How Much Should You Actually Say?

Your players have a better read on what you do in a session than you do. When researchers compared coaches' ratings of their own behavior with what an observer actually recorded, the players' ratings matched the recording more closely than the coaches' own did (Cushion, Ford & Williams, Journal of Sports Sciences, 2012).

Few coaches think of themselves as talkers. But watch the sideline at any youth session, mine included, and count how often a coach's voice fills a gap that didn't need filling. A pass goes slightly wrong and out comes an instruction, before the player's even had a chance to notice it themselves. A game is flowing fine and it still gets stopped, because there's a coaching point sitting there, unused.

Building the right environment was half the job. This is the other half: what you actually do once the session is running — one of the ideas behind The Fundamentals of Soccer Coaching.

What coaches actually say, when someone's counting

One college coach, asked why his questions to players were mostly closed ones, didn't dress it up. He "wanted the answer immediately, knew what the answer was, and knew that they could give me it."

He was one of three collegiate coaches (field hockey, volleyball, basketball) in a season-long study that logged what they actually said during real sessions, not what they thought they said, over 1,000, 533 and 905 minutes of observation (Harvey, Cushion, Cope & Muir, Sports Coaching Review, 2013). Instruction made up 27–37% of everything each coach said. Questioning made up only 9–14%, roughly a 3-to-1 gap in instruction's favor. Of the questions that did get asked, closed ones — the kind with one right answer the coach already has in mind — outnumbered open ones by roughly 8 to 1.

That study is collegiate coaches, not young players, and not soccer. Youth soccer has its own numbers, and they tell a slightly different story. A review of the observational research on youth soccer coaching, grassroots through academy, found instruction was the single most common thing coaches did in every study it looked at, generally more than once a minute (Cushion, Ford & Williams, Journal of Sports Sciences, 2012). So the instruction half holds up. The questioning half is less lopsided. When researchers filmed 19 Australian youth soccer coaches (U12–U16) in real training and counted every question, they asked a little under one a minute, and the split was close to even: about 52% closed, 48% open (O'Connor et al., Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 2021).

Put together: coaches lean on Instruct across sports and ages, and closed questions are at least as common as open ones, but the 8-to-1 closed-question gap from the collegiate study doesn't show up in soccer. Stopping to ask a real question and wait for the answer is harder than just saying the thing. It's slower in the moment, which is a big part of why it gets skipped.

Instruct is one tool, not the only one

I use a wider menu with my own coaches. The menu isn't mine: lists of coaching behaviours like this turn up all over coach education, and this is the set of twelve I've put together and use. Instruct is one entry on it, not the default:

• Observe. Gather information before deciding whether to act at all. Says nothing yet.
• Silence. Withhold input on purpose, so the player has to solve it themselves.
• Question. An open question that makes them think — "What else could you have done there?" — not one with a single right answer you're waiting to hear.
• Guide and discovery. A narrower nudge that points them toward the answer without giving it — "Who was free?"
• Co-create. Build the solution with the players instead of handing it to them — "What do we want to try in the next three minutes?"
• Check understanding. Ask them to tell you back what they took from it.
• Demonstrate. Show it instead of describing it.
• Reframe. Change how the player sees the moment, not what they did — "That wasn't a bad pass. That was the right idea, a second late."
• Feedback. Tell them what happened and what it caused.
• Reinforce. Name precisely what was good, so it happens again.
• Challenge. Raise the demand on a player who's comfortable.
• Instruct. A direct, unambiguous command — "Body between the ball and the defender. Now." Still sometimes exactly right. Just not the only entry.

None of these are tied to a fixed situation. Experiment with your own group — the same moment might call for Silence with one player and Instruct with another, depending on what they're ready for.

Why over-instructing doesn't just slow things down

If you read the first piece in this series, you've already met the working-memory study: the same five instructions helped children with more working memory and made those with less of it worse (Buszard et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2017).

Every time Instruct is the reflex instead of a choice, you're adding to a working-memory load that's already close to its limit for a meaningful number of your players. Question, Silence and Guide and discovery aren't softer alternatives to Instruct. They ask the player to hold far less of your words in mind, because the player is doing the thinking instead of storing instructions.

There's a related line of research worth knowing about, because it complicates the popular advice rather than this argument. Researchers pooled experiments on 173 boys under 18, including academy athletes, and compared a plain cue ("sprint as fast as you can") against more crafted external-focus and analogy cues. In seven of eight comparisons there was no difference, and the one difference favored the plain cue (Moran et al., PLOS ONE, 2023). That was sprinting and jumping, and it tested the type of cue rather than how many, so it says nothing directly about instruction volume. It's a reason not to assume a cleverer cue will fix an overloaded player.

A separate line of research, from sport psychology rather than motor learning, points toward asking and involving players too. A study of 325 Chinese youth athletes, ages 12–18, across team, individual and endurance sports, found that coaching which supported autonomy (giving athletes a real say, asking rather than dictating) predicted higher psychological resilience, which predicted more optimism, which predicted better development outcomes (Zhang, Du & Tao, Frontiers in Psychology, 2025). An older, soccer-specific study backs the same direction with a much bigger sample: 370 youth soccer players found that a coach's autonomy support predicted how satisfied players felt in the sport, which predicted more self-motivated engagement and more enjoyment (Álvarez, Balaguer, Castillo & Duda, The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 2009).

Both samples are 12 and older, and both measure motivation, resilience and enjoyment rather than skill or results. Neither shows that asking more questions makes a young player a better player. What they show, across two different populations, is that being asked and involved changes how a young player experiences the sport.

Should you be saying anything at all?

Everything above assumes you've already decided to step in. That's not automatic, and the two decisions get solved by different tools.

The way I approach it, whether to intervene at all is a STEP question before it's an interaction-style one. If a session is running too easy, too difficult, too slow, or producing the wrong behavior, my first move is usually the environment (space, task, equipment, players) rather than my voice. A coach who spots a struggling group and reaches straight for more talking is often fixing a design problem with the wrong tool. So I check the environment first. If it's built right and players are still stuck, that's when you're choosing how to say something, not whether to.

The exception is a player who can't yet do the thing at all. Simplifying the game helps up to a point, but past that point it's a teaching problem, and that's where the next section comes in.

When Instruct is the right call

This isn't an argument for never instructing. Some moments need it: safety, a rule the player doesn't know yet, a skill so new there's nothing for them to discover because they don't have the reference points to discover it with. Demonstrate and Instruct do real work there that Question can't.

That third case is bigger than it sounds with young players, because they're beginners at a lot of what we ask of them, and beginners tend to learn more from explicit guidance. Teach It or Let the Game Teach It? covers that research, including where it runs out. A question only works if the player has something to draw the answer from. Ask "who was free?" of a player who never looked up, and all you'll get back is a guess.

So the useful question in the moment is whether this is one of those cases, or whether Instruct is just the fastest thing to say.

A way to check yourself without overthinking it mid-session: After training, try to remember the last five things you said to players. If four or five of them were you telling someone what to do, that's worth noticing, not as a verdict on you as a coach but as the same kind of data the studies above collected. You don't need a clipboard and a stopwatch. It helps to count, though. Your players already have a better read on this than you do, and a rough count beats a gut feeling. How to See Your Own Coaching has better ways to find out than memory.

One moment, three ways to respond

Take the Switch of Play game from Why Your Soccer Practice Feels Like Chaos, where a goal counts double if it's scored on the opposite side to where your team won the ball. A player wins it on the right and drives straight at the near goal, while the far side is wide open.

Here are three ways I might respond. None of them is the right one by default.

• Silence. Say nothing and let the scoring rule do the teaching. Missing out on the double goal is feedback in itself, and the next time they win the ball, you get to see whether they look.
• Question. At the next natural pause, ask the question from the game's activity sheet: "Where did we win the ball, and which side is open now?" If they never looked up, you'll get a guess, and that tells you something too.
• Instruct or Demonstrate. If the player saw the far side but can't yet get the ball across that distance, the decision isn't the problem. Show them, or simplify the game, then put them back in.

Which one I'd pick depends on the player: Silence for one who's close to working it out, a question for one who's ready to explain it, and Instruct for one who can't do it yet. And when they do switch, a quick Reinforce on the move ("That's it — you looked before it came to you") helps it happen again.

The next decision

Knowing what to say, and when to hold back, is one half of this. The other half is when you step in — whether you stop the whole session for a coaching point that could've been a sentence in passing. That's the next piece: how to coach without stopping the game every two minutes.

For now, after your next session, try the five-things check.

Common questions about how much a coach should talk

How much should a youth soccer coach talk during practice? Probably less than most of us do by default. Across observational studies of youth soccer coaching, instruction is the most common thing coaches do, generally more than once a minute. One season-long study of collegiate coaches in other sports found about three times as much instruction as questioning; youth soccer coaches filmed in training asked closed and open questions in roughly equal numbers. There's no fixed target, but if you can't remember the last five things you said without most of them being commands, that's worth noticing.

What's the difference between coaching by instruction and coaching by questioning? Instruction tells a player what to do. Questioning, asking something like "what else could you have done there?", makes the player work out the answer themselves. Both have a place. Questioning is the one coaches reach for less, mostly because it's slower in the moment and harder to do well under pressure. It also only works if the player has something to draw the answer from.

Can a coach just say nothing? Yes, deliberately. Observing and Silence are both legitimate coaching choices, not gaps in coaching. Observe means gathering information before deciding whether to act. Silence means withholding input so a player has to solve it themselves. Neither gives the player anything extra to hold in mind, which matters more the younger they are.

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This is part two of a series on what actually shapes a youth practice. Start with Why Your Soccer Practice Feels Like Chaos, which covers building the right environment in the first place, or continue with How to Coach Without Stopping the Game Every Two Minutes.