Is Your Training Session Really Just About Completing a Few Drills?

European youth academies have a different understanding of fundamentals training. By not piling up technical drill volume week after week, they not only protect children from potential injuries caused by overtraining, but more importantly, their session designs are much closer to real match play, focusing early on developing children's ability to read and understand football and matches.

Fundamentals, meanwhile, gradually take shape through the accumulation of reasonable training hours over time. However, in many traditional training systems, daily sessions are dominated by fundamentals training, which leads to a confusion many people can't understand:

Why do Chinese players often have solid fundamentals, yet once a real match starts, they move like "wooden puppets"?

Isolated Fundamentals Training

We have always been fascinated by the mechanism through which players read the game and react on the pitch. A child's decision-making ability and capacity to adapt to rapidly changing match scenarios are the most important factors in determining whether they become a player who truly understands the game and is more creative.

Everyone has likely noticed that in younger age groups, such as U8 competitions, our children do show advantages in fundamentals, and these advantages bring some benefit to their matches.

But by around age 14, our children already appear to struggle in international competitions. After 18, in adult-level matches, no one would deny that the gaps in every aspect have become glaringly obvious.

In the earlier days of traditional football powerhouses like Germany and England, the approach to training children focused more on technical movement drills detached from match play, what we commonly call fundamentals training. But gradually, they discovered this teaching approach wasn't quite right.

After extensive and deep reforms, European youth development philosophy now leans toward less isolated fundamentals training. What are the reasons behind this?

In our view, isolated fundamentals training is a singular activity without many variables.

It does develop better foot technique, more standardized movements, and the ability to handle the ball independently. But it cannot develop a child's understanding of and adaptation to matches, it may even hinder their exploration in this area.

A player's adaptation to match environment variables and their quick, even instinctive, reactions actually come from their ability to read and make decisions based on the information around them. We often discuss the differences between how foreign children and domestic children play football, always puzzled by the question: "Why do Chinese children seem so stiff and mechanical once they step onto the pitch?"

Think about it: when we do isolated fundamentals drills, children don't need to consider anything around them at all. They're doing an unchallenging, pressure-free exercise within a fixed field of vision.

But in real football, in real matches, everything on the pitch changes in the blink of an eye. Every second looks vastly different.

If we could incorporate more of this kind of practice into children's training, getting them accustomed to fast-paced, rapidly changing environments from the very start, would we still worry about them becoming "wooden puppets" on the pitch?

Why Are We So Obsessed with Fundamentals?

The reason we see nothing wrong with the idea that "you must first learn basic technical movements before you can understand football" is that we rarely consider football education from the perspective of the child's development. Our thinking and awareness always stop at things that provide a sense of "immediate" success.

For example, many session designs exist solely for children to complete a formulaic set of movements.

These isolated fundamentals drill packages are like semester report cards for children, completing them and doing them well seems to mean children have truly learned and understood.

Our coaches are caught in a misconception, confusing the difference between "performance" and "learning."

Many coaches have an ingrained habit of thinking that children's football training must have a very high success rate, and that any mistake by a child is bad and wrong.

So to achieve this effect, many session designs are built on the premise of ensuring high success rates.

This way, when children achieve high success rates in training, whether in passing or shooting, we misinterpret this success as the child "having learned something" and subconsciously assume the child will naturally transfer what they've learned to match-related scenarios.

This subconscious conceptual transfer is like believing that dribbling around cones trains the skill of beating a defender.

No, what the child has learned is only how to dribble around cones, not how to beat a defender.

Why Does This "Pseudo-Teaching" Exist?

Thinking it through carefully, there seem to be three issues lulling us into complacency:

1. "Practice makes perfect";
2. Coaches and parents feel very satisfied when they see children "successfully" complete a set of movements following instructions during training;
3. It seems like everyone thinks this way and teaches this way.

Thinking about it in reverse, the reason isolated fundamentals sessions are so widespread is precisely because of their high success rate. For example, a child passing 200 times in 5 minutes versus helping a child understand when to pass, these are completely different levels of difficulty.

"Immediate success" makes both coaches and children feel they've learned passing.

But learning and understanding are two completely different levels.

The gap between these two levels is the child's ability to transform technique into match decision-making.

The reason we develop a habitual psychological dependence on isolated fundamentals training is mainly our short-sightedness and ignorance in teaching. Like all other education, we've become accustomed to certain "immediate," visible successes and mistake them for the child's growth.

While isolated fundamentals training does develop better foot technique, more standardized movements, and the ability to handle the ball independently, it cannot develop a child's understanding of and adaptation to matches, it may even hinder their exploration and growth in the direction of creativity.

A player's adaptation to match environment variables and their quick, even instinctive, reactions actually come from their ability to read and make decisions based on the information around them. For example, their understanding of match rules and the match environment allows them to begin to understand, adapt to, and quickly process the variables that appear in any scenario, and these variables are what determine the tactics on the pitch at that moment.

But isolated fundamentals simply cannot achieve this purpose.

Exposing children to more match-scenario-related training early on is extraordinarily important for developing their creativity. When a coach tells a child to avoid this cone, go to that zone, pass in that direction, and so on, does the child know why they're doing it? Are they just doing it to complete the movement? These are questions we should be asking.

Everything Should Be "Match-Related"

When our training is designed with no connection to real matches, based only on the coach's assumptions or because the training they themselves received was just like this...

Then when children step onto the real match pitch and find that everything is inconsistent with what they've been practicing for so long, problems will inevitably arise.

Football, based on dynamic information on the match pitch and communication within the team, is a sport that requires making large numbers of rapid decisions.

Every session design should contain more choices and possibilities for "football actions." Every scenario should place children within dynamic variables, leaving the decision-making power on the pitch to the children.

The coach's direct instructions should focus more on establishing rules, rather than dominating every second of the session. Give the decision-making power back to the children (for example, traditional passing drills where A passes to B and B passes to C involve absolutely no decision-making). The coach's energy should go more into session design, the theme of each session and the rules of each segment.

More clearly theme-oriented rules can guide children to identify how many players are in a specific area, how many balls are in play. In other words, when children begin to notice their surrounding environment and analyze the information they receive, they can make better decisions.

This approach is fundamentally about aligning with the principle of "match-relatedness."

When our coaches start focusing on designing "games" related to match play for each segment of training, and skillfully leverage the power of rules to make training closer to real matches, children's decision-making ability and creativity will naturally continue to develop.