 What's up? Do you have a big game coming up and you really want to perform because I'm about to show you how to play soccer better in your next match? If you don't know about me, I used to be a huge underachiever, but through obsessive self-improvement, I found my success. Earned a college scholarship, played for my national football team, a YouTube channel with over 100 million views, I've helped players worldwide and I'd love to help you improve faster and achieve more. For the longest time, I did what most players do. When I practiced by myself, I spent time on freestyle tricks and hitting free kicks. The truth was I was underperforming and I wasn't playing well in games. It was only when I decided to change the way that I trained and really focused on becoming a better player every time I showed up to my next game that I started to see changes in my performances. Eventually, I created some reliable strategies that helped me perform more consistently and my coaches, teammates and everyone started to notice. Let me show you five strategies that you can use to play better soccer in your next match. Train with purpose, intensity and consistency. You have a game coming up. You need to make sure that your training is actually going to make you a better player in that game. So if you're just spending all your time doing freestyle tricks and hitting dead balls, which you do maybe once or twice per game, is that actually going to help you improve? Yes, you can do those things, but it's more important to focus on things like finishing, shooting, dribbling with speed and intensity, practicing your ball control, working on your sprinting, your speed and your fitness. Make sure that you're using intensity. So if the drills are easy, you're going too slow, you're not pushing yourself. It's not replicating a match speed and it's not going to help you in a game. Consistency is so important to train every day. On the field now, what you want to think about when you're defending your man is being goal side inside. So what I mean by that goal side, you are closer to your goal than the player that you are defending. Okay, so if I'm defending this player here, I'm responsible for him. If he's on this side of me, I am not a goal side of him. He is goal side of me. So I want to get a goal side of him. Now obviously, if you're playing offside, you don't want to be sitting back here because you'll keep everyone onside. So if you're on that last line, then you can get up here, you'll force him to come up and you still have to be aware of them. Maybe he's trying to be sneaky clever. Okay, but in most situations, you want to be goal side. So closer to your goal than that player on the ball. Now you still want to be close enough to them that when they receive that ball, you're right on top. Okay, so number one goal side inside. So I want to be inside. I want to be closer to my net than him. So if he's here and I'm there, he is inside of me. So he is on the inside of the goal. He has a better opportunity to score. If I'm defending, I want to get narrow, tight to my other defenders. I want to be inside of him who is closest to the ball needs to press. Now in certain situations, let's say somewhere up here where you're further away from your goal. If you like this content, check out the soccer success planner. You can download it for free. There's a link in the description below. And for advanced training, check out the online soccer account. You can press with more intensity. You can run in there really fast, risk it a little risk getting beaten a little bit and press with high intensity. In other situations, let's say you're in one on one here, you need to be a little more cautious. However, you still need to close the space and not allow this player on the ball to make forward passes to get crosses into the box or shots onto your net. So if you are the closest player on the ball, you need to press, close that space down. Everyone else wants to think about covering. So press. If you're closest to the ball, you want to press. If you're not closest to the ball, you want to think about covering the next potential pass. So let's say the ball gets shifted out here. Okay, how does everyone adjust? So who is closest to the ball? This player is probably closest to the ball. He's going to press. Okay, everyone else and we'll make some runs by other players. Something like that. Okay, everyone else is thinking about covering. So he's going to come in here, cover this, he's going to come in here. Remember both my inside cover that he might cover something like this. He's going to come around here. Think about blocking this pass off and he can even think about doubling up something like that. He might come in here and cover that. This guy's going to get cool side inside like that. We're nice and narrow. Everyone's thinking about covering the next potential pass. So when you are attacking, do not stand still. Now saying that if I have lots of open space, sometimes the best thing is to stand still. So you need to be aware of where the space is. If you are not in open space, you're getting defended. Well, then you want to think about your movement. So do not stand still. Now, what types of movements should you make? Well, when this player is on the ball, you either want to think about making a forward run into space, forward run into space, forward run into space, or you want to think about supporting the ball. Okay, giving different passing angles. So helping him if he gets in trouble, we're not just standing there watching him. We want to think about, Hey, if this guy does get in trouble, where should I be so I can give him the best possible way to get out? Think about playing forward whenever possible. And you want to think about keeping possession. Okay, so this ball is the most valuable thing on the field. We want to keep possession. We do not want to give it away to the other team. However, if we are keeping possession, and we're not making anything happen, and we're just keeping possession, and we're forcing ourselves to play deeper and getting ourselves into dangerous positions, just because we want to keep possession. Well, this can be a very dangerous game. So you want possession with a purpose. So in order to play with purpose, you want to think about every time I can get my head up, I want to play a forward pass. Now that doesn't mean just kicking up the field and everyone run after it. What that means is I want to be composed. But when I get my head up and I see that I have a teammate in a position and an advanced position, I want to get him the ball. Because when we do that, then we can start creating chances for our team. Okay, so whenever possible, get your head up, can you play forward? Get your head up, can you play forward? And when you have that mentality of always trying to play forward, always trying to create chances without risking without forcing the play and giving the ball away. Okay, if you realize that you're in a situation where hey, this is really high pressure, I can't play forward in this position. Well, now we will keep possession, we'll change the angle. And then we'll try to play forward again. It's one thing to know what to do. It's a completely different thing to do it at match speed. So when you're in the game, focus on your speed of play. Defensively, how quickly can you get into position, attacking? How quickly can you execute your basic skills? Never let a lack of effort be the reason that you lost. If you were outperformed, you were beat by a really good team or a really good player, fine, that's life, you'll take that lesson and you'll learn from it, you'll get motivation from it. But never let the reason that you lost be because you chose to give up, you chose to not give your best effort. So what does hard work look like? It can be closing players down, not giving them any time to play or get their head up, beating your opposition to the ball and choosing to be strong on the ball, not getting pushed around. It means getting forward and tracking back when things don't work out, not complaining, not whining, just putting in the work, working hard off the ball when you don't have the ball at your feet, making four runs to get in the box and tracking back to help out on defense. It's so important that when you're playing, you do not stop running when you are tired, you stop when the job is done. If you like this content, check out the Soccer Success Planner, you can download it for free. There's a link in the description below. And for advanced training, check out the Online Soccer Academy.