I watched an under-10s session last spring where the coach spent twelve minutes explaining pressing triggers to a group of nine-year-olds using a tactics board. Twelve minutes. The kids were, to their enormous credit, mostly quiet. One of them was lying on the grass. Another asked if they could play a game yet.

Nothing about that coach was lazy or unqualified. He'd clearly done his badges, he knew his stuff, and he was trying hard to deliver something serious. That's exactly the problem. He was delivering a professional session to children, and the professional session isn't designed for children.

The trickle-down that went wrong

Youth coaching has improved enormously in twenty years and I don't want to be the person who says everything was better before. It wasn't. The old model of "run laps, then a match, then more laps" produced fitter kids and worse footballers.

But the correction has overshot in a particular direction. What's trickled down from elite football isn't primarily the good stuff — the individual technical work, the small-sided games, the emphasis on touches — it's the organisational stuff. Formations. Positional discipline. Tactical instructions. Because that's what's visible when you watch professional football, and it's what feels like real coaching.

The result is a lot of eleven-year-olds who know what a half-space is and can't turn under pressure.

What children actually can't do yet

Some of this is developmental and not up for negotiation.

Peripheral vision and the ability to track multiple moving objects develops well into the teenage years. A ten-year-old genuinely cannot scan a pitch the way a sixteen-year-old can. So when we ask them to check their shoulder before receiving, we're asking for something their visual system isn't fully wired for. Some will manage it. Most will nod, agree, and then not do it, not out of defiance but because the information doesn't stick.

Working memory is the other big one. An adult can hold four or five tactical instructions and apply them situationally. A young child can hold about one, and under the arousal of a competitive match, sometimes zero. Every additional instruction you give doesn't add — it displaces. The fifth thing you say pushes out the first thing you said.

And then there's the simple fact that their bodies keep changing. A kid who could strike a ball cleanly in September can look like a newborn giraffe by March because he's grown eleven centimetres. Coaching him harder is not the answer, and criticising his technique during that window can do genuine damage to his confidence.

What they can do brilliantly

Here's the flip side, and it's the part I think we waste.

Children learn movement patterns faster than adults. Substantially faster. The window for acquiring complex coordination — the kind that underpins a first touch, a body feint, a strike through the ball — is wide open in the years we spend teaching them where to stand.

They also learn implicitly far better than explicitly. Put a child in a game situation that repeatedly presents a problem, and they'll solve it, and the solution will be durable in a way that a verbally instructed solution never is. Tell them the same thing and it lasts about a fortnight.

This suggests a fairly clear priority order for the ages up to about twelve: touches on the ball, game situations, and problems to solve. Not shape, not roles, not phases of play.

Practical things I've changed

I've been at this long enough to have swung too far in both directions, so take these as adjustments rather than gospel.

Talk less by about half. I now aim for instructions under fifteen seconds. If I can't say it in fifteen seconds, the problem is that I haven't designed the practice properly and I'm compensating with words.

Change the game, not the player. If I want more forward passes, I make forward passes worth two points. If I want them to play out from the back, the pitch gets a zone near the goal where defenders can't be pressed. The rules teach it. I don't have to.

Let positions rotate absurdly. Everyone plays everywhere until at least thirteen. Yes, including in matches, and yes, it costs results. A kid who's only ever played centre-back has a narrower football education than one who's spent time confused in central midfield.

Stop coaching during matches. This was the hardest for me. Standing on a touchline shouting positional corrections at children is, I've come to think, almost entirely counterproductive. They can't process it, it makes them look at me rather than the game, and it teaches them that decisions come from outside. Now I mostly write things down and we look at them on Tuesday.

The results problem

None of this survives contact with a league table, and that's the honest obstacle. If your under-11s league keeps standings, publishes them, and parents read them, then every incentive points towards playing your biggest kids at the back, hoofing it, and winning 2-0.

I don't have a clean answer to that beyond saying it's a structural problem rather than a coaching one. The countries that develop players best have mostly removed competitive tables at young ages, and it's not a coincidence. Where that hasn't happened, individual coaches are being asked to sacrifice short-term results for long-term development while being judged on the short-term results. Some will. Many won't, and I find it hard to blame them.

But within whatever constraints you've got — talk less, play more, let them solve things. The tactics board can wait a few years. It'll still be there.