How to play

Mark a pitch about 24 metres long and 18 wide. Put two mini goals on each end line, one near each corner, and mark a shooting zone 6 metres deep across each end.
Make teams of four. Three play and the fourth waits beside the pitch; after every goal, each team brings its fourth player on and takes another off.
No goalkeepers. Each team attacks the two goals at the far end and defends the two at its own end. A goal only counts if the shot is struck inside the shooting zone.
Every restart is a dribble or a pass in from the line. After a goal, the team that conceded starts from its own end line.
Play games of five minutes. With more than eight players, set pitches side by side: after each game the winners move up a pitch and the losers move down.

The decision it trains

The player on the ball has two goals ahead and one question: which one have the defenders left? Three defenders cannot press the ball and guard two goals 14 metres apart at the same time, so one goal is always freer. Dribble at the guarded goal to pull them across, or switch the ball early to the open side. Teammates without the ball spread towards both goals so the switch is there. Defending, each child decides who goes to the ball and who drops to cover the far goal.

Make it harder or easier

Too hardlet a goal count from anywhere in the opponents' half, not only from the shooting zone.

Too easyboth teams may score in any of the four goals, but never twice in a row in the same one, so the attack keeps hunting for the goal nobody is guarding.

Younger playersplay two against two on about 20 by 15 metres, with goals allowed from the halfway line on, and swap one player in after every goal.

What to ask at the breaks

"When you got the ball, where were the defenders, and which goal did that leave you?"

"How did your team get the ball from one side to the other?"

"When you were defending, how did you decide who went to the ball and who stayed by the other goal?"

Where it is played, and what it is called

Each name links to its source

World map: each dot is a country where a game is documented

Where it comes from

Funiño is Horst Wein's game, and he coined the name from the English "fun" and the Spanish "niño". It is the first competition in his model of football made to the child's measure, "Fútbol a la medida del niño", whose book the Spanish federation's research centre published around 1997. A date of 1990 for Funiño itself appears only in second-hand sources. Children play it in Germany (FUNiño), Austria (3er Fußball), Hungary, Finland, France (le multi buts) and Japan (フニーニョ).

Sources (10)