State of GrassrootsSoccer Coaching

Respondent Profile

Coaches from four countries, predominantly coaching the U9–U12 developmental window — the transitional phase where intermediate formats (7v7 and 9v9) and competitive league structures first intersect.

This report reflects responses from a diverse cross-section of grassroots coaches across four countries. While not intended as a statistically representative global sample, the findings highlight consistent patterns across respondents.

Percentages represent the share of total selections. Many coaches work across multiple age groups and formats, so totals reflect distribution of coaching exposure rather than number of coaches.

Game Formats

The game formats reported map directly to the age group distribution, reflecting the progression pathway from small-sided development to full-field play. Substitution complexity, tactical planning, and session design all scale with format size.

Multi-Team Coaching

A notable proportion of respondents coach more than one team simultaneously. This is a critical detail that amplifies every finding in this report — preparation time, equipment costs, attendance challenges, and cognitive load all multiply for coaches managing multiple squads across different age groups and formats. Respondents managing multiple squads face compounding demands across preparation time, equipment costs, attendance challenges, and cognitive load — areas where support systems rarely scale proportionately.

Personally Underwriting Quality

Club-provided equipment is highly inconsistent. Coaches fill the gap themselves — spending $0 to $3,000+ on balls, cones, goals, coaching boards, agility gear, and video technology.

In Their Own Words

These examples illustrate challenges some coaches face. They are not universal, but they highlight the types of gaps that can occur when club support is inconsistent. The frustration is not abstract — it's grounded in specific, tangible failures of the systems around them.

One U14 coach described an association that still provides size 4 balls for under-14s, and refused their personal offer to purchase size 5 replacements. Their equipment budget relies entirely on donations despite the league purchasing items coaches never asked for — with no new equipment bought in three years.

A U8 coach reported that their club website promised coaching materials and mentor coaches would be provided, but neither materialised. They were left with a single soccer ball and a bag of cones.

A Canadian coach noted that their club provided balls in the first year of representative play at U8, but after that, coaches were entirely on their own for replacements and all other equipment in subsequent seasons.

An AYSO coach shared that while their club supplied balls, the balls were well-worn and of mixed quality. They purchased a dozen additional balls at $20 each just to ensure consistency during training.

Another coach invested $700 over four years, with the steepest single cost being video recording equipment at approximately $300 — a personal purchase they made because their club provided no analysis tools.

Commentary

The spending pattern here tells a deeper story than simple out-of-pocket costs. When 80% of coaches are spending over $100 — and a quarter are above $600 — it suggests that the baseline quality of club-provided equipment is failing to meet the standard coaches believe their players deserve. Coaches aren't buying luxuries; they're buying essentials.

This has several implications worth considering. First, it creates an uneven playing field: teams whose coaches can afford to invest personally will have better training environments than those whose coaches cannot. Player development becomes tied to the financial capacity of a volunteer, which raises questions about how consistently the grassroots principle of equal access is upheld.

Second, it raises retention risk. Coaches who feel they're subsidising their club's responsibilities may eventually burn out or walk away — taking their investment, knowledge, and relationships with them. The cost isn't just financial; it's emotional. When you're buying your own cones and goals while also spending hours planning sessions for free, the weight of being undervalued compounds over time.

Third, the 60% app non-usage rate sitting alongside high personal spend is revealing. These coaches are clearly willing to invest in quality — but they're investing in physical tools, not digital ones. That's not because they're resistant to technology; it's because the technology available hasn't earned their trust. Any digital solution entering this space needs to recognise that it's competing with tangible, proven equipment for a share of a coach's already-stretched personal budget and attention.

Finally, this data hints at a potential role for clubs and associations to play. If organisations redirected even modest resources toward standardised equipment kits or subsidised coaching toolkits, they could meaningfully reduce the personal burden while improving consistency across their programs. The question isn't whether coaches will invest — they clearly will. The question is how clubs and associations might reduce the personal burden while improving consistency across their programs.

Fragmented Preparation, Deep Commitment

No single integrated platform dominates. Coaches piece together session plans from scattered sources, spending 15 to 60+ minutes before every training.

Training Frequency

Understanding how often coaches train matters because it multiplies every preparation burden measured above. The data shows a clear weekly norm: two sessions per week, with midweek evenings dominating the schedule.

Wednesday is grassroots soccer's coaching night — appearing in 58% of all training schedules. Weekdays account for virtually all training time; only a small minority of coaches listed a weekend day. This concentration on midweek evenings has a practical implication: preparation happens under time pressure, often on the same day or the night before. With two sessions a week as the norm, even a modest 30-minute prep investment per session adds up to over an hour of planning every week — before accounting for match days.

Match Preparation — The Hidden Time Cost

The survey also captured match preparation time separately from training prep — and the numbers add significantly to the total time burden. Many coaches spend an additional 15–60 minutes preparing for each match day on top of their training preparation. This includes building substitution plans, reviewing formations, planning warm-ups, and coordinating logistics like player availability and arrival times.

When combined with training preparation, the total weekly time commitment for a coach with two training sessions and one match day could easily reach 2–3 hours of planning alone — before accounting for the sessions and matches themselves. For coaches managing multiple teams, this figure compounds further.

Commentary

The fact that 75% of coaches spend more than 15 minutes preparing for every single session — with many exceeding an hour — is a testament to how seriously grassroots coaches take their role. But it also reveals a systemic inefficiency. These are overwhelmingly volunteers, and the time they spend searching YouTube, scrolling Reddit, and piecing together drills from scattered sources is time that could be spent on higher-value coaching activities like reviewing player development or building relationships with families.

The fragmentation of content sources is particularly telling. When coaches are pulling from seven or more different platforms just to plan a training session, it signals that no existing solution is meeting their needs holistically. YouTube might have great drill demonstrations but lacks seasonal structure. Coaching manuals provide curriculum frameworks but can feel disconnected from the practical realities of a Tuesday evening session with 14 kids on half a pitch. Coaches are essentially acting as their own content curators, assembling bespoke session plans from a patchwork of inputs.

This creates two problems. First, quality becomes inconsistent — not because coaches lack effort, but because the inputs they're working with are inconsistent. A coach who happens to find a great YouTube channel will deliver different sessions than one who relies on a ten-year-old manual. Second, the cognitive burden of curation compounds over a season. By week 20, the enthusiasm for searching and planning can wane, and sessions may start to feel repetitive or disconnected from earlier work.

The emerging use of AI tools (20%) is a signal worth watching. It suggests that some coaches are already looking for ways to shortcut the curation process — and are open to intelligent systems that can do the assembly work for them. The opportunity here isn't just to be another content source; it's to be the layer that sits on top of all sources and delivers a structured, adaptive plan that evolves with the season and the team.

What Keeps Coaches Up at Night

Attendance uncertainty dominates, but the full picture reveals compounding pressures that create unsustainable cognitive load.

Understanding the Categories

Attendance refers to the unpredictability of who turns up to training and matches. This includes late arrivals, last-minute dropouts, players juggling multiple sports, and fluctuating roster numbers that force coaches to constantly re-plan drills, formations, and substitution schedules on the fly.

Space captures the physical constraints coaches work within — partial pitch allocations, shared facilities with other teams or sports, indoor gym sessions during winter months, and fields that don't match the dimensions their age group requires. The survey revealed that coaches work across grass, synthetic, and indoor surfaces — often switching between multiple field types across a single season. One coach specifically described training in a school gym as their biggest challenge, while another reported having only one-third of a pitch available for a full team of nearly adult boys. Coaches frequently adapt sessions in real time based on what space is actually available when they arrive.

Engagement reflects the challenge of maintaining player focus and attention throughout a session or match. This is particularly acute with younger age groups (U7–U10) where attention spans are shorter, but it also covers managing distractions, keeping energy levels up, and striking the right balance between fun and structured development.

Session Planning captures the cognitive burden of designing relevant, progressive, age-appropriate training content week after week. Coaches consistently describe the challenge of knowing what to teach, how to structure sessions for a specific age group, and how to build coherent curricula across a full season rather than a collection of disconnected drills. One coach described it as “hard to link sessions up over the course of the whole season — hard to develop an overarching curriculum.” Another struggled with “knowing what to spend time teaching: technique vs tactics, and how to progress skills.” A third mentioned “not trying to cover too many topics in one session” and managing transitions between activities. This burden is compounded by the fragmented content landscape — coaches piecing sessions together from YouTube, Reddit, podcasts, and coaching manuals have no structural thread connecting their choices into a coherent seasonal programme. The variable quality of club-provided coaching education (detailed in the section below) means many coaches are navigating this challenge largely without a foundation to build on.

Parents covers the management of parent expectations, sideline behaviour, communication demands, and the emotional labour of navigating playing-time conversations, team selection decisions, and differing views on development versus winning.

Admin refers to the non-coaching tasks that consume a coach's time — team communications, registration paperwork, scheduling, coordinating with club administrators, managing kit and equipment logistics, and the general organisational overhead that comes with running a team.

The Club Support Spectrum

One of the starkest findings in the survey is the enormous range of support coaches receive from their clubs and associations. The table below illustrates the spectrum — from structured, multi-component programmes to virtually nothing at all.

Commentary

The fact that attendance uncertainty tops the list at 85% is significant, but not surprising to anyone who has coached at the grassroots level. What makes this finding important is the cascading effect it has on everything else. When a coach doesn't know whether 10 or 16 players will show up, every session plan becomes provisional. Drills designed for groups of four might need to work for groups of three or five. Small-sided games might need to shift from 4v4 to 3v3 with a floater. Substitution plans built the night before become irrelevant. The mental energy spent adapting in real time is enormous — and largely invisible.

The combination of attendance (85%) and space constraints (60%) is particularly revealing. These two factors interact in ways that amplify each other. A session designed for 12 players on a full pitch might actually need to accommodate 8 players on half a pitch — a fundamentally different planning challenge. Coaches who face both of these issues simultaneously are essentially designing two or three contingency sessions for every one they actually deliver.

Engagement at 70% is higher than many might expect, and it points to a subtle tension in grassroots coaching. Coaches are being asked to deliver fun, development-focused, age-appropriate sessions — but they're doing so under conditions (uncertain numbers, limited space, mixed abilities) that make engagement genuinely difficult to sustain. This isn't a reflection of coaching quality; it's a reflection of the operating environment.

The parent management figure (40%) likely understates reality. Many coaches may not consciously categorise parent interactions as a “challenge” even when they consume significant emotional energy. Sideline behaviour, playing-time conversations, and the pressure to prioritise winning over development are persistent background stressors that shape how coaches plan, communicate, and ultimately decide whether to return the following season.

Admin burden at 55% is a quiet but corrosive factor. Every hour spent on logistics, communications, and paperwork is an hour not spent on coaching — or on the coach's own family and life. For volunteers, this is the category most likely to drive attrition. The coaching itself is often the reward; the admin is what makes people quit.

A Fragmented Ecosystem of Tools

No two coaches use the same combination of resources. The toolkit that emerges from the survey data is rich, varied — and almost entirely disconnected.

Session Planning & Drill Inspiration

Game Day & Team Management

Video & Analysis Technology

Additional YouTube Channels Mentioned

Will John, Kreider Academy, Unisport, AllAttack, Soccster, Simple Football, Paul Spacey, The Purist Football, Catalan Soccer, Soccer Dots, 343 Football, AD Football, Coach Ricky Soccer, World Class Coaching, Jack Hunter, @coachbetter_ltd, @thelbperformance1.

Commentary

The sheer volume and variety of tools coaches mentioned — more than 22 distinct resources across three categories — is itself the finding. This isn't a market where one or two platforms have achieved meaningful dominance. It's a market where coaches are assembling their own bespoke toolkits from whatever they can find, with no shared standard and no integration between layers.

Coaches make extensive use of digital tools for preparation — YouTube, Google, manuals, and apps — but adoption drops sharply on game day. This isn't due to resistance to technology; it reflects the reality that match environments are chaotic, time-pressured, and hands-busy. Tools that require attention during games simply don't fit the workflow.

The session planning category is by far the most crowded, with YouTube channels alone accounting for the majority of mentions. This reflects the low barrier to entry for content creation and the high volume of free coaching material available online. But volume isn't the same as utility — having access to 15 channels doesn't make session planning faster or more structured. If anything, the abundance of unfiltered content adds to the curation burden.

The game-day category is small by comparison, but the tools that do appear are more specific and purpose-built. SubTime's dominance here is notable — it's one of the few tools that coaches mention by name unprompted, suggesting it has found genuine product-market fit in a narrow but high-frequency use case. The fact that it only solves one part of the game-day problem (substitution timing) leaves significant adjacent territory unaddressed.

Video technology adoption at 5% is striking. Despite broader consumer camera technology being more accessible than ever, almost no grassroots coaches are using it systematically. Cost is one factor, but the more likely barrier is workflow: recording a game is easy; doing something useful with the footage is not. Until analysis tools become genuinely zero-friction, video will remain an aspiration rather than a habit at this level.

Four Forces Shaping the Landscape

Across every geography and age group, four interconnected themes define the grassroots coaching experience.

Commentary

These four themes don't exist in isolation — they form a reinforcing cycle. High personal commitment (Theme 1) means coaches care deeply, which makes the fragmentation of support (Theme 2) more frustrating, which increases cognitive overload (Theme 3), which makes them more likely to reject technology that adds to the burden rather than reducing it (Theme 4). Any solution that addresses only one theme in isolation risks missing the systemic nature of the problem.

Theme 4 deserves particular attention because it reframes the entire technology conversation. The grassroots coaching market isn't underserved because coaches are technophobic — it's underserved because the technology that's been offered so far has been designed for the wrong context. Most coaching apps are built for the desk, the laptop, the calm moment of preparation. Grassroots coaching happens in the chaos: on a rainy Tuesday evening, with half the team missing, on a pitch shared with another group, with a parent asking questions on the sideline. Technology that doesn't account for that reality will fail regardless of how elegant its features are.

The interplay between Themes 1 and 2 also points to a retention risk that clubs and associations should take seriously. Committed coaches who feel unsupported don't usually complain — they simply don't come back the following season. The fragmented nature of the support ecosystem means that when a coach burns out, there's no structured system to catch them, support them, or reduce their load. They're left to figure it out alone, and many eventually decide it's not worth the cost.

Perhaps the most actionable insight from these themes is this: the bar for success is lower than it might appear. Coaches aren't asking for revolutionary technology or comprehensive digital transformation. They're asking for small, targeted reductions in friction — a substitution plan that updates itself, a session template that adapts to who showed up, a seasonal structure they don't have to build from scratch. Tools that understand the difference between adding capability and removing burden are better positioned to meet coaches where they are.

Closing the Support Gap

Respondents report investing significant personal time and money into programs that are often structurally under-supported. For survey respondents, the operational challenges they face — attendance uncertainty, space constraints, fragmented content sources, and inadequate technology — are consistent across geographies, age groups, and competitive levels.

The gap between the responsibility placed on coaches and the structured support they receive is an area where tools designed specifically for grassroots realities could have meaningful impact.

Summary Data

Using These Findings

This report is free to read, share, and reference — no permission required. We actively encourage clubs, associations, coaches, journalists, researchers, and product teams to cite these findings. Every time the data is referenced, it helps more coaches discover, benchmark, and advocate for better support at the grassroots level.

Attribution

When citing a finding, please credit it as “The Grassroots Coaching State of Play Report, 2026” and include a direct link back to this report. Linking to the source — rather than just quoting the statistic — allows readers to verify context, explore related findings, and access the full picture. It also helps the research reach more coaches, which is the whole point of publishing it.

Data disclaimer

These findings are directional rather than statistical. They highlight consistent patterns across respondents and are intended to illuminate the lived experience of grassroots coaches, not to serve as a census of the entire coaching population. Findings reflect survey responses from a self-selected sample of grassroots coaches across the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia. Results are representative of survey respondents and should not be extrapolated as a statistically precise measure of the broader global coaching population. All individual responses are anonymised and aggregated — no personal data is published in this report.