Soccer Training Notebook

Do you keep missing penalty kicks in soccer? Do you struggle at the thought of taking a free kick?

The answer could be a lot simpler than you thought.

It's the 2018 World Cup final. It's 1-1 and there's a handball in the Croatian penalty box. Antoine Griezmann steps to the mark. He steps up and sidefoots it into the right han corner. The keeper dives the wrong way and has no chance. This critical penalty sent France onto their 3rd world cup win.

What you saw behind Antoine Griezmann's simple goal is hundreds of hours of practice. Lots of misses. Lots of experiments and a lot of hard work.

While you may or may not play in the world cup, you can benefit from systematic documentation of free kicks and penalty kicks. While going through this process, I noticed that there were certain areas of the goal that I was better at hitting than others. A higher percentage of goalkeeper saves in other waves. Over time, I worked on improving my penalty kicks and saw the improvement in the documentation. This made me less nervous taking penalty kicks during the game.

For free kicks, our coach noticed that certain players has better conversions from certain spots on the field. We used that data to get the best conversions on free kicks in the league.

Very few players and teams follow a systematic method to improve their performance. This will eventually make a huge difference in the final results.