Soccer · Issue No. 16
Why Does My Daughter's Academy Care So Much About "Touches"?
Week of September 14, 2026
A parent wrote in: "My daughter's academy coach is obsessed with something he calls 'touches' and barely talks about actual game tactics. Is that normal?"
Our answer: Very normal, and for good reason — here's what he's actually building toward.
Ask a professional soccer academy director what actually builds a great young player, and you might expect an answer about tactics — pressing schemes, formations, game models. Instead, the answer is almost defiantly simple: touches on the ball, and lots of them.
According to one MLS academy director with experience at multiple professional clubs, if a 13-year-old isn't getting somewhere around 500 touches on the ball in a single training session, that's a real problem — regardless of how sound the tactical work around it is. His reasoning: technical quality has to be built at a young age, and if it isn't, there's no catching up on it later. Tactics can be layered on top of a technically sound player at any point. A technically underdeveloped player, though, has missed a window that doesn't reopen.
That's part of why he's cautious about a trend he's noticed among newer coaches: an explosion of accessible footage of professional training sessions has produced a generation of young coaches who want to coach like Pep Guardiola or José Mourinho before their players can even consistently control a pass. It's not bad information, in his view — it's just misapplied at the wrong age.
He also pushes back on a common parent anxiety: should my kid play full-time on a weaker team, or spend limited minutes on a stronger one? His answer depends entirely on two questions nobody usually asks first — what age are we talking about, and better for whom, the player or the parent? A kid playing 35 honest minutes a game while training hard in a demanding environment can develop faster than a kid dominating easy minutes on a team where he's never truly challenged. The car ride home matters here too: a parent who stays encouraging through a tough developmental stretch gives that process room to work. A parent who fixates on playing time can undo it.
One more point he raises, and it's a hard one for American soccer culture to hear: European academy kids often rack up thousands more informal touches than their American counterparts simply by playing in the street and the park after watching a match, instead of watching more television. That gap in unstructured play, not just organized training, may be part of what separates development systems — and it's something no amount of paid coaching alone fixes.
From an interview with a professional soccer academy director.
This piece ran in PPA Pro Issue No. 16, alongside a camp spotlight and trainer pick for every sport. Subscribe free.