Soccer Leaders Home >

Basic Guide to Formations & Positional Training: 2: Defensive & Attacking Styles

Picking a Defensive Style of Play

With just a little direction, even very young players will be able to understand that if their team sends everyone to the opposing goal, their own goal will be wide-open and vulnerable to a counterattack. But, of course, if everyone stays back to guard their goal, they won’t ever score or have any fun at all.

One good approach is to ask your players to think up some solutions to the defensive problem. One of the first suggestions that you’ll probably get is to leave somebody by the goal. However, when you ask for volunteers, you are likely to find that everyone will want to be in the attacking group. Well, if nobody wants to stay to guard the goal, then what other solutions are available?

Option 1: Man-Marking

One defensive solution is to have everyone pick one of the players on the other team to guard when the other team has the ball. Instantly, you have introduced the concepts of marking and following your mark. But, what happens if somebody loses his mark, either because he gets distracted or is slower than his mark or is simply beaten? Well, then you need to have the nearest available player jump in and cover for him, right? This is the second basic element of defensive support and needs to be learned and re-learned constantly. However, man-marking may be unsuited for players below U-10s, as they tend to be very easily distracted. In addition, because of the lack of size and strength in the younger groups, most opposing players tend not to be scoring threats until fairly close to goal so it may well be a waste of defensive manpower to mark players outside of scoring range.

Option 2: High Pressure Defense (Defensive Swarm)

If young children are put onto a field with a soccer ball, divided into teams, and just told to use their feet to kick the ball into the goal of the opponent, they will instinctively play “swarm ball” (or “magnet ball” or take the “beehive” approach to the game. Why? Because they all like to be where the action is which, oddly enough, is where the ball is. As a result, they instinctively are applying a defensive style which is known as “high-pressure defense”, in which several players try to surround the opponent and keep him from going forward.

Is the swarm a “bad” thing? Not necessarily so, at least from a defensive standpoint, as long as any attackers that choose to stay out of the swarm are accounted for. The swarm actually tends to be very effective at shutting down attacks by an opponent until the opposition learns to spread out on its attacks and develops the skill to accurately pass the ball to open players. Moreover, kids tend to adjust automatically as the swarm becomes less effective, so the size of the swarm naturally gets smaller over time even without coaching intervention.

Whether or not to permit a swarm obviously will depend on the number of players that you have on the field. In 3v3 or 4v4, it will be harder to swarm with more than 2 players, because you will leave your goal wide open. In 6v6 or above, it is possible to use a multi-person swarm fairly effectively.

Option 3: Low-Pressure Defense

There is also another defensive solution available which is relatively easy for younger players to execute. In this solution, you can send 1 player to slow down the person with the ball and another one to back him up in order to give everyone else on the team time to get back and set up in front of the goal area. This is called “low-pressure defense,” and is an approach which can work well IF 1) the pressuring players know how to do their jobs and 2) the retreating players are ready to become the pressuring players themselves if the ball is played to an attacker who is close to them. In fact, many top-level international teams use the low-pressure defensive system, so we weren’t kidding when we said that a defensive “swarm” is not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, attacking players must be closely marked when they get into scoring range, particularly when they’ve developed the leg strength to make lofted shots on goal.

Handling Other Common Defensive Problems

What happens if the other team has some really fast players? Well, if you also have some really fast players who are good defensively, one easy solution is to man-mark these particular threats even if you are using a low-pressure or high-pressure system overall. Also bear in mind that even a slow defender can be quite effective in stopping a speedy attacker once he learns basic defensive footwork and positioning. Lots of players who have had exposure to other sports such as basketball will already have been exposed to these concepts. Essentially, the job of the initial pressuring defender is to slow the attacker down by getting in his way, giving ground as slowly as possible, but not making any attempt to win the ball until cover has arrived. This is a job that anyone can do with practice, so don’t allow your slower players to avoid learning these vital skills because of their lack of speed.

Picking an Attacking Style of Play

Once you have decided on the best way to defend your own goal, then you are ready to decide on the best way to attack your opponent’s. Many youth coaches are inclined to put their biggest/fastest kids as attackers to try to outrun the opposition, and to try to get the ball to these speedsters as quickly as possible by having their defenders ‘boot it” down the field. While this approach, known as “boot-ball”, is somewhat similar to an attacking style known as “direct play” it is done with considerably less finesse.

Although this approach may be effective initially, it doesn’t tend to produce good soccer players in the long run for a couple of reasons. First, it promotes over-specialization since nobody gets to be an attacker except for 1-2 stars and all the rest of the team learns is how to kick the ball hard and far. Second, it fails to teach any of the players how to retain the ball in tighter spaces by using teammates. Over time, the early-maturing players who were the “stars” on these teams lose their size/speed advantage as puberty starts to level the playing field. Additionally, since all they know is how to be a fast-break forward, most upper-level teams will not be interested in them. Meanwhile, the supporting players whose only job was to mindlessly boot the ball up-field to the stars will not have any ball control skills and will likely have only mediocre defensive skills as well. So, resist the temptation to adopt the boot-ball style of play.

In the long run, the best future training for players is to teach “possession-style” soccer based upon the basic offensive positioning noted above. In this approach to the game, players are taught to control the ball well by using their body and feet to shield it from an opponent. They are also taught to use supporting teammates to move the ball in tight spaces by means of short passes which get longer as they develop strength and ball control. Additionally, they pick up the courage/ability to take on a pressuring opponent by dribbling. After developing these skills early in a small-sided setting (e.g. 1 v 1, 2 v 1, 3 v 3, etc.), the players will have little difficulty when extra players are added into the mix as the extra players will simply provide additional options on where to move the ball.

For suggestions on how to train your players in these basic positions, see the Practice Plan section.

[source:  Soccer-Coach-L manual.  Updated 6 April 1999. 
Read these legal and copyright notices before using any Soccer-Coach-L material…]

<< Back to main page