---
title: "Driblinho"
description: "One player keeps the ball from two in a small square; lose it and you hunt it back. A Brazilian street game for the 1v2 moment."
canonical: https://hobbit.football/drills/driblinho
language: en
publisher: Hobbit (https://hobbit.football)
---

# Driblinho

> One player keeps the ball from two in a small square; lose it and you hunt it back. A Brazilian street game for the 1v2 moment.

U7 to U12 · 3 to 3 players · 10 × 10 m · 8 min

Also called Driblinha, Dribbel-Spiel Lionel Messi.

![Diagram of Driblinho](https://hobbit.football/api/game-library/diagram/driblinho)

## How to play

1. Make groups of three, each with one ball and its own 10 by 10 metre square, the squares side by side so every group plays at once.
2. One player dribbles and tries to keep the ball; the other two try to win it.
3. Whoever wins the ball becomes the dribbler, and the player who lost it joins the hunters straight away.
4. A ball that leaves the square goes to the nearest hunter. Play 60-second rounds: whoever has the ball when the coach calls time wins the round. Then change groups.

## The decision it trains

The dribbler faces two players at once and keeps choosing: shield the ball from the nearer one, escape into the space the pair has left, or take one of them on, and which one. The two hunters decide as a pair: who goes to the ball and who cuts off the escape. Because the ball changes hands all the time, every player keeps switching between keeping it and winning it back.

## Make it harder or easier

- **Too hard:** grow the square to 12 by 12 metres, so the dribbler has room to escape.
- **Too easy:** a dribbler who takes the ball through the gap between the two hunters scores a point on the spot.
- **Younger players:** start with one hunter while the third player counts out loud how long the dribbler keeps the ball, and rotate all three roles.

## What to ask at the breaks

- "When did you protect the ball, and when did you go past someone?"
- "Hunters: how did you two decide who went to the ball?"
- "When two players came at you, where was the space?"

## Where it comes from

It is a Brazilian street game. Its rules come from a single observation in Alcides Scaglia's 2003 doctoral thesis at Unicamp: a boy kept the ball from two girls and, when he lost it, tried to win it back from them. A 2018 school report presented at the University of São Paulo calls it driblinha, and its pupils decided it is a different game from bobinho, the Brazilian piggy in the middle. No date of origin is documented.

## Documented by

- German regional FAs (Bavaria, Hamburg, South Baden) (Germany): Dribbel-Spiel Lionel Messi
- US Youth Soccer (United States)
- Unicamp (Brazil): Driblinho
- Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil): Driblinha

```json
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@type": "Article",
      "headline": "Driblinho",
      "description": "One player keeps the ball from two in a small square; lose it and you hunt it back. A Brazilian street game for the 1v2 moment.",
      "url": "https://hobbit.football/drills/driblinho",
      "mainEntityOfPage": "https://hobbit.football/drills/driblinho",
      "inLanguage": "en",
      "publisher": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "@id": "https://hobbit.football/#organization",
        "name": "Hobbit",
        "alternateName": "Hobbit AI",
        "url": "https://hobbit.football",
        "logo": {
          "@type": "ImageObject",
          "url": "https://hobbit.football/icon-512.png"
        },
        "sameAs": [
          "https://x.com/pc_hobbit"
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}
```