how to use space which will benefit your team in the long run. To do this I use a lot of small-sided games which are great to coach young players in how to use space and passing.

Fabregas’s ability was demonstrated by one pass in the 1-0 defeat of Liverpool earlier this month which was over 30 yards and at an angle through a crowd of Liverpool players to the feet of Diaby which showed his awareness and sense of space – Diaby failed to control it otherwise the scoreline would have been greater.

In this clip you can see some of the incredible passes he makes that look so simple but show his amazing vision:

What you see in Drogba is power and determination to get to goal. There are some great strikers around the world but I don’t think I have ever witnessed a more powerful player than Drogba.

His ability to hold on to the ball under pressure and knock defenders away is second to none. Then he has a powerful shot at the end of it.

The work Drogba puts in on the training ground is the secret of his success. He uses exercises like the one above to fine tune his balance and power. If you are going to turn your young players in to potential Drogbas you have to do something similar with your players.

Try this:

Your player must dribble in and out of the coaching poles, go around either side of the cone, by selling a dummy or skill move and follow up with a shot on goal.

In diagram two the player must do the same movement but beat the goalkeeper at the end.

In diagram three the player must do the same movement but beat a real defender and then the goalkeeper.

He obviously has a lot of natural ability but he also puts in a good deal of hard work to give him his striking power. Watch these clips from Chelsea’s training ground you will see what he gets up to in order to make himself one of the world’s best strikers:

Passing is the key to any match, if you can out pass your opponents the team has a headstart on winning the game.

Any exercise relies on the coach to guide his or her players in the exercise they are doing. So good touch and good movement to the ball is an essential part of any passing exercise

I use this constant passing game as a good starting point in developing passing and movement for individuals and teams:

I just sit there and watch them and take a few notes which give me some great ideas what to do with my own players at our next match.

It doesn’t matter what age you coach, all ages can warm up in the same way. When you go to watch your next game see how simple some of the warm ups are for even the most skilful players.

The superstars of the English Premier League warm up with simple runs, stretches and jumps.

Watch these clips taken before Chelsea and Manchester United games where the players are warming up before their matches.

In my publication Soccer Coach Weekly I have a column which runs bi-weekly called Skills School. In this column you can get all the skills your players should learn and how to do the technique. All you have to do is get out in the backgarden and practice them.

Here’s an example from skills School:

The swivel

How to set it up
Get your players into threes, with one ball in an open area. The players (A, B and C) start around 10-15 yards apart. Moving around the pitch the three players control, swivel then pass to one another.

How to play it
A passes to B who controls the ball, swivels with the ball on his right foot before releasing it to C. The three players then continue to move forward. When you advance the play, C controls B’s pass, then passes to A. He controls, swivels then delivers the pass to B, and so the practice evolves.

Key coaching tips

First touch is crucial – it can be the difference between keeping or losing possession – so passing must be accurate into the path of the receiver. This means you must work on your players’ control.
Improve your players’ awareness by changing positions.

Ive put a clip up of a coach showing how skills are done with some young Brazilian players to give you one or two hints for your next session on skills:

If you haven’t got the ball or you keep losing it, the best way to get it back is to have a strong midfielder whose job it is to tackle the opposition, win the ball and get your team passing again.

If you are playing possession soccer, one of the things you have to take into account is winning the ball back. Sure, all your players know how to tackle but do they know what to do when they win the ball?

What you have to do is take your best tackler and show them how to stop attacks and then hit the opposition hard with some good passing.

When the opposition loses the ball they will be at their most vulnerable and your midfielder will be able to put them on the back foot with a good pass.

This will become a key tactic for match days – a player the rest of the team rely on to win the ball back.

The midfield ball winner

Tell your player to play in the hole in front of the central defenders.

Get them to close down any player running at the defence and stop them in their tracks.

You’ve seen games where the opposition kick off and runs right through your team to score. This player stops that by targeting the player with the ball and making the tackle.

And when they do get the ball,they need to be off running, passing, opening up the opposition defence.

The rest of the team have to be ready to support this role and be open for the pass.

It’s not always a great tackle that wins the ball in midfield. When USA played Brazil in the Confederations Cup Final it was an interception just outside the USA penalty area that led to a breakaway goal by Landon Donovan to put USA ahead 2-0 of Brazil.

It was a fantastic move. Landon Donovan takes possession, finds Charlie Davies and races forward, collects Davies’ return pass, takes a brilliant touch to create room on the edge of the Brazil box and fire left-footed into the far corner past Julio Cesar.

Passing and movement at its best. Watch out England.

Watch the position of the covering midfield players and the pass out of defence that set up the perfect counter attack:

Before he died he spoke about what was important to him.

“Pele called it the beautiful, didn’t he? It’s a perfect game. It’s a game of athleticism, a game of power and competition and strength – anybody who thinks football is just a game of deftness of touch without those other things wouldn’t win. You need courage, you need steel in your make up. But it’s the deftness too, the control – Waddle, Barnes, Pele, Di Stefano, Puskas, Denis Law, George Best – the spontaneous things that players like that can do, that’s what’s beautiful.”

“And then it’s the national game. Every weekend two million people play it in this country, not watch it, play it.”

And that’s where we come in. We are coaching those players and we are the ones who sell the perfect game every week to our players. That responsibility rests on our shoulders, we make the game beautiful to them, so they enjoy it and remember for the rest of their lives how much fun they have and why they will always follow the beautiful game.

Remember the World Cup Italia 1990, when Bobby Robson so nearly won it for us…

One of the first things I look for in coaches I meet is passion. Not running up the touchline screaming at the players sort of passion, but a passion for coaching children how to play soccer.

If you haven’t got passion some where during your first season you will run in to trouble through either losing games and want to give it up or finding all the organizing that you have to do to run a successful team too much of a chore.

The team will suffer because the coach is not putting effort in and is merely going through the motions.

I was thinking about this during the week after reading about the ex England International John Barnes. What a player he was for his club Liverpool, although he never quite managed to bring that to the England team. He has also never managed to bring any of the success he had in his playing career to his management at Scottish giants Celtic and recently at Tranmere Rovers.

I looked in to what Barnes had to say about coaching when he was a player. There’s not a lot written, although there is one very telling interview with him by sports writer Pete Davies where he was asked if he could see himself in management.

“Not right now no. The closer you get to retiring then maybe you think, Ok I’d like to coach or whatever and some people may not have an option they can’t do anything else and they’re offered a coaching job so they do it. But at the moment I don’t think I would. I might play non-league or coach a school team or a little local side something like that.”

I was interested that he thought coaching a school team or a little local side is something you could take or leave, that it would be easy to do.

Then he said: “ I’m basically a very lazy person. If it came up then I’d do it, put it that way but it’s not something I’d like to do.”

When in 1999 he got a dream ticket to manage the Glasgow giants Celtic he must have wanted to do that I would imagine, but he suffered a series of very poor results one getting the famous headline “Super Cali go ballistic Celtic are atrocious”. He was sacked.

This year he managed Tranmere Rovers and won only two out of eleven games again he was sacked.

I think he’s missing the passion in his coaching that he had in his playing….

watch him as a player:

but he could rap!

One question that I’m often asked is how to give players that self motivation when they are on the pitch and the team has just lost a goal, Why do some players sulk or cry or just give up?

On Saturday my U9s went 1-0 up, but just before half time went 4-1 down. But they never gave up and late in the game scored to go ahead by 5 goals to 4. They have self belief but we all have to work hard for that.

Personal motivation is a hard part of coaching. Once a player is on the pitch how do you go about getting them to put 100 per cent in when the going gets tough?

Personal motivation starts at your coaching sessions by you giving players targets to meet, by giving them targets at the beginning of the season that are about them, rather than targets like winning a game, tell them you want to see them make 4 or 5 tackles in one half of a game or to have five shots at goal. In this way they will learn that a lot of their performance is down to wht they do on the pitch rather than winning or losing.

You can also give players rewards like the football (soccer) patches we use that gets players striving to be better so they can win their badge.

Talk to your players about how they should be thinking about the game and their role in it. Explain how they must strive to meet their targets so they can go on to become better players.

Check out this clip of Clint Dempsey of Fulham and the USA men’s national team, talking about self motivation and how hard he works to keep himself at the top level.