Italian Academy Training Sessions for U11-U14 - a Complete Soccer Coaching Program

Book excerpt: Soccer Italian Style coaches Mirko Mazzantini (AFC Fiorentina) and Simone Bombardieri (Empoli FC) are both professional football coaches and in this book provide a full soccer training program from their top Italian Serie 'A' academies. This book contains 12 complete soccer training sessions detailing over 80 practices and progressions as used in the academies of the Serie 'A'. Each session focuses on technical or tactical elements of training and are structured "from simple practices to more complex game situations." This outlines a complete program of training across the 12 sessions. The 12 sessions (over 80 practices) cover the following attributes: Technical training; passing and receiving, quick combination play, possession, ball control and dribbling, 1 v 1's, feints and moves to beat, crossing, finishing, shooting and heading, football specific conditioning with and without the ball, coordination, acceleration, speed, and agility training. Tactical training; game situations, tactical small sided games, phase of plays, creating space and improving game intelligence, possession play, attacking combinations, Psycho-Kinetics (Think and Act Quickly), quick transitional play, defensive positioning, set plays, build-up play from the back and more. Most of the practices cleverly structured for "global training" which means working on more than one attribute at the same time. This is valid for all players, with drills and exercises for specific roles (Attackers, midfielders and defenders). There are also numerous variations for many of the practices, meaning that the 12 sessions can be repeated again and again providing great practices for any coach to produce academy level training sessions.