Score!: Soccer Tactics & Techniques for a Better Offense

This book is very useful in educating young soccer players. It covers all the basic techniques young players need to develop in order to play the game at a high level. The pictures in the book are very well suited for fine-tuning your technique. If you are not familiar with the technical aspects of soccer the pictures may be a bit hard to interpret. But for coaches already involved in youth training this is a guide which you should have. Major weakness of this book is that it focusses on only one aspect of soccer: technique. Don't expect to find much useful information about tactics (despite of the subtitle of the book). Still it is a 'must have' for youth coaches working with young players.

Wiel Coerver has certainly proved that he is, once again, is truly the master coach of ball control. the drills in this book certainly outrank the drills I've seen in other books, and if you want visual layouts, this book is for you. Now on to the more critical part of my review.First of all, the reason why I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5 is that this book does not live up to what it was meant to be. I read in other reviews that this book was meant to teach one-on-one moves and creative dribbling, but instead, I found the information to be very basic. Moves such as the Cruyff Turn, the Rivelino(scissors fake), and the basic feints and fakes were basic moves usually taught in other books. (For REAL soccer moves, check out Play The Brazilian Way: By Simon Clifford. )Second, this book has a little too much visual attention drawn to it and too little text explainations. The only explainations of a certain drill or technique is described in usually a sentence or so, as headings in a line of images. To me, this is barely sufficient, for the images take up at least 4/5 of the book.However, despite all the gripes above, I found the book to be an interesting read, and a perfect way for beginners to get a feel for the lost art of creative dribbling. The drills are perfect for coaches who want to emphasize on ball control, thus making this a great all-around reference.

This book helped me improve from a kick & run player to a more sophisticated ball player. Unfortunately, I got this a bit late, when I was 30 years old. Now I have mastered the drills and practice them almost daily. When my fitness is OK I can execute these drills in a game situation. I a getting my son to learn these skills, hopefully he will be a better player then me.

I think it is important to put the Coerver Method into its proper context.It cannot be emphasized enough that Coerver's ideas have transformed the thinking of soccer coaching worldwide over the last twenty years. His methods are endorsed around the world, and by some of the best coaches in the U.S. (e.g., Anson Dorrance of UNC, originator of the "Win Forever" slogan of U.S. women's soccer - you must read his book if you coach girls/women's soccer). Licensed Coerver Coaching youth soccer camps abound, and many of the better soccer camps have incorporated elements of the Coerver Method into their training.What gave Coerver his start was the trend for European soccer in the late 1960's on through the early 1980's to develop into a sterile, defensively oriented passing game. Teams that had gifted ball control artists were routinely strangled by the tactic of heavy fouling. The concept of "direct soccer" was developed to use as few passes as necessary to put players into scoring position.. Although highly useful as a tactic and style of play, used to the complete exclusion of developing ball control skill, it quickly degenerated into simple "kick and run" soccer. The English version of this became known as "English long ball". Fortunately for world soccer, over the last fifteen years, by making a series of rules changes, FIFA has worked at both encouraging a more offensively oriented style of play and discouraging excessive fouling. FIFA came to realize that people the world over (not just Americans) hated having to watch boring soccer. Individual style and flair have reappeared in world soccer as South Americans, Africans, and Eastern Europeans have spread out to teams around the globe.. There continue to be proponents of the "kick and run" style of soccer coaching, especially in the United States. There is a simple reason for this. Due to the lack of an established soccer culture in this country, it takes an enormous amount of team practice time to train even one player how to properly execute soccer moves. There is just so much that a team coach has to do already to get his team ready that there is simply not much time left to devote to practicing soccer moves. It is much easier for a team coach saddled with highly athletic but relatively less skillful players to win games by playing "direct soccer" or some other version of "kick and run" soccer. Getting players to perfect one or two moves at the youth level is about all that can be reasonably expected, given the fact that most youth club teams practice only two to three times a week. If a player wants to progress at a greater rate, the players and their parents must have the dedication to go out and practice more frequently. A team coach can only show his/her players how the moves work, but the players must find the extra time to go out and practice on their own, or with their parents, siblings, or friends. In countries with established soccer cultures, that is exactly what happen

This book is intended for the serious youth soccer coachinterested in teaching "moves" to his/her players. The book is simply filled to the brim with pictures of young players executing one after another series of these moves. To this extent, this book was indeed what I was looking for - however, be warned that if you are not yourself familiar with how to do these moves, that it is very hard to follow the sequence of the footwork described in the static pictures and in the text for many of the moves. Eventually I ordered the companion videotape "Play like a Soccer Legend" from Charlie Cooke/ Coerver Coaching, and this tape (with the help of the frame-by frame viewing button on my VCR remote control) was much more helpful than the book itself in demonstrating how to execute the moves, although the tape is somewhat more cursory in its treatment of the moves. Soccer Learning Systems carries the full set of Coerver Coaching videotapes that are the original companion set to this book.