First Touch and Receiving: Why Players Can't Look Up Until the Ball Stops Needing Them

A player's first touch decides whether they get to look up at all.

If the ball needs watching all the way in and all the way out, the player's eyes are busy. Everything the scanning piece says about checking the field before the ball arrives assumes the player has some attention left over for it. For a lot of young players, the first touch is where that attention goes.

Why the touch comes before the look

The clearest evidence for this comes from a study of high-level U13 and U23 players at a Bundesliga club, tested in a passing machine that fires balls at a player and asks them to pass into lit-up targets. Players who turned their heads more before the ball arrived completed the task faster. Players who turned their heads more while they already had the ball were slower (McGuckian et al., Science and Medicine in Football, 2020).

Read one way, that's a scanning finding: look early, not late. Read another way, it's a first-touch finding. A player who still has to look around after receiving is a player whose touch didn't set up the next action, or who didn't get the information in time to choose one. Either way, the time spent looking on the ball is time the game gives to defenders.

Pressure makes this worse. Across the U17 and U19 European Championship finals, players scanned less the more tightly they were pressed (Aksum et al., Journal of Sports Sciences, 2021). It's a reasonable inference, not a finding, that a player who can trust their first touch under pressure has more of their attention free to keep looking when it gets tight.

For younger players there's a working-memory side too. A young player has a limited amount they can hold in mind at once, and that capacity keeps growing through childhood (The Fundamentals of Soccer Coaching covers the research). If controlling the ball is still taking most of it, there's little left for the game around them.

What a useful first touch does

A first touch that stops the ball dead at a player's feet is controlled. It isn't always useful. In a game, a useful first touch usually does one of three things:

• Moves the ball away from pressure, so the next action has time.
• Moves the ball toward the next action, into the space the player means to use or onto the foot they mean to pass with.
• Keeps the ball where the player can see past it, so they can look up without losing it.

Coaches often talk about receiving with an "open" body, turned so the player can see more of the field as the ball arrives. That's coaching convention more than research. I haven't found a study that tests it with young players. But it follows directly from the scanning work: a player facing the ball and nothing else has to turn to see anything, and looking around once they have the ball is exactly what the U13 study found slowed things down.

One way to build it: repetition first, then the game

This is one of the clearest cases for the "teach it before the game can teach it" idea in Teach It or Let the Game Teach It?. If the ball bounces off a player's shin every time it arrives, a game built around a clever receiving condition won't teach them much, because they'll never get to the decision.

So there's a place for a focused block of receiving practice. It doesn't need to be the same ball fed from the same spot twenty times: the "repetition without repetition" idea from part 2 applies here. For receiving, that means varying the pace, height and angle of the pass, which foot receives it, and where the next action is meant to go.

Once players can control the ball well enough, move it into a game, and use the game to reward where the touch goes rather than just whether it stops:

• A gate or zone the first touch has to go through, so receiving away from pressure scores or keeps possession.
• A bonus for playing forward within two touches, which only pays off if the first touch sets up the second.
• A reward for switching play. The Switch of Play game from Why Your Soccer Practice Feels Like Chaos already does this: the double goal only comes if the first touch after winning the ball opens up the far side rather than turning back into pressure.
• Smaller teams. More players on the ball more often means more receptions per player. In one study of ten-year-olds, switching from 7v7 to 4v4 doubled the actions per player per minute (Hintermann et al., PLOS ONE, 2021). Small-Sided Games for Young Players has more on that.

Each of those is a STEP adjustment (Task, Equipment and Players) aimed at the first touch.

How strong is any of this?

The honest answer is: less strong than the amount of first-touch coaching content online would suggest.

• There's a lot of research on scanning and very little on the first touch itself. I haven't found a study that tests how to teach first touch to players under ten.
• The U13 study was a passing machine, not a match, and the players were at a professional club's academy.
• A 2023 systematic review of the soccer research on practice schedules, demonstration, focus of attention and feedback found that most of the findings weren't unanimous (Pacheco et al., International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 2023). There's no settled soccer-specific answer to "blocked or varied practice?" for receiving.
• "Receive on the back foot" and "open your body" are coaching wisdom with a sensible logic behind them, not tested findings.

What holds up is the chain of reasoning: attention is limited, a touch that needs watching uses it, and looking once the ball has arrived goes with slower play. That's enough for me to put the first touch ahead of scanning in the order I coach them.

Next session

In one small-sided game, count the touches that need looking at. A player who receives, stares at the ball, then looks up is telling you where the bottleneck is. If most of the group does it, give them five minutes of varied receiving before you go back to the game.

Common questions about first touch

What makes a good first touch in soccer? Control is the start, not the whole thing. A good first touch usually moves the ball away from pressure or toward the next action, and leaves the ball where the player can see past it.

Should I teach first touch with drills or games? The approach I'd take is both, in that order. If players can't yet control the ball, a short block of varied receiving practice gets them to the point where a game can teach them where to take it. Once they can, games that reward the direction of the touch do more than more repetition.

Why can't my players look up when they receive the ball? Often because the ball still needs all their attention. Scanning before the ball arrives depends on the first touch being reliable enough not to watch. Work on the touch and the looking usually has more room to happen.

At what age should players learn to receive with an open body? There's no research-backed age. It makes sense to introduce it once players can reliably control the ball, because an open body only helps a player who has some attention free to use what they can see.

The Series

Before the Decision

What a player needs before a game can teach them to decide: seeing the picture, being able to do the skill, and a first touch that frees their eyes.

1. 1SeeingScanning: Why Information Comes Before DecisionsWhy the research on perceiving studies a head turn, and how to build looking into a game.
2. 2DoingTeach It or Let the Game Teach It?Choosing badly, or can’t do it yet? When a game does the teaching, and when a skill needs teaching first.
3. 3ReceivingYou’re hereFirst Touch and ReceivingWhy players can’t look up until the ball stops needing them, and how to build a touch that frees their eyes.

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This is part three of Before the Decision. Start with Scanning: Why Information Comes Before Decisions, or go back to Teach It or Let the Game Teach It?. For the broader idea underneath all three, see The Fundamentals of Soccer Coaching.