Football Drills for 10-Year-Olds to Practice at Home

It's Sunday morning on game day and your ten-year-old is lacing up their boots, and you're thinking the same thing you thought last Sunday: they need to practise at home during the week. Not just the club session on Tuesday and the match on Sunday. Something in between. Something you can run in the backyard without a coaching badge or a set of cones that cost forty dollars.

The problem is that most of what you find when you search "football drills for 10-year-olds" is either too basic (tap the ball between your feet, great, then what?) or too advanced (full cone ladders, agility harnesses, drills that need six markers and a gym). You need drills that sit in the middle: specific enough to develop real technique, simple enough to run with a ball and a couple of jumpers for cones.

After watching my own kid train and seeing what actually stuck - not the flashy drills, but the ones that build the fundamentals your child's coach keeps mentioning - first touch, ball control, passing accuracy, weak foot, and body shape. Here are five you can start this week, with nothing more than a ball, a wall, and a few metres of grass.

Why these drills work for 10-year-olds

Ten is a golden age for motor learning. The brain is absorbing movement patterns like a sponge - what's laid down now becomes the technique your child defaults to under pressure. It's also the age where the gap between kids who practise at home and kids who don't starts to widen visibly. The coach notices it. The other parents notice it. Your child notices it.

But here's the thing: the drills that matter at ten aren't the complicated ones. They're the fundamental movements - controlling the ball, passing cleanly, striking with both feet - repeated until they're automatic. A ten-year-old who can take a clean first touch and play an accurate five-metre pass is ahead of the one who can do stepovers but can't control a bouncing ball.

The five drills below each target a specific fundamental. They take fifteen to twenty minutes total. Run them twice a week and you'll see the difference by mid-season.

Drill 1: Wall-pass first touch (first touch and control)

Objective: Teach your child to control a pass with their first touch instead of stopping the ball dead.

Setup: A wall, a ball, three metres of space. Your child stands facing the wall.

Execution: They pass the ball against the wall. It comes back - at a different pace, a different angle, every time. Their first touch must control the ball into space (not stop it dead), then they pass it back. One minute. Left foot, right foot, both. Three sets.

Coaching Points:

• The first touch should take the ball out of the feet, not trap it under the body. A touch that stops the ball dead means the next pass takes an extra second - a defender closes that gap. The ball should move to the side, into space, so the next pass is immediate.
• Watch the receiving foot. It should be relaxed, not rigid. A stiff foot makes the ball bounce away; a soft foot cushions it. Think of it like catching an egg - you give slightly on contact.
• If the ball keeps bouncing away, they're meeting it too late. The foot should make contact as the ball arrives, not after it's already past them.

This drill builds the single most important skill in football: controlling a moving ball. Every match touch starts here. I wrote about this in depth in twelve first-touch drills for parents - if your child's touch is their weak link, that article breaks down the progression from wall-pass to match-realistic receiving.

Drill 2: Cone weave dribbling (ball control and close touch)

Objective: Develop close ball control so the ball stays within playing distance while moving.

Setup: Five cones (or jumpers, shoes, water bottles) in a line, one metre apart. Your child starts at one end with the ball.

Execution: They weave through the cones, keeping the ball close to their feet. Not speed - control. The ball should never be more than a metre from their foot. Weave there and back. Three sets, alternating which foot leads.

Coaching Points:

• Small touches. The temptation at ten is to take big touches and sprint. This drill is the opposite: tiny, controlled touches that keep the ball glued to the foot. If the ball runs away between cones, the touches are too big.
• Use both feet. Weave right-footed one way, left-footed back. If the weak foot is much slower, that's the one that needs the reps. (If weak-foot development is a priority, the weak-foot shooting guide has dedicated drills for building a genuine weak foot at home.)
• Keep the head up. This is the hardest part. At ten, kids stare at the ball. Start by asking them to look up between each cone - briefly, just a glance. Over time, the glances get longer. A player who can dribble with their head up sees the pass before the defender does.

Drill 3: Target passing (passing accuracy)

Objective: Build the ability to pass to a specific target, not just in the general direction of a teammate.

Setup: Two cones set up as a gate, about one metre apart, five metres from your child. (If you have a goal, use the goalmouth as the target.)

Execution: Your child passes the ball through the gate. Ten passes. Count how many go through cleanly. Then narrow the gate by thirty centimetres and do ten more. Keep narrowing until they're missing more than they're hitting - that's the edge of their current ability, and that's where the learning happens.

Coaching Points:

• The plant foot dictates direction. I wrote about the plant-foot mistake in detail - if your child's passes keep going to one side, it's almost always the plant foot pointing that way. Plant foot aiming at the target, every pass.
• Lock the ankle. A loose ankle on the passing foot means the ball comes off wobbly and off-target. The ankle should be firm, foot pointed, contact through the centre of the ball.
• Strike through the ball, not at it. The follow-through matters. The foot should continue in the direction of the pass after contact, not stop on impact. A clean follow-through keeps the ball low and straight.

Drill 4: Weak-foot wall strikes (weak foot development)

Objective: Build the weak foot so it becomes a real option in matches, not just the foot they happen to stand on.

Setup: Same wall setup as Drill 1. This time, weak foot only.

Execution: Your child passes the ball against the wall with their weak foot only. Receive with the weak foot, pass back. Two minutes. Three sets. The goal is clean contact - not power, not pace. Just the foot learning to strike the ball consistently.

Coaching Points:

• This will feel awkward for them. That's normal. The weak foot is underdeveloped because it never gets reps. The awkwardness is the feeling of a new motor pattern forming. Push through it.
• Watch for the plant foot again - it's even more important on the weak foot, because the weak foot is less stable. If the plant foot is pointing away from the wall, the strike will follow it. Plant foot at the target, every time.
• Don't let them switch to the strong foot when the return is tricky. The whole point is weak-foot reps. If the ball comes back awkwardly, control it with the weak foot and pass again. The messy reps are the valuable ones.

The 10-14 age window is when weak-foot development is most effective - the brain is most plastic for motor patterns. I covered this in detail in the weak-foot shooting parent guide, including a three-drill progression from wall strikes to match-realistic finishing.

Drill 5: One-touch finish (match transfer)

Objective: Connect the technique from the first four drills to a match-realistic moment - receiving and finishing in one touch.

Setup: You (the parent) as server. A goal or two cones as a target. Your child stands eight metres from goal.

Execution: You roll the ball to them. They finish with one touch - no controlling touch, no extra setup. First touch is the shot. Vary the serve: along the ground, to the left, to the right, at different paces. Ten serves.

Coaching Points:

• Body shape before the ball arrives. If they're still adjusting their feet when the ball reaches them, they'll mis-hit it. Plant foot, body over the ball, eyes on the ball - all set before the serve lands.
• Placement over power. At eight metres, a placed shot into the corner beats a smashed shot at the keeper. Accuracy first; power comes later.
• If they keep missing, slow the serve down. This is training, not testing. Build success first, then add pace until it matches game speed.

How to structure a fifteen-minute backyard session

Don't try to run all five drills every session. It's too much for a ten-year-old's attention span, and it means each drill gets shortchanged. Instead, pick three per session and rotate:

Session structure:

1. Wall-pass first touch (2 minutes) - warm-up + the most important skill
2. One of: cone weave OR target passing (3 minutes) - ball control or passing
3. Weak-foot wall strikes (2 minutes) - always. The weak foot needs frequency, not duration.
4. One-touch finish (3 minutes) - match transfer, the fun one they'll want to do

That's ten minutes of focused work plus transitions. Add a five-minute free play at the end (let them mess around, try things, no coaching) and you've got a complete session that builds technique without feeling like a chore.

Twice a week. Fifteen minutes. That's the dose that matters. You'll see changes in four to six weeks - cleaner first touches, more accurate passes, a weak foot that starts showing up in matches without being forced.

How to know if the drills are working

You'll see it on Sunday. The first touch takes the ball into space instead of stopping it dead. The pass finds the teammate instead of rolling behind them. The weak foot appears when the ball comes to that side and your child doesn't shift to the strong foot.

That's the test. Not the drill itself - the match. The drills are the reps; the match is where the reps show up. If the drills look good in the backyard but nothing changes on Sunday, the gap is usually pace - backyard serves are slower than match balls. Speed up drill 5 until the one-touch finish holds at match pace.

How video feedback helps you see what to work on next

The hardest part of coaching your own child is knowing what to focus on. You can see that the first touch is inconsistent, but you can't always see why. You can tell the passing is off-target, but you can't always spot whether it's the plant foot, the ankle, or the strike point.

That's where filming a short clip helps. Film your child doing any of the drills above - from the side or from behind, so both feet are visible - and upload it for a free analysis. The feedback breaks down what's happening across the whole technique: the plant foot, the ankle lock, the body shape, the strike point. It identifies the root causes behind what you're seeing, not just the symptoms, and gives you specific drills to fix each one.

The analysis covers strengths (your child will have them - you need to know what's working so you don't coach it out), areas for improvement with root causes explained in plain English, the tactical side, and metrics you can track across future clips. It's the same kind of feedback a private coach would give you after watching your child closely - except it costs about A$10 a month instead of A$80 a session, and you get it before Tuesday's training session runs out of daylight.

For more drill ideas, three backyard drills for first touch covers the platform that makes everything else cleaner, and how to film your child's football technique shows you exactly how to capture clips that produce useful feedback.

Ten is the age where home practice starts to matter. Not because the coach isn't good enough - because the reps that build technique happen between sessions, in the backyard, with a parent who cares enough to spend fifteen minutes running drills that nobody will ever see. The coach can't give your child five hundred extra touches a week. You can. And that's the difference.