Chart 1 / drill-and-cone problem
What practice types grassroots coaches generate by age band
The youngest players get the most isolated drill-work.
Mini-soccer coaches (U6-U9) ask AI for 87.9% technical drills. Only 7.2% are small-sided games — the format kids actually learn from. Technical-drill bias falls as players get older; tactical work scales correctly with age. Game-based learning sits under 7% at every age band.
n = 7,114 categorised drills with age band. Bands with fewer than 50 drills hidden. methodology
Chart 2 / planning rhythm
When grassroots football coaches plan their training week
Tuesday, not Sunday, is grassroots planning night.
Practice generation peaks on Tuesday and Monday evenings — coaches plan their week early, not last-minute. The busiest hour is 8pm UTC.
| 0 | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 | 18 | 21 | |||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mon | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tue | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Thu | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fri | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sat |
Hours shown in UTC, every third hour labelled. Darker = more drills generated.
n = 7,125 drills. methodology
Chart 3 / audience mix
Who actually uses football coaching AI tools
More than one in four queries comes from a Football Manager video-game player.
Real grassroots coaches make up the majority of activity, but Football Manager video-game players are the second-largest audience — sharing the same tool with very different intent.
n = 14,824 mode-tagged queries. Modes with fewer than 50 hidden. methodology
Chart 4 / age band distribution
Most-coached age groups in grassroots football
Teenagers, not under-9s, are the most-coached age band.
The 'grassroots = wee kids' assumption is wrong. Senior Youth and Junior bands account for over half of all drill volume; Mini-soccer is the third smallest band by activity.
n = 7,114 drills with assignable age band. methodology
Cut 5 / pitch concentration
85%
Almost every animated practice puts the action in the middle third.
Coaches across every age band design overwhelmingly in the middle of the pitch. Defensive-third practice (own-goal-line work) is rare. Attacking-third (final-third finishing) is also under-served. Computed from the average y-coordinate of all players in each drill.
n = 7,114 drills with at least one player. Pitch thirds are computed from each drill's average player y-coordinate (0-100, where 0 is the defending goal line). 'Middle' covers y=33-66.
Cut 6 / player counts
87%
Of Mini-soccer practices use 5 or fewer players — the format kids learn best in.
At the smallest age band coaches do design appropriately small. The story changes higher up: Adult coaches favour 8v8+ work; Senior Youth split fairly evenly between 2v2 and full-format. Each cell is the count of practices with that team size at that age band.
| 1v1 | 2v2-3v3 | 4v4-5v5 | 6v6-7v7 | 8v8+ | total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mini (U6-U9) | 77 | 401 | 292 | 101 | 12 | 883 |
| Junior (U10-U12) | 139 | 628 | 615 | 316 | 97 | 1,795 |
| Youth (U13-U15) | 103 | 432 | 432 | 413 | 260 | 1,640 |
| Senior Youth (U16-U18) | 88 | 460 | 508 | 394 | 381 | 1,831 |
| Adult (U19+) | 39 | 180 | 173 | 167 | 259 | 818 |
| Mixed | 6 | 63 | 42 | 14 | 22 | 147 |
n = 7,114 drills with both age band and player count. Player count is derived from drill_data.players[]; bands are 1v1, 2v2-3v3, 4v4-5v5, 6v6-7v7, 8v8+.
Cut 7 / cohort profile
88%
Mini-soccer's category profile is technical-dominant — every other band balances out.
Each polygon shows category share within an age band. Mini-soccer (red) collapses on the technical axis; older bands fan out across tactical, game-based, set-piece and warm-up. The shape difference is the story.
Categories: technical, tactical, game-based, set-piece, warm-up, physical. Each axis is the band's share of practices in that category. Bands plotted: Mini, Junior, Youth, Senior Youth (top 4 by volume). methodology
Cut 8 / weekly trends
6,805
Practices generated across the last 12 weeks. Peak week: 1,411.
The cadence reveals coaching seasonality and the impact of FootballGPT releases. The mode-mix stack underneath shows whether new audiences (FM, Player, Scout) are growing or shrinking against the coach baseline.
Animated practices per week
Peak week: 23 Mar (1,411 practices)
Mode mix per week (queries)
Cut 9 / animation complexity
3.2 → 3.7steps
Practice complexity barely scales with age.
Average sequence step count per drill (each 'step' is one phase of the animation). Mini practices average ~3 steps; Adult barely reaches 4. Either coaches genuinely want short drills regardless of age, or the AI tends to produce a similar number of steps regardless of prompt.
Deep cuts / FootballGPT
Underneath the four anchor charts
The same FootballGPT data, sliced more ways: what topics coaches are asking about, which features they use most, the formations they pick by team format, the techniques they analyse, the languages they study, and the qualifications they hold.
- Questions answered
- 50,000+
- Practices created
- 1000+
- Countries
- 30+
- Positive feedback
- 7%
Cut A / topics
What coaches are asking about
Twelve coaching topics detected by keyword match across every chat query. A single query may match more than one topic.
All topics
Top topics — grassroots
Top topics — academy
Top topics — professional
Cut B / tools
Which tools coaches use
FootballGPT exposes a dozen specialised tools alongside chat. Share of total tool events:
Cut C / formations
Formations coaches actually pick
Coaches state their preferred formation in their profile or pick one in match-prep. Shown by team format.
11v11
9v9
5v5
Cut D / who they are
Demographics from FootballGPT profiles
Self-stated by users in their FootballGPT profile. Where percentages don't sum to 100, the underlying field is multi-select or partially populated.
Years coaching
Qualifications held
Team formats coached
How they use the tool
Cut E / techniques & languages
Skills coaches analyse, languages they study
Technique-analyser uploads (which skill)
Football Lingo languages studied · 70% average accuracy
Cut F / keywords
What words show up in the practice prompts
Top tokens extracted from the prompts coaches send to the practice generator. Stop-words and the words "drill" / "practice" are filtered out.
Cross-product
Coaching qualifications, post-session reflections and community discussion
The charts above come from FootballGPT — what coaches ASK AI for. The three below pull from CoachPage (who coaches ARE), CoachReflect (what coaches THINK after sessions), and the FCA Skool community (what coaches publicly DISCUSS). Different products, different cohorts, different lenses on the same population.
Chart 5 / who coaches actually are
From CoachPage: licence, country, years coaching, age groups, specialities
FootballGPT shows what coaches ask AI for. CoachPage shows who they are. Each coach who builds a public CoachPage states their licence, country, years coaching, the age groups they teach, and the specialities they list.
- Coaches
- 13
- Licensed
- 3
- Countries
- 3
Licence band
Years coaching
Country
Age groups taught
Stated specialities
n = 13 directory-visible coaches. Cohort is below the k≥50 anonymity floor used elsewhere on this page — counts published as raw figures with the source named explicitly. Source: coachpa.ge. Coaches teaching multiple age groups appear in each band.
Chart 6 / what coaches reflect on
CoachReflect feed temporarily unavailable. Refreshes hourly.
Chart 7 / what coaches publicly discuss
FCA Skool feed temporarily unavailable. Refreshes hourly.
FAQ
Common questions about grassroots coaching, answered from the data
Each answer below is grounded in the live numbers shown above, refreshed weekly. Where the underlying cohort is small, the answer says so.
▸What do grassroots football coaches focus on most?
Across 14,824 coaching questions logged in FootballGPT, the most common topic is General Coaching at 33%. Technical drills also dominate practice generation — 87.9% for U6-U9, falling to 70.9% for adult football.
see the chart →▸What practice types work best for U6, U7, U8, U9?
In our data, 87.9% of practices coaches generate for U6-U9 are technical drills, only 7.2% are small-sided games. Most coaching guidance for this age band recommends the reverse — game-based learning is how children actually internalise football. The data shows the gap between guidance and practice.
see the chart →▸When do grassroots football coaches plan their training week?
Tuesday and Monday evenings dominate. The peak hour is 8pm UTC. Sunday-night planning, despite the stereotype, is not the busiest slot. Coaches plan early in the week, not last-minute.
see the chart →▸What age group is the most-coached in grassroots football?
Senior Youth (U16-U18) and Junior (U10-U12) are the largest bands by practice volume. Mini-soccer (U6-U9) is the third smallest. The "grassroots = wee kids" assumption does not hold up. Largest band: Senior Youth (U16-U18) at 1,831 animated practices.
see the chart →▸Are grassroots coaches the same audience as Football Manager players?
No. Of 14,824 mode-tagged queries, 65.4% come from coach mode and 24.5% from Football Manager video-game mode. They share the same AI tooling but with very different intent. Roughly one in four queries to a "football coaching AI" comes from someone playing the FM video game.
see the chart →▸What questions do grassroots coaches ask AI most?
Topic detection across every query: General Coaching (33%), Formations & Tactics (15%), Session Planning (13%), Pressing & Defending (11%), Passing & Possession (9%). A single query can match more than one topic.
see the chart →▸What licence do most grassroots football coaches hold?
Among 1,152 contributing coaches, qualification mix on CoachPage shows UEFA B, FA Level 1/2, Coerver, S&C and others. The cohort is small (~13 directory-visible coaches today) so the distribution is indicative rather than statistical.
see the chart →▸What do football coaches reflect on after sessions?
From CoachReflect: top tags coaches attach to their post-session reflections include player_development, session_planning, tactical, communication, technique. Free-text reflection content is never published — only structured tags and ratings.
see the chart →▸What do grassroots coaches publicly discuss in coaching communities?
From the FCA community: session design is the most-discussed theme this snapshot. The next most common are player management, community chat, tools and resources. Themes refreshed weekly from a fixed 13-bucket taxonomy.
see the chart →▸How many football coaches contributed to this dataset?
1,152 distinct grassroots coaches generated the 7,125 animated practices in this dataset, alongside 14,824 logged questions. The dataset refreshes weekly.
see the chart →Use the data
All charts are aggregate. No row-level data, no PII, no club or coach identifiers — ever. For interviews, additional cuts, or a press-ready summary, get in touch.