Create and use space: complete football session
Complete football session to create and use space: a game, a situation and a final game, with session sheets, video and animated diagram.
SÉANCE PAR THÈME
6/16/20253 min read
Introduction to training sessions
Football is a team sport that demands not only individual skills but also a good understanding of how the game works. In this article, we'll explore how to create and use space during football training sessions. Whether you're a coach, a player or simply a fan, understanding how to manipulate space on the pitch is essential to improving your game.
So the phase of play will be: "We have the ball – keep possession and progress"
and the game principle will be: "Create and use space"
The session will be made up of a game, a situation and a final game.
The first game
To get familiar with the session, the first activity is a game. Its objective is to improve collective and individual movement but above all to improve the quality of the receive-and-pass sequence.
The pitch measures 50 x 40 m, and the blue inner zone 40 x 20 m.
The difficulty of this game lies in its objective: the blue zone will be crowded with players, forcing them to play quickly and therefore improve their ability to control and pass in one movement (don't forget to scan before receiving the ball). There is also a second aspect to consider: the players are confined to zones, and those outside the blue zone have little space and few touches. All of this highlights how to move collectively and individually to progress forward with the ball, and therefore to create and use space.
The situation
Now we get to the heart of the session with the situation. It follows on from the game and allows us to work on the previous objectives in even more depth.
Don't forget that a situation is a match situation recreated in training. Here we'll use collective and individual movement and the receive-and-pass sequence (objective of game 1) to work on the objective of our situation: improve the team's ability not to lose the ball before playing forward.
The situation takes place on half a pitch with no zone restrictions. The setup is up to the coach and his style of play (system): a chance to kill two birds with one stone, combining the game principle and the system of play for better progress!
A specific instruction (applying to all situations): as soon as the ball goes out of play (throw-ins), whether in our favour or not, play restarts automatically from the goalkeeper and it counts as 1 action. Every 5 actions the teams switch sides, and therefore goals, until you reach 15 or 20 minutes.
The final game
The game that closes the session isn't necessarily very complicated. On the contrary, it almost always has simpler instructions than the first game, but it isn't necessarily easier, because it's designed to put into practice everything seen during the session.
This end-of-session game is almost identical to the first game: one pitch with a blue zone where players are confined, but this time it's a match with a goalkeeper for both teams. The pitch is bigger (from one penalty area to the other), and there's a stricter restriction (2 touches) for players outside the blue zone.
For variations: to make the game easier, you can allow a support player to enter the blue zone to create an overload, but he must leave it after touching and releasing the ball. To make it harder, impose a minimum of 3 passes in the blue zone before you can score, which forces players to secure possession before scoring.
The 3 activities as animated diagrams
🎧 Watch in English: on YouTube, click ⚙️ Settings › Audio track › English. You can also turn on English subtitles in ⚙️ Settings › Subtitles.