What Football Should Really Teach Your Toddler

It is super important to understand what goes into the designing of our toddler sessions, especially if you are interested in your child pursuing football as a hobby early on in their life.

When we sit down on a Tuesday morning every week and design the plans for the rest of the Academy to follow that weekend, we go back to our “Periodisation” document, which gives us the framework of what the children need to learn in that block of their development.

Now, that may sound complex, but its simple.

We have built a framework and a football ideology over the last 10 years of being in the business of “Starting” a child’s football journey.

We have seen Ernest, Kaiden, Carter, Kahdel (and the rest of the superstars on our Hall Of Fame page) go through that early development and we have refined our process to make sure there is always a balance between what they need to learn in those early years, and making sure that we help them fall in love with football.

Each “learning block” is split into 4 weeks of refined learning, where there is a focus and our sessions are designed to reflect that block of their learning.

Instead of going through each block, I am going to focus on one part: Movement.

A 2 year old starting football for the first time with us needs to develop one skill before they graduate into our next class - the ability to “move, and move efficiently”.

That movement block is broken down into “Agility, Balance, Coordination”, ABC’s.

We disguise these movements into fun games, where the children have to move in different ways, in different directions and usually “multi-tasking” so that they have to hold/throw/place something in and on things that help to develop their coordination.

If there is one thing that “Elite” level players have at 8 and 9 years old, it is the ability to move well.

If we start that journey early enough, we give the children the best possible head-start.