Doing The Math- Taking a Look At The Practice-to-Game Ratio

By Michael Jones

I just found out that some parents of the kids on the U-10 travel team I coach have entered the team into the first session of indoor play at our local dome. While there is nothing I can do to actually stop them, as the team’s coach, I would recommend that we don’t do that. The fall season only ended a week ago and the “spring” season for our club usually starts around early December when the second session of indoor play begins. A few weeks off in between is good for the kids, I believe.

What's more, our club does not have available practice fields at this time of year, and I don?t like the idea of playing seven or eight consecutive games of competitive soccer with no regular practice schedule set up between the matches.

But the biggest problem I have with yet another session of indoor play is that it contributes to a practice-to-game ratio that is already way out of whack for most American youth players.

Three times in the last few months, I have come across stories that have addressed this issue. This past summer, I interviewed a coach from a U12 Everton side that caused a stir while visiting the New England Soccer School in Amesbury, MA. Tony ‘Tosh’ Farrell described his charges’ training regimen as being “coached three times a week before taking part in a Sunday fixture.” Earlier this year, in researching a story about Inter Bandits SC, I uncovered a snippet about a young player from Newton, MA who attended Birmingham City’s youth academy in England and also took part in “three practices a week and a game at the weekend.”

And in last month’s 90 Minutes With Mike Singleton, the Mass. Youth Soccer State Coach lamented the number of games players play declaring that “the ratio of games to practices should be more like one-to-five.”

And none of these statements came as a surprise to me. I have always just taken it as a given that soccer players should practice more than they play, just like a pianist will spend many more hours rehearsing than performing.

By my recollection, it all goes back to the 1970s when, as a teenager, I witnessed two successive World Cups for which my home nation, England, failed to qualify. As you can imagine, this was the cause of a national identity crisis and forced a complacent soccer community to do a lot of soul searching about why we were no longer producing top-class players. That search focused mostly across the North Sea in Holland, where a country that was a fraction of the size of England had suddenly started producing the best players in the world and a team that made the World Cup final in both 1974 and 1978. Two things the English learned from the Dutch were to use small-sided games to teach children to play and to maintain a 3-1 practice-to-game ratio.

The first of those concepts seems to have successfully made it across the Atlantic, but the second seems to have come to rest somewhere near the Titanic. And soccer, it seems, is not the only sport that is suffering.

In researching this piece I came across a fascinating article in the Toronto Globe and Mail. The story lamented the fact that Canada, with three times as many arenas as all of Europe, and with 3.5 times as many youth players as Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Russia combined, was no longer producing the world’s top hockey players. One of the stated reasons was the large number of competitive games played by Canadian youth players.

“The practice-to-game ratio is consistently higher in Europe than in Canada’s game-oriented system,” the article noted. “A Canadian eight-year-old may practice once for every two games played. In Europe, the ratio is turned around, so a child gets three practices to every game.”

The story went on to note that the one position at which the Canadians were still able to produce world class players was goaltender, because kids face so many shots in heated competitive games.

Sound familiar?

Of course it’s not hard to see where Czech, Swedish, and Russian hockey coaches got the idea of a three-to-one ratio. They’re all probably soccer fans and, like the English, they were sitting at home on their couches watching the 1974 World Cup and wondering how the Dutch got to be so good so quickly. The hard lessons their soccer coaches learned in the 1970s were no doubt quickly translated to hockey, and Eastern Europe was soon able to overtake Canada as the top producer of hockey talent in the world.

All of which brings me back to the kids on my travel team. In the past twelve months, many of these kids have played three sessions of indoor (21 games, plus one or two more if they make the playoffs); two eight-week seasons of outdoor, one in the spring and one in the fall (sixteen games); at least two indoor tournaments (six games minimum and more if they advanced out of their groups); and two more outdoor tournaments (six more games guaranteed there). Some of the better players also play for a local premier club which also has eight week outdoor spring and fall seasons of its own and enters its own selection of indoor and outdoor tournaments.

So the top players on my team are playing roughly 75 competitive games a year, while most of the others are playing at least 50. And they are nine years old!

50 to 75 games a year at age nine can easily translate into 75 to 100 by age twelve and 120-plus by age fifteen. Meanwhile, the Everton Academy that gave us Wayne Rooney, the most gifted teenage player of his generation, plays roughly 40 to 45 competitive games a year.

The net result of this competition is that players simply do not have the time to learn the game properly, particularly the technical skills necessary to play at a high level. Players get far fewer touches on the ball in a game situation than they would in a well-run practice, and they will seldom try a move that they have not already perfected when they are in the heat of competition. Moreover, the focus on competitive games will often affect how the practices themselves are run, with emphasis on tactics, set plays and conditioning rather than technical development.

So we have twelve-year-olds who do not know how to execute a chest-trap properly, fourteen-year-olds whose heading technique is flawed and sixteen-year-olds who do not know how to bend a ball.

So, coaches and parents, do the math on your own children. Add up the number of competitive games they are playing and compare that to the number of practices. If your players are not attending at least 2 or 3 times as many practices as games, there is a problem. Solving that problem will go a long way towards producing better soccer players in the long run.