Is Winning Important in Youth Soccer? Using Competition in Training

Put a tied 5v5 at the end of a youth soccer practice and watch what happens. Players who were drifting ten minutes ago are asking for another goal. Nobody told them to care.

I see this often enough at U9 and U10 that it no longer surprises me. Kids want the game to finish. A result closes it, and a tie leaves it open.

It sits awkwardly next to a line I hear a lot in youth soccer: winning is meaningless at this age, nobody cares what you win at ten. About the standings on a Saturday, that's mostly right. About what happens in training, I don't think it holds.

Does winning matter in youth soccer? What the research says

The study I find most useful is Cumming, Smoll, Smith and Grossbard (2007): 268 basketball players aged 10 to 15 on 50 teams. They compared each team's win-loss record with the climate its coach created, then looked at how much players enjoyed the season and how they rated the coach. A mastery climate, built around effort, improvement and learning from mistakes, predicted far more of the difference than the record did. A climate built around beating others went with a lower opinion of the coach. Enjoyment and ratings of the coach followed what the coach did more than where the team finished. The record still counted for a little: win percentage predicted how players rated their coach's knowledge and teaching, just far less than the climate did.

It's one sport, and the design is correlational, so it shows an association rather than a cause.

A 2015 paper from the same group (Breiger, Cumming, Smoll and Smith) found that in a strong mastery climate, winning had little bearing on how players rated their experience. For boys in an ego climate, enjoyment of the team and liking for the coach and teammates followed the win record closely. Girls responded badly to ego climates too, and winning tracked their attitudes less than it did boys'. In both papers, what mattered was the climate the adults created around the result.

In soccer, Visek and colleagues (2015) asked 142 youth players, 37 coaches and 57 parents what makes sport fun. Being a good sport, trying hard and positive coaching came out on top, and winning sat in a group ranked ninth of eleven. The players ran from U9 to U19, so it doesn't say much about the youngest, and it measures what kids say is fun rather than how hard they work.

I couldn't find a youth soccer study testing whether keeping score, or having something at stake, changes how much effort players give. The small-sided game research I know compares formats, pitch sizes and goal types, not whether players are counting goals. So when I say players lean in when something's on the line, that's what I see in training, not a finding.

Where it goes wrong

A lot of the "winning doesn't matter" message is a reaction to coaches who made it matter for the wrong reasons: short with a ten-year-old after a loss, picking the lineup to win rather than to develop players, measuring their own season by the table. In those cases the game is serving the coach more than the players, and I'd want that fixed before anything else.

But "stop making it about winning" can mean two things. One is to stop making the result about the coach's ego or a child's worth. The other is to stop having a result at all. The research above supports the first. I haven't found anything supporting the second, and in training I think it costs something, because a session with no score and nothing to lose tends to run at the pace of its most reluctant player.

How to use competition in youth soccer training

I think of the score as one more constraint, like a smaller pitch or an extra neutral player. It changes what players do, and you can switch it on or off to get a particular effect.

A few ways I use it:

• Keep score in the game you already have. A small-sided game with the goals counted is a competition already. It needs no extra rules.
• Play to a number, then reset. First to three, then new teams or a new matchup. A loss in the first game gets a chance to be reversed in the second.
• Make the next rep the contest. "Win this ball" or "win the next duel" gives a player something to chase in the next ten seconds, rather than a result at the end of the hour.
• Let it end. If a game finishes level, play on to a winner.
• Keep any consequence light. The losing team tidies a set of cones, or starts the next game a goal behind. Fitness as a punishment, or anything that singles out a player, turns the climate into the one the research warns about.

If the players are happy to play again after a loss, the climate is usually doing its job. If they go quiet and avoid my eye, the competition has become about something else.

Two 3v3 games where the score rewards the behavior

The way I use competition most is a small-sided game where a goal counts double if it follows one specific action. The players are still competing, but what they're competing for is the behavior I want to see.

Both of these are 3v3s on a 30x20 yard pitch with two small goals at each end.

Switching the play. When a team wins the ball, the idea is to move it across to the opposite channel before the other team can recover. A goal scored opposite the side where the ball was won counts for double points.

Playing back to go forward. Here the pitch is split into thirds. If a team wins the ball in the middle zone and nobody is open ahead, a teammate drops underneath and they can play it back into their own back zone. If they win it in the furthest zone, the one they're attacking, they can play it back to the middle zone. Either way, they then go forward again, and any goal scored in that same passage of play counts for double. A team that wins the ball in its own zone can't score double points. The player who receives the pass back is one of the three, and defenders can step into the zone too, so the pass still has to be played well.

In both games, a team can score one at a time by taking the easy route, or score double by doing the harder thing. Players pick up on that quickly, usually without much from me. I'd rather reward the behavior in the scoring than ban the workaround, because if a game doesn't need the behavior to win, players will find a way to win without it.

View full size Diagrams like this are built in PitchLabs →

Both clips were made in PitchLabs. There are more small-sided games like these on YouTube and Instagram.

What I'd watch for

If a game gets so tight that players stop trying anything new, the score is working against what you want to see, and it's worth changing the constraint. And some players play worse when the score matters. That's a reason to watch how individuals respond and adjust, not a reason to remove the score for everyone.

Next session

Pick one game you already run and add a score. Watch the quietest player on the pitch. If they've started calling for the ball, you've found something worth keeping.

Common questions about competition in youth soccer training

Is winning important in youth soccer? To the players, in the moment, it does. That's what I see in training. For their development, the research I found points to the coaching climate mattering far more than the win-loss record. Winning is a useful tool when the adults use it to push effort and decisions, and a problem when they tie it to their own ego.

Should you keep score in youth soccer practice? I usually do, in small-sided games. I can't point to a youth soccer study that tests it, but the youth sport research suggests the damage comes from how adults treat results, not from the score itself.

Should kids compete at U9 and U10? In my experience they want to, as long as the competition is aimed at effort and decisions rather than at the coach or the table. The studies above found climate predicted enjoyment far better than the win-loss record, for players aged 10 and over.

What's a healthy consequence for losing in youth soccer practice? Something small that's forgotten within a minute, like starting the next game a goal down or tidying a set of cones.

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This is part of Coaching Principles. See Small-Sided Games for Young Players for how team size changes involvement, Coaching U6 to U10 for how the approach changes with age, and Why Your Soccer Practice Feels Like Chaos for adjusting a game with one constraint.