Gary Wilson

Think about this for a second, at the 2018 World Cup, FIFA tracked every single match and found that out of an average match length of roughly 97 minutes, the ball was out of play for over 40 minutes. That's almost half the game where nothing is actually happening with a football, fouls, throw-ins, goal kicks, corners, substitutions, celebrations, all of it eating into the time the ball is actually in play. That's the elite level, the absolute pinnacle of the sport, including the best players on the planet, the most organised teams, the most detailed preparation you can imagine, and the ball is still dead for nearly half the match. This season in the Premier League, it's a similar picture, where average ball-in-play time is sitting at around 55 minutes per game, which means in a match that lasts over 100 minutes with added time, roughly 45 minutes of it is spent waiting for something to restart, and that number has actually gone down from previous seasons, not up. Now take that reality and think about what we're watching on the weekend at the grassroots level. We're watching children, some as young as 5, 6, 7, or 8, who are still learning how to use their bodies. Still figuring out spatial awareness, coordination, balance, how to share space with other people, how to process what's happening around them while also trying to kick a ball in the right direction. They haven't even mastered the basics of physical movement yet, let alone the football side of things. Yet somehow we expect it to look organised, we expect patterns and shapes and the "right" decisions. We get frustrated when it looks chaotic, when children are bunching around the ball, when they're out of position, when the game looks like a mess. What else would it look like? They're children. If elite senior professionals can only keep the ball in play for just over half the match, why on earth would we hold kids to a higher standard of order and control? All of that time when the ball is out of play at grassroots level, those moments between the throw-ins and the goal kicks and the stoppages, that's not dead time. That's coaching time, that's your window, a quick question while the ball is being fetched. A gentle prompt before a goal kick: "Where's the space?" "What did you see?" "What might you try next time?" Those little moments of guided discovery add up over a season far more than any amount of shouting instructions during play ever will. So next time you're watching an under-7s or under-9s game, and it looks a bit all over the place, take a breath. Remind yourself that even at the World Cup the ball spends nearly half the match going nowhere. Then use those natural breaks to coach, to connect, to ask questions that help a young player start thinking for themselves. The game will always have stoppages, the question is whether we waste them or use them and at grassroots level, those moments might be the most valuable coaching time you've got.