How to Coach U5-U7: Your First Sessions

It is your first session with the U6s. You have planned a passing drill, brought a whistle, and printed a diagram. Four minutes in, one child is crying, two are picking daisies, one has left the pitch to see his mum, and a boy called Alfie has scored in the wrong goal and is celebrating like it counts.

Nothing is wrong. That is what coaching U5 to U7 looks like, and the coaches who thrive at this age are the ones who stop fighting it.

Your job with this age group is not to produce footballers. It is to make the ball, and you, something they want to come back to. This guide covers the four rules that make first sessions work, what good foundation coaching actually looks like, a session built from our Drill Library, and the mistakes that empty a Saturday group by half term.

What coaching U5-U7 actually is

Children this age are not small U10s. Most are meeting organised sport for the first time, some are meeting instructions from an adult who is not family for the first time, and almost none can process more than one idea at once. Developmentally they are working on fundamental movement: running, stopping, balancing, falling over and getting up. The ball is a brilliant excuse to practise all of it.

So the coaching model flips. There is no team, no shape and no tactics worth the name. The FA's foundation-phase guidance is unambiguous: at these ages the priorities are enjoyment, movement skills and love of the ball, through play rather than instruction.

That is not a lowering of standards. It is a different standard, and it is measurable. A five-year-old who leaves every session giggling, sweating and asking to come back has had a perfect session, whether or not anything resembling football happened.

The four rules of first sessions

1. A ball each, always. Sharing means waiting, and at five years old waiting means wandering off. One ball per child in every activity is the single biggest touch-count and behaviour decision you will make. Twelve children with twelve balls are all playing football. Twelve children with one ball are eleven spectators and a queue.

2. Every game gets a story. Dribbling through cones is boring. Escaping pirates, raiding the dragon's treasure, driving cars that stop at red lights: the same practice, renamed, becomes irresistible. Young children do not practise, they pretend, so wrap every football action in a story and they will repeat it hundreds of times without noticing the repetition.

3. No queues, ever. The moment children stand in a line, learning stops and mischief starts, and the mischief is the correct response to a badly designed activity. Audit every game you plan with one question: what is each child doing right now? If the honest answer is waiting, redesign it before Saturday does it for you.

4. Success means they come back. Not the score in the three-goal chaos at the end, not whether the drag-back looked right, not what a watching parent thinks progress looks like. Retention is the metric. A child who returns next week will eventually learn everything. A child who does not will learn nothing, forever, and it will quietly be our fault.

What the best foundation coaches do

Sit and watch a good professional club's pre-academy or a well-run FA Playmaker session and the pattern is identical. Sessions start the moment the first child arrives, with a ball at their feet and a challenge waiting, because warm-ups and registers are adult inventions. Activities change every eight to ten minutes, always before the energy dips rather than after. Coaching points are one sentence long, delivered mid-game to one child at a time, and outnumbered ten to one by celebrations.

Listen, and you notice what is missing. Nobody says positions, formation or pass it. The coaches narrate stories, count goals that do not matter and lose races on purpose. The skill level of the adults shows not in what they say about football but in how invisible the organisation is: children flow from game to game without ever standing still, and the session appears to run itself.

None of this requires a badge or a professional badge-holder. It requires planning games instead of drills, and the humility to be entertaining first and technical second.

How to coach it: a first session that works

The plan below is built from drills in our Drill Library, each one wrapped in a story and run with a ball per child. Change activity every ten minutes at most.

Start before you start. As children arrive, send each one into the Fast Feet Maze with their ball: a scatter of cones to weave through, sold as a haunted maze where cones are sleeping monsters. There is no waiting for the session to begin, because arrival is the session. Your only coaching points: little touches, and heads up so you do not wake the monsters.

Then open the space. Open Space Dribbling becomes explorers charting a new land: dribble anywhere, find grass nobody else has touched, freeze on your ball when the coach roars. You are secretly teaching them to carry the ball with control and find space, the two most valuable habits in football, but the word teaching never comes up.

Add the chase. Tag & Look turns scanning into a playground game: keep your ball moving, look around, point at what the coach calls out. Children who look up at five do not need to be untaught staring at the ball at nine. One challenge at a time, and let the giggling do the repetitions.

Finish with beautiful chaos. Multi Ball Chaos is the finale: balls everywhere, goals everywhere, everyone playing at once and nobody quite sure of the score. It looks like anarchy and it is, by design. Underneath the noise, every child is reacting, controlling and shooting dozens of times. End the session here, mid-laughter, so the last memory is the best one.

Three mistakes that empty a U6 session

Talking for longer than they can listen. A five-year-old's attention for adult speech runs out in about two sentences. Explain games by playing them (watch me, now you), coach one child at a time while the game runs, and save the team talk for a future that has not arrived yet.

Running drills instead of games. Cone-to-cone passing practice with a queue is how clubs lose five-year-olds by October. If an activity has no story, no score and no silliness, it is a drill, and drills are for later ages. Everything at U5-U7 must survive one test: would a child choose to play this?

Measuring the wrong things. The coach who frets about technique, teams and tournament results at six is answering a question nobody asked. The only data that matters arrives next Saturday morning: how many of them came back? Coach for that number and, strangely, the footballers arrive anyway.

Adapting it as they grow

At U5 and U6, keep parents close (some children need a familiar knee nearby), keep games under ten minutes, and expect tears, toilet breaks and glorious nonsense. The ratio to aim for is simple: maximum ball rolling, minimum coach talking, one story per game.

By U7, you can stretch the same games: add points, add simple 2v2 and 3v3 matches with tiny goals, and let the competitive ones start to feel what winning and losing are in doses they can handle. The story wrappers fade gradually, the ball-each rule never does. When they move towards U8 and the game starts becoming recognisably football, our guide to coaching U8-U10 footballers picks up where this one ends.

The takeaway

A ball each, always. Every game wrapped in a story, no queues under any circumstances, and no measure of success except whether they want to come back. Get those four things right and you are not just running a fun hour: you are building the touch count, the movement skills and the love of the game that every later stage depends on.

If you want ready-made foundation-phase session plans, story games included, they are part of Coach Notes Pro, alongside the rest of our coaching library.