Coaching goalkeepers in grassroots football without a goalkeeper coach

At a club with no specialist, the goalkeeper only trains differently if someone actively decides so. It is not a budget problem — nobody is hiring a goalkeeper coach for the under-12 B team at a neighbourhood club. It is a planning problem: what the goalkeeper does in each block of the session, with which teammates and which ball.

The outfield coach who takes this on does not need to become a specialist. They need to decide, age group by age group, how much integrated time and how much specific time the goalkeeper gets, and keep it up week after week even when nobody asks for it. That balance shifts with age: it is not the same at prebenjamín as at cadete, and that progression is exactly what we lay out next.

At prebenjamín (ages 6-7) and benjamín (8-9), played in 7-a-side or 8-a-side, our approach is not to fix a goalkeeper. We rotate the whole group through goal, including the kids who ask for it least, so nobody gets stuck with that label from age six.

Hand games — catching, throwing, covering the body — go into the warm-up for the whole group, not just whoever is in goal that session. Gloves are not compulsory at this age: we would rather a child lose the fear of the ball with bare hands before adding an accessory that also makes it harder to grip small objects. The ball is size 3, the same one the rest of the team uses.

At alevín (ages 10-11, 8-a-side in most regional federations and 7-a-side in Madrid) we keep the same idea with a small shift: rotation gets wider rather than strict — two or three kids volunteer more than the rest — but we still do not fix anyone in goal. The ball moves up to size 4. It is the last age group where we suggest leaving the decision open.

We cover how to apply this from day one in the first day of minibenjamines: if the whole group takes a turn in goal during the first weeks, it becomes far easier afterwards to see who actually wants to stay there, without us deciding for them.

At infantil (ages 12-13) the jump to 11-a-side raises the demands on a goalkeeper: a bigger box, longer shots, a size 4 or 5 ball depending on the federation. This is where we start fixing a goalkeeper — not by rule, this is a RutaMister suggestion — with short blocks of specific work, 10 to 15 minutes, inside the group session, never apart from it.

In those blocks we work on catching (collecting low and mid-height balls cleanly, without spilling them), the side-fall with arm support, and playing with the feet under pressure from an opponent, since in 11-a-side the goalkeeper takes part in building play from the back. Coming off the line for 1v1s — when to close down, when to hold — also belongs at cadete (ages 14-15, size 5 ball), along with the goalkeeper joining the attacking phase when the opponent presses high.

The underlying idea matches the methodology described on efdeportes.com: keeping the goalkeeper integrated throughout the whole training session, with the rest of the group, instead of isolating him in a corner of the pitch with a ball and a cone. The specific blocks sit inside the cadete session, they do not replace it.

At juvenil (ages 16-18) it is common for the player to ask to specialise, especially after a couple of seasons between the posts. Without a specialist at the club, the sensible answer is not to promise what we cannot deliver: it is to organise what is actually within reach.

A weekly session with a positional teammate — another goalkeeper from the club, even from a different age group — works on 1v1s and situations that do not repeat often enough in the full-group session. Filming ten minutes of a match and reviewing positioning and starting position costs little and pays off well at this age. One-off goalkeeper clinics, when the club or the regional federation runs them, cover what the weekly session cannot reach.

Coordinating with the rest of the coaching staff — an assistant, a fitness coach if there is one — stops the goalkeeper carrying the upper-body strength work or the shoulder-and-wrist prevention his position needs entirely alone. No specialist is required to share that load among people already at the club.

Here is how we spread the goalkeeper's work across a normal session, without pulling him out of the shared group in any block:

No block takes the goalkeeper off the shared pitch: only the instruction changes, not the space.

Some signs are worth taking seriously because they go beyond what an outfield coach can cover with common sense. The first is technical stagnation: if the kid has gone two or three seasons without progressing in catching or positioning despite the integrated work, he probably needs specialist eyes.

The second is recurring discomfort in the hands, wrists or shoulder. No diagnosis is needed to decide: if the complaints repeat session after session, the priority is a physiotherapist or a fitness coach, not more repetitions of the same movement.

The third is explicit interest from the player or the family in specialising seriously, beyond passing curiosity. The fourth arrives with the jump to 11-a-side at infantil: the technical jump is big enough to justify at least a one-off outside assessment.

If the club decides to go a step further and train its own goalkeeper coach, the route runs through the RFEF: we cover the full pathway here — Nacional C de Porteros with an active outfield UEFA C, then UEFA Goalkeeper B and UEFA Goalkeeper A with an active outfield UEFA B, the last two taught at Las Rozas.

Regional federations run the Nacional C goalkeeper course every season: as of September 2026, for example, Extremadura offers it for €275 with pre-registration open until March 2027, and Álava has even run a free edition. Current deadlines are in our course-calls table.