Coaching a soccer team is a huge responsibility that doesn’t end on game days—it extends to every practice and every spare moment you have to think of new ways to improve the team’s performance or try out different approaches.
This creative process can, in some cases, be quite draining for coaches. Sometimes, it’s hard to completely disconnect from coaching duties, and you end up thinking all day about how to help the team gel better or how to achieve a better defensive balance during transitions.
That’s why many coaches now rely on soccer coaching apps that save time and effort when creating new exercise routines, formations, and drills.
In this post, we’ll discuss the top 6 soccer training apps that every coach should have on their phone and let technology assist them in their arduous planning process.
Table of Contents
1. The Coach Hub: Free, comprehensive, and seamless.
The Coach Hub app was designed to be the ultimate tool for all soccer coaches, with different sections covering virtually every area a coach needs to address with their team.
To start with the most important part, the app is completely free and features a library of exercises for every training session, each with detailed descriptions and the recommended skill level players should have to perform them.
With a catalog of over 30 exercises, you can keep your players motivated during every training session, using dynamic drills that reinforce key concepts by recreating real-game situations.
- My Starting XI: The app has a section where you can build your starting 11 using different formations and roles for each player. You can save various formations and strategies to try out in matches.
- Post-match analysis: On the platform, you’ll find a comprehensive section for writing post-match reports for each player. This will allow the players to see in writing what their strengths were, what mistakes they made, and what they need to improve for future training sessions.
- Season planner: The coach can plan the entire season with weekly or monthly plans. Each week, you can focus on a different area, whether it’s endurance, physical conditioning, or tactics.
And as an added bonus, The Coach Hub is accessible from your phone and computer. Just open your browser, and all your team’s data will be synced by importing your email data.
2. Tactical Pad, your digital whiteboard.
Tactical Pad has become a technological alternative to conventional whiteboards, allowing you to visually project tactics in a much easier-to-understand way.
The app features animations and 2D/3D models that let you depict a play or tactical approach in video format, which is ideal for helping the kids translate what they see on the board to the field.
In addition to this, Tactical Pad also has other sections, such as the session planner and the community, for sharing all the content with the kids, parents, and guardians.
Of course, to take full advantage of all the features, you’ll need to purchase the paid version from their website.
- Innovation for tactics: 3D projections are key to showing each player’s role in the game plan.
- Compatible with soccer, indoor soccer, and handball.
3. TeamSnap, to streamline communication.
TeamSnap is an app used by many professional teams due to its wide range of features, both for coaches and for communicating with players and their parents.
The thing about TeamSnap is that it requires immediate payment to start using it; there is no trial version.
However, if you’re willing to cover that cost, you’ll have an app that centralizes all your team’s operations in one place—from attendance sheets and payments to important documents, schedules, and more.
- Saves administrative time: By having everything organized in one place, you save time on sending messages, confirming receipt, and other administrative tasks.
- Video exercises: The app features a catalog of video-recorded exercises to send to the players and prepare them for upcoming sessions.
4. Coachbetter, the coach’s right-hand man.
This paid app has been praised by professional soccer players and coaches of the caliber of Hansi Flick (Coach of F.C. Barcelona) and Steven N’Zonzi, 2018 World Cup champion with France.
The app features a vast catalog of soccer exercises and drills for players of all levels, saving the coach time when planning each session.
You can also plan your match days and special events, with sections that allow all players and parents to get the latest updates firsthand.
- Useful exercises: The app features exercises for different game situations and to strengthen various areas.
- Video analysis: It includes a tool to upload videos of the team’s matches, break them down, and analyze each play.
5. The Coaching Manual, to plan it all.
The Coaching Manual provides practical solutions for coaches who need to submit an annual plan to their superiors or apply for a coaching position on a team.
Its templates are quite professional and visually appealing, which is why many coaches choose it to organize their ideas and capture them digitally.
- Seasonal plans for different teams and age groups.
- Professional diagrams that can be shared in various formats, easy to understand and use on a daily basis.
6. SkillShark, perfect for evaluation.
If you’re the kind of coach who enjoys evaluating your players session after session and game after game, SkillShark is a must-have app for you.
This program replaces pen and paper so you can grade the kids from your phone, with clear and concise performance reports containing information that’s easy for the kids and their parents to understand.
Plus, it lets you keep a history of all assessments to track players’ progress over time.
- Perfect for weekly, monthly, and quarterly evaluations.
- Organize all your documents and tests by player, session, or timeframe.
With these apps, you’ll save a lot of time in your daily routine as a coach and use that time for other personal activities; and the best part is that you’ll do it almost without thinking once you get used to using them.
Make room for technology in your role as a coach, experiment with modern football drills and become the best coach you can be.
