ABSTRACT

Winning soccer matches is the main goal of most adult players, teams, coaches and support staff across the world. In the majority of cases to achieve this goal requires consistent and skilled performance from the team and players. Professional soccer clubs pay huge transfer fees to other clubs to acquire the most skilled players in pursuit of these two goals. National, club and private youth-development schemes spend years and large sums of money attempting to develop players that are skilled enough to help their teams achieve these goals (or in some cases at least to gain a financial profit from future transfer fees). Coaches and support staff also spend many years acquiring their skills through education and experience so as to improve the performance of players and teams. Many factors must combine across an extended period of time for expert performance to be attained and maintained in sport (for a review, see Davids and Baker, 2007). In this chapter, we review research showing how engagement in practice and other soccer activities might lead to the acquisition of skill and the attainment of expert performance in players. Moreover, research examining the microstructure of practice activity and its effect on skill acquisition in soccer is reviewed. We begin the chapter with a review of the developmental activities that players engage in during their formative years.