Net success: How goalscoring insights from the boys' academy can help us create inspirational finishing practices for our players

25 Mar 2024

Net success: How goalscoring insights from the boys' academy can help us create inspirational finishing practices for our players

Crafting a practice design that balances ample repetition, realism and relevance can significantly support players’ transferring their learning from practice to game day. In this blog, Game Insights Analyst Aston Cox will explore goalscoring trends within boys’ academy football. The aim is to provide coaches with valuable insight to optimise their practice design and enhance the developmental journey for their players.

Understanding the technical, tactical, physical, social, and psychological needs of your players is crucial to be able to maximise their development and enjoyment. This paired with the understanding of your game format is the perfect combination to be able to facilitate an environment to support your player’s needs. To support the observation presented in this blog, analysis was conducted on 375 goals scored during the boy’s academy games program. However, what impact do the following findings have on your practice design as a coach?

Finishing locations

One aspect that was prevalent and consistent within all four of the ages groups was many goals being scored from the second 6-yard box. This emphasizes the importance of refining finishing skills within the crucial area of the second 6-yard box within practice design. Furthermore, it is also urged to manipulate STEP principles – Space, task, equipment and people to manipulate training environments to provide players with the diverse finishing opportunities they might face within match situations. In addition, whilst the insight highlights the need to provide players with repetition of finishing from the 2^nd 6-yard box, there is an important factor to provide players with a variety of finishing opportunities from different locations. Currently, within your practice design where do your players most commonly practice finishing from?

Finishing techniques

Delving deeper into finishing techniques, it becomes apparent that younger players exhibit a more limited repertoire compared to their older counterparts. While U9s predominantly rely on four finishing techniques (Strike, inside foot, touch, and chip) with 64% of goals being scored with the inside of the foot, older players, particularly U16s demonstrated proficiency in a wider range of finishing techniques (Strike, inside foot, chip, volley, whipped, header and touch) with the two main techniques for goal scoring being a strike with 44% of goals being scored and inside foot with 35%. This emphasises the necessity for tailored practice design aimed at expanding the skills sets of your player whilst encouraging experimentation with a range of different finishing techniques. The question here, is does your practice design act as a facilitator to allow your players to replicate a range of different finish techniques within your sessions?

Assists

Another notable finding is the significance of assists in goal-scoring scenarios. Within this tournament as you analyse the different age groups, there is a marked increase in the utilisation of assists to score goals. The highest was the U16s with 71% of their goals featuring assist, second highest was the U14s with 62%, third highest was the U12s with 53% and finally the U9s with 44%. This suggests that younger players may benefit from developing core skills such as moving with the ball , while older players may need to priorities core skills such as passing and receiving. However, it is crucial to ensure that regardless of age, the coaching environment facilitates the development of core skills necessary for progression along the developmental pathway. Does your practice design feature an array of different assist to create realism within the session?

Ultimately, understanding the interplay between player’s needs, game format and the developmental pathway is crucial to support the needs of your players. By adapting your practice design to meet the needs and wants of your players and taking a holistic approach will allow the development of skills associated with goal scoring.

Coaching considerations

What locations do your players practice finishing from?
Does your practice design facilitate an opportunity for your players to practice a range of finishing techniques?
Are your players practicing core skills associated with different types of assists?