Grassroots football preseason: the 3-4 week plan

Many grassroots teams start preseason as if they were a senior team: long continuous-running sets, fitness tests and an eleven-a-side match as soon as they arrive. The problem is that a group of children or teenagers does not need to "get fit" before touching the ball — they need to reconnect with the ball from minute one, and raise physical demand gradually around that technical base.

A 3-4 week plan that goes from less to more solves two things at once: it lowers the risk of overload injury after the holidays, and it gives you time to see who has grown, who has changed and who needs more attention before competition starts. The rule that orders the whole plan is simple: each week raise physical demand a little and tactical complexity a little, never both at once.

That plan is not the same for a prebenjamín as for a juvenil, but the logic of progression — ball from day 1, load that grows gradually — holds for every age.

The first session sets the tone for the whole season. Before thinking about drills, settle three things: how you will split the group (by age, by level, or mixed if the squad is small), what basic rules you will communicate (punctuality, equipment, behaviour), and what gear you need ready.

Minimum equipment for the first day:

It is worth communicating the first day's rules to families too, not just to the group, so you do not depend on a child repeating them correctly at home. The guide on how to manage parents in grassroots football has a useful script for that first meeting: what information to share, which channel to use, and what to leave out of the conversation with families.

Spend the first 10-15 minutes introducing yourself, explaining the season's plan and playing something with the ball — not on a long speech. The sooner they touch the ball, the better preseason starts.

The first week is not about performance, it is about habit. The goal is for the group to get back into the training routine, reconnect with the ball after the holidays, and for you as the coach to observe without correcting too much yet.

Physical load is low-to-medium: ball games, short runs built into the technical tasks themselves, no isolated continuous-running sets. Ball density should be high: the more touches per player and per minute, the better the week starts.

If the group arrives unmotivated or scattered after summer, do not force technical demand from day one. The guide on how to keep kids motivated without boring them has concrete ideas to re-engage the group in these first sessions without resorting to talks or punishment.

In the second week you can step it up: more repetitions of technical work, slightly more demanding tasks, and the first collective notions if the group's age already allows them. The progression is still gradual, not a jump.

The criterion for choosing tasks this week is the same as the rest of the year: it depends on age. What suits a benjamín is not what suits a cadete, either in volume or complexity. The guide on grassroots football exercises by age gathers concrete tasks by band that fit well into this phase of preseason.

This is also the moment to introduce, if the age allows it, the season's first conditioned matches — simple rules that force a behaviour (for example, a goal only counting after a minimum number of passes) without talking about system yet.

From the third week it is worth adding the first friendly, once the load has risen enough to handle a full match without overload. The friendly is not about winning, it is about watching the team compete and adjusting what is still missing before the first official match.

In the fourth week, if the calendar allows it, add a second friendly and the final adjustment: less volume, more targeted intensity, and a session leading into the first match similar to the one you will use every week during the season. The Monday session explains that logic of adjusting load to what the weekend brought — the same logic you need to design the last session before the league starts.

If the team arrives at the first match after 3-4 weeks of orderly progression, no special closing session is needed: the last preseason session can already look like any normal session during the season, just with slightly less volume to arrive fresh.

The 3-4 week, less-to-more skeleton works for any age, but the content of each week changes a lot between a prebenjamín and a juvenil. It is not about applying the same plan with a smaller ball.

The detail of format, pitch and ball size by category — which also shapes how much preseason can demand — is in the guide on grassroots football categories by age. Without aiming to be exhaustive by band, the general idea holds: the younger the group, the less preseason differs from the rest of the year.

The most repeated mistake is copying a senior team's preseason: long continuous-running sets, fitness work without the ball, and endurance tests on day one. At development ages, that approach does not prepare better — it just tires and bores the group without building anything technical.

In early categories (prebenjamín to alevín, and even infantil), avoid ball-less physical work as an isolated block. If you need to work capacity, build it into ball tasks instead: dribbling with pace changes, chasing games, technical circuits with real physical demand that is not separated from the match gesture.

Also avoid double sessions for children, even if the club's calendar allows it. Doubling training sessions in preseason at grassroots ages does not speed up learning, and it does raise the risk of overload and of the group arriving burnt out before real competition starts.