Why your possession drill teaches nothing

A rondo is a wonderful practice for one thing: keeping the ball under pressure in a space with no target. That situation occurs in a match perhaps twice, usually by accident, and never in the moments anybody is worried about. The reason coaches keep running it anyway is that it looks like football and produces a lot of passes, and a lot of passes feels like progress.

The fix is not to stop doing rondos. It is to give the ball somewhere to go. The moment you add a direction — a target player, a gate, a zone that has to be reached — the practice stops training possession and starts training progression, which is the thing the model actually asks for. The players will hate it for about four minutes because the success rate drops, and the drop in success rate is the entire point.

The line to add: a goal counts only if the ball leaves the square. Everything else about your rondo can stay exactly as it is. If you want the full version, it is the third-man session, and it is one of the free ones.