Early Engagement Guide
Read the information below to understand what early engagement is, then watch the video above and refer back to it while working with your son or daughter.
What is Early Engagement?
Early engagement means learning to control and manipulate the ball early in life, at the youngest ages. Basically, as soon as your child can walk, you should have them engaging with a ball.
Think of this early engagement as a huge head start for them in soccer, much like language learning where starting early is a huge advantage for fluency.
A child’s brain is 95% developed by the age of 6 and the feet, which are the furthest distance away from the brain, rarely have an opportunity to develop neural pathways linked to the cerebellum, which is crucial for motor learning.
Early engagement helps to establish neural pathways and by repeating movements, this hardwires the brain into memory where technical soccer skills can be used later in more of an automated, unconscious way.
What size soccer balls do I need?
It is helpful to have soccer balls of different sizes for variety and increased learning, so get a size 2 and a size 4, plus a tennis ball.
What exercises should my child be doing?
You should encourage your son or daughter to use different parts of their feet to move and manipulate the ball, including the use of their sole which is crucial.
The video above shows the basic movements your child should be doing with the ball. Allow them to experiment but encourage them to use BOTH feet as much as possible.
Engaging in these ball mastery exercises at a young age also helps to develop cognitive, emotional, social and physical skills.
It takes a certain level of focus, concentration and discipline to stay on task; paying attention is perhaps one of the most important skills any parent can help their child to develop.
*Note – in addition to these footwork exercises, once your child is around 6 years old, they should also starting doing ‘ball and wall’ passing exercises to work on passing & control with both feet. This will speed their development.
**See STEP 2: Individual Training for guidance on ‘ball and wall’ exercises.
What is the end result of doing this training?
If your child starts at a young age, they’ll be capable of this kind of ball control and manipulation by the time they are 6 or 7 years old (video below).
That sets them up to be able to compete and improve quicker during team training with other players, once they go into the team environment.
Can I learn more about early engagement?
If you want to do a deep dive into early engagement, get the FREE eBook ‘Football Starts At Home’ by American coach Tom Byer who is an expert in this area:
If you want to see progression examples from age 2 to age 8 using basic footwork exercises, click the YouTube link below to view Tom Byer’s playlist: