The first session I ever ran on pressing lasted forty minutes and by the end of it I had eleven exhausted thirteen-year-olds and no idea what I'd actually taught them. That was four seasons ago. I'm better at it now, mostly because I've made every available mistake at least twice.
This isn't a guide. It's a list of things I got wrong, which is probably more useful anyway, because the guides all say roughly the same thing and none of them mention the bits that actually go wrong on a wet Tuesday with a squad of teenagers.
Mistake one: I taught the running before the trigger
My first version of pressing coaching was essentially "when they have the ball, go and get it, quickly." Which is not wrong exactly, but it produced a team that sprinted at the ball in ones and twos, arrived out of shape, and got played through constantly. We were the fittest team in the league and we conceded the most goals.
What I eventually understood is that the press is a decision before it's an action. The question isn't "how fast do I run at him," it's "is this the moment." And the moment has specific, teachable characteristics — a bad first touch, a pass played backwards, a receiver facing his own goal, a ball travelling to a weak foot. Those are the triggers. Without them you're just chasing.
The fix was almost stupidly simple. We spent three sessions doing nothing but calling the trigger out loud. Players didn't press at all, they just shouted "now" when they thought the moment had arrived, and we froze the game and looked at whether they were right. Boring? A bit. But after three weeks the whole squad was seeing the same picture, and that's the thing you actually need.
Mistake two: I let the first presser choose his own angle
This one cost us a lot of goals before I noticed it. A striker presses a centre-back and runs straight at him. Perfectly committed, full effort, and completely useless, because running straight at somebody gives them both options — they can play either side of you.
The whole point of the first press is that it isn't really about winning the ball. It's about deleting one option so the rest of the team knows where the ball is going next. Curved run, body shape closing the inside pass, force him wide. Then the winger and full-back on that side already know they're about to be busy, and the far side can slide across.
I now spend more time on the shape of the first presser's run than on almost anything else in the defensive phase. It's the domino that sets up every other domino. And it's the one thing that a single player can get wrong to make ten other players' work pointless.
Mistake three: I never told them when to stop
Nobody talks about this and it might be the biggest one. I taught them to press. I never taught them to abandon a press.
So what happened was, we'd trigger, the opposition would play out of it — because sometimes they just will, that's football — and my players would keep chasing. Three of them, forty yards up the pitch, while the ball travelled into a completely empty midfield. The press had failed twelve seconds ago and nobody had noticed.
Now we have a word for it. Somebody shouts "drop," usually the deepest midfielder, and everybody's job changes instantly from pressing to recovering the block. It took about half a season to become automatic. The word itself doesn't matter, what matters is that abandoning the press is a positive, coached action rather than a failure that nobody wants to admit to.
Mistake four: I ignored the goalkeeper entirely
For two full seasons my keeper had no role in the press other than "be ready." Meanwhile every high press in the world creates the same vulnerability — a huge space behind the defensive line — and there's exactly one player positioned to defend it.
Getting a fourteen-year-old goalkeeper to start his sweeping position on the edge of the eighteen-yard box, and to move up as the team moves up, was genuinely hard. Keepers at that age have been taught for years to stay near their line. Every instinct says stay. And the first time he comes twenty yards out and gets chipped, in front of parents, it is not a fun afternoon for anybody.
But you can't press high with a keeper on his line. You just can't. Either the line drops and the press becomes disconnected, or the space behind is undefended. I wish I'd started that work two years earlier than I did.
Mistake five: I assumed effort was the variable
The one I'm least proud of. When the press wasn't working, my instinct was to demand more intensity. More running, more urgency, more want-it. And there were days when that was fair, teenagers being teenagers.
But mostly the problem was structural, not motivational, and shouting at a kid for a coaching error I'd made is not a great look. If three players press and two don't, it's usually because those two don't know that they're supposed to, or they can't see the trigger from where they're standing. That's a coaching problem wearing the costume of an attitude problem.
These days when the press breaks down I ask the players what they saw. Not rhetorically — actually asking. About a third of the time the answer reveals something I hadn't considered, like the fact that our left winger literally could not see the ball at the moment of the trigger because he was ball-watching from a position I'd told him to take up.
Where we ended up
We press now. Not brilliantly, but recognisably, and mostly at sensible moments. We're not the fittest team in the league anymore and we concede fewer goals, which tells you something about how much of the early running was wasted.
If I could pass on one thing to somebody starting this work it would be: press less, but press together. Five well-timed presses in a half that all involve four players are worth more than thirty desperate individual sprints. Youth players will give you the effort. Your job is to spend it well, and for a couple of years there I spent it very badly indeed.