Football juggling for beginners

While it is unlikely that you will juggle a ball across the park during a match, practising this skill will help you improve your ball control. Juggling is helpful particularly in improving your first touch. This post will give you a few tips on football juggling.

Basic football juggling techniques

There are basically two methods to juggle: using your laces and using your toe box. The first method is used when you want a little bit of power in the touch to pass it to other players or lift the ball higher into your upper body. The second method is used when you want to keep the ball under control and close to you to execute other freestyling moves.

When you use your laces, point your toe slightly up. If you leave your toe down or flat, the ball is going to bounce away from you. If you position your toe lightly up, the ball is going to come straight back up.

When you use the toe box, you want to hit the ball between your laces and the toe. Bend your toe slightly so that your foot is almost flat and then when the ball comes down just lift up each time. With this method, the ball is always right underneath you. With this method, you can just bounce up and down not moving your foot at all and touch the ball every time it goes down. If you don’t want to bounce each time, you have to actually lift up your foot.

With both methods, you want to hit the ball so that it goes straight up each time. If the ball is going away from you, that means that your toe is pointing too far down. If the ball is crowding you and coming back too tight, your toes are pointing up too high. So, you want to find a happy medium. The only way to really figure this out is to train every single day and get it down in your muscle memory.

Starting out

The most important quality for beginning jugglers is persistence. To master these methods you’re going to need a lot of practice. A major part of getting better at football juggling is just ingraining it into your muscle memory. Every time you practice juggling you grow muscles in your legs and cells in your brain that improve your skills. With regular practice, you will gradually become the excellent juggler you always want it to be.

Use your hands when you are first learning to juggle. Start by using your hands between each touch, then gradually increase the number of touches without hands. Using your hands can help you learn faster by enabling you to maintain more control during the early stages of juggling.

One of the most difficult challenges for beginning jugglers is keeping the ball from getting away from them. To help solve this problem, drop the ball with a slight backspin and try to maintain the spin as you juggle. You will find that backspin keeps the ball coming back to you rather than getting away. As your skills improve, backspin will become a less important part of juggling.

With no spin and greater precision juggling is far easier and more effective when both feet are involved. To help your weak foot become a partner of your strong foot spend some time improving your weak foot separately. Try to set new records using only your weak foot. If your weak foot can juggle the ball at least five times, it should be strong enough to alternate with your other foot and improve your overall juggling skills.

Skilful jugglers develop a rhythm moving the ball frequently between both feet. It is important that you begin working with both feet right away, juggling the ball between them as often as you can.

As you become comfortable football juggling with your lower body your, the next step is to master ball control with your upper body. This is a topic for another post 😉

Pablo Matamoros

I am a software engineer with 25+ years of experience across diverse industries. I've climbed the corporate leader over the years, which has some benefits but means I moved away from my love for tinkering with technology. So, I build the odd website or application to keep learning and stay in touch with technology. FootballTechniques allows me to combine my programming knowledge with my passion for football.

To find out more about my professional experience, visit PabloMatamoros.com

10 drills to improve ball control

Ball control is the most important skill in football. This post goes over a variety of drills to develop your ball control.

5 football dribbling moves all players should know

There are many fancy moves in football, but you only need to master a few simple skills to protect the ball and open opportunities for your team. [...]

5 mistakes football players make that keep them average

Common mistakes hold footballers back from getting to that next level. This post focus on 5 mistakes football players make that keep them average.