David Garcia:

One of the strangest things about football training is how many activities have become completely detached from the game situations they were originally designed to solve.

Take something like a 4v4+3, you can find thousands of versions online, coaches use it everywhere, it looks recognizably “football,” players are busy, there are decisions, pressure, passing, support, all the things we associate with a good activity, but ask a really basic question, what game situation is this actually recreating, and what problem are the players meant to become better at solving?, and quite often there isn’t a clear answer.

I don’t think that means the activity is bad, I think it means we’ve often started at the wrong end.

An activity gets created because a coach sees something happening repeatedly in a match, they want their players to experience that situation more often, so they build a training environment around it, but then the activity gets shared, copied, modified, put into session libraries, posted online, copied again, and eventually the original game problem disappears.

What remains is the exercise.

Crafting training sessions around the match seems like common sense.