Rondo and Positional Play Exercises

A little ways back, Jens Schuster, a German coach, posted an excellent presentation with a litany of exercises for rondo and positional play based training. I’ve personally used many of these exercises already this fall season and have used them as a springboard to develop new exercises as well.

These are both a great collection of exercises on their own and a wonderful source of inspiration for coaches to adapt, change, scale up or scale down the exercises to suite their coaching style, level of player and team and the ambitions of those teams in terms of style of play.

One such exercise is one of Pep Guardiola’s rondo games, the 4v4+3, seen in the video below:

The only drawback to this work was it is originally in German. Through a slightly painstaking and time consuming effort I was able to get a rough translation of these exercises into English. It is not perfect, far from it, but the translation does help to provide a better understanding of some of the exercises.

You can download the translated version using the link below:

jensschusterrondos_juegodeposicion-docx-de-en

The original version can easily be downloaded directly off of Jens’ twitter profile. Schuster is definitely worth a follow on twitter if you are a coach.

In an email exchange with Jens he had some additional comments on some of the exercises:

I’ve used almost all forms in training. I think most forms are suitable for non-professional youth teams, but I think it depends on your playing philosophy which are the best rondo-forms for your team.

I think Rondos like

• 05. 2 + 1N vs. 1 + 1 vs. 1 IM FELDERWECHSEL
• 12. 2 MAL 4 vs. 2 IM 4 vs. 4 vs. 4
• 13. 3 + 4N vs. 3 ÜBER DIE ÄUSSEREN NEUTRALEN
• …..
• 21. 6 + 1 vs. 3 ‘ÜBER DEN FREIEN MANN ZWISCHEN DEN LINIEN ZUM FREIZIEHEN IN ZONE 23‘
• 22. 7 vs. 2 MIT MITTLEREM PASSDREIECK ‘PASS ÜBER EINE LINIE‘
• 23. 5 + 1 vs. 2 ‘PASS ZWISCHEN DIE LINIEN‘
• 31. 4 + 4 vs. 2 + 1 + 1 ‘DRUCK AUS 2 EBENEN‘
• 48. VOM 7 vs. 1 BIS ZUM 7 vs. 7
• 53. ‘FRISCHER GEGNER‘ IM 4 + 4 vs. 4

….

you can do with almost every team.