25 personal goals for soccer players, from first touch to full season

Ball mastery goals

Ball mastery goals count touches, and a ball and a wall are all they need.

• Take 1,000 touches a day for 30 days.
• Juggle the ball 50 times in a row.
• Juggle 100 times using both feet in turn.
• Pass against a wall for 15 minutes a day for a month.
• Dribble a cone course 10 times a day for 2 weeks.

Passing and shooting goals

Passing and shooting goals count clean repetitions, and most of them should be with your weaker foot.

• Hit 100 weak foot passes against a wall at every session.
• Hit a marked corner of the goal 7 times out of 10 from the edge of the box.
• Take 50 shots a week with your weak foot.
• Land 20 crosses in a target zone from each side at every session.
• Complete 5 weak foot passes in every match.

Soccer fitness goals

Fitness goals are built outside team training. They follow the same rules as the wider list of goals for athletes.

• Beat your last fitness test score.
• Run 5 km in under 25 minutes.
• Do 10 sprints of 30 m twice a week for 8 weeks.
• Do 2 strength sessions a week for 12 weeks.
• Play a full match without asking to come off.

Match goals for soccer players

Match goals should be habits you can spot on video, not numbers on the score sheet.

• Look over your shoulder before every pass you receive for a full half.
• Take your first touch away from pressure for a full half.
• Call for the ball out loud every time you are free.
• Run back every time your team loses the ball for a full match.
• Watch your own match video 10 times this season.

Season goals for soccer players

Season goals are counts of work, plus one result to aim at. Players on ice set theirs the same way, as these goals for hockey players show.

• Attend every training session of the season.
• Stay 20 minutes after training twice a week all season.
• Make the squad, or the starting eleven.
• Play in a new position for 5 matches.
• Add up 10 goals and assists this season.

What are good personal goals for soccer players?

Good personal goals for soccer players are about your own actions. A review of 27 studies of goal setting in sport found that process goals, the ones about how you carry out a skill, had the largest effect on performance (1.36). Performance goals came next (0.44). Outcome goals, like winning, had almost none (0.09).

So keep one result to aim at, like 10 goals and assists, and write the rest as habits. "Look over my shoulder before every pass I receive" is a process goal a coach can check on video.

Big numbers get done in small sets. A thousand touches is 10 sets of 100, and breaking a goal into smaller ones is what makes a daily total feel short. A review of sports studies found that deliberate practice explained 18 percent of the differences in performance, so make the sets count.

How to track soccer goals

Log your count the day you train. A review of 138 studies found that people who monitored their progress reached their goals more often, and that recording it beat keeping it in your head.

Touches, passes and shots are amounts that add up. Training days are a day count, the same shape as most 30 day challenge ideas.

Thirty thousand touches in a month sounds huge. A picture that fills up 1,000 touches at a time shows it is only 30 small days.

Frequently asked questions

What are examples of personal goals for soccer players?

Take 1,000 touches a day for 30 days. Juggle 50 in a row. Hit 100 weak foot passes at every session. Attend every training of the season. Each one depends on you and not on the team sheet.

What are SMART goals for soccer players?

Goals with a number and a date. For example: juggle the ball 50 times in a row by 1 June, practising 10 minutes a day. It says what, how many, by when and how.

What are good goals for youth soccer players?

Small daily counts with the ball: touches, juggles and wall passes. They can be done in a garden in 15 minutes, they are easy to count, and they build the first touch every later skill needs.