7 Rare Habits That Make You Dangerously Good at Football

There are 7 skills on football that are so rare, just learning them will give you an unfair advantage over 99% of players. And today, I'm breaking down each one, which will get more and more rare as this video goes on. Ending with the bonus skill only the top 1% are doing right now that could completely transform your game. Starting with number 1. This is a bad pass. This is a good pass. So here's why and how this skill could take your passing to the next level. A common thing most players do is always aiming to the feet. You practice it in training, trying to get it as accurate as possible. But this is wrong. You're not meant to aim for the person's feet. You want to pass like a professional footballer, which is rare, but it separates you from most young players. A pro calculates three things in their head right before they pass to make sure they play the perfect ball every single time. One is space. Are they in space or under pressure? So in this situation, if there's a bunch of time, defender is super far away, you want the ball to be played into space, so you can step onto it and then progress the ball forward. The second is defenders, which goes hand in hand with space. Does the player have space? Which is dependent on how far away the defender is. For defenders around him, and there's no opportunity for him to go in behind, I would maybe just look to play him feet and then receive it again. Third is having the next movement in mind. If I'm going to play him, what is the action I want him to do? In this position for defenders around him, I'm going to play it feet and then ask for the ball back. Once you know these things, you can play a pass to the right foot with perfect speed into the right space. And it's the first of eight skills that get more and more rare as the video goes on. Which brings me to number two, because it's time to play Scout That Player, the game show that's both educational and fun. And today, I've got three players at our showcase, and it's your job to pick the best one for the team. Okay, player one. Short, fast, strong, and oh boy, can he shoot. But up steps player two, also short. Not very fast, but what a touch. And a great ball player. But for player three, he's slow, great touch, great pass, but you can hear it. Now, which player are you picking? Let's go back to the studio to find out. Boy, that game show host is pretty damn good looking, huh? Anyways, every player there was good, but I picked number three. And only because he had a skill that a lot of people are starting to forget in football. Football is a team sport. Your individual talent isn't the only thing that makes you a good player. Most players are quiet, timid, and keep to themselves, even on a team. But if you're ever in a game, or especially on a trial, there's no easier way to stand out to a coach than this skill that I call confidence transferring. There's three steps to it. First is your body language. At the higher levels, everyone is very similar in skill set. But you can either be a quiet player or a leader. Your goal is to lift the people around you so you can play better, and this is how. People can sense if you're fake. So whether you make a mistake or your teammates make a mistake, you're not putting your head down and accepting defeat. You're telling them to put their head up. So a good leader always has a positive body language. Second is your awareness. A good example of this is Jude Bellingham. You need to be aware of what people need. Do they need help, or do they need hyping up? And if you can supply that need in those specific moments, you can uplift that individual player's performance, which then overall can help the team perform a lot better, which will help you stand out. And third, it's talking constantly. Once you're aware of things you need to intervene with, bring people up by talking. You always need to be in some sort of communication with your team around you, whether it's giving commands, instructions, or uplifting a teammate. But the chances are 99% of people who try this fail because they lack a skill which is killing their confidence, making it impossible to make people around you feel confident as well, which brings me to skill three. Just by looking at what you did today, I can tell you exactly where you'll be one year from today. What level you're at, how good you are, or if you don't learn this third skill, how bad you are. And here's why it's so important. I used to have two friends. Let's call them D's and Nuts. Both of these players had big dreams. They both wanted to play for the Canadian national team, but they were both playing Sunday league soccer. D's wanted to have everything now. He started by thinking that today he's going to train, and by tomorrow he's going to be a completely new player. Nuts, on the other hand, went for the slow approach. He didn't really expect to improve straight away. After two weeks, D's gave up because he didn't improve. Whereas a few years later, Nuts was playing for the Canadian youth team, and it's because he knew something that D's didn't. And that is that if you train for two hours today, you're not going to be instantly better tomorrow. If you visualise today, you won't be confident tomorrow. And a lot of players give up like D's because of that. To get better at something, you have to consistently show up and do the work for a long period of time to actually see real improvement. But the rare players I know that succeed follow the 1% rule and get further than everyone else. And to further understand this concept, I like to use Michelangelo's statue of David the Goliath as an example. He first started with a huge rock. Then every day he made chips into it, slowly chipping away at the huge rock. And by trusting the process and showing up every single day, he now has one of the most famous pieces of art ever. So what can we learn here? So you have to see your development kind of like Michelangelo saw the huge piece of rock. Slowly making 1% chips, which is you showing up every day and doing the trainings, then eventually get this famous, beautiful piece of art. And that famous, beautiful piece of art for you is signed to a professional academy, getting to the Canadian Youth National Team. And this here is another example. This is from the book Atomic Habits, and this is a chart showing the difference between someone who gets 1% better every single day for a year versus someone who gets 1% worse. You're able to clearly see that just by focusing on getting 1% better each and every single day, by the end of the year, you're going to be 37.78% better than you were the year previous. But if you end up getting 1% worse every single day, by the end of the year, you're actually a worse footballer than you started the year with. And that is the power of consistency. Consistency means showing up in everything you do, sticking to your work. So start being consistent with turning up to training and games on time, training outside of team training, and doing the small habits that make you a better person and player. I actually give all my students a daily progress tracker so they can stay consistent with the tasks that actually matter in their day, and be the person up here at the end of the year. You can click the link in the description to get that inside the Player Accelerator. But just being consistent doesn't actually work if the things you do every day aren't helping you improve, which is why this fourth skill could change everything. Imagine you're a character in a game. You have a ton of stats. Every day, you work on improving those stats. If you take your time to understand those stats, this could be a huge skill, and here's why. The problem is, a lot of players believe they're better or worse than they are. So they go out and start training things randomly, whenever they see someone else train. This is slowing down their improvement more than anything. The goal is to build a card that suits your game. Here's what Mbappe's card looks like, or Holland's. They're not good at defending because they don't need to be. They work on the things that make them better. The only way you can get there is by doing what I call SAT. It stands for Stat-Aware Training, and it works like this. It's not about picking the best drills. It's about picking the best drills for you. You start by writing down all your stats in your game and being super realistic. Then, as if you're customizing a character in a game, look at the stats and start to only train the things you want to improve. Not many players are aware of their game in this way, so training like this is an easy hack to set you apart from everyone else. But remember, these skills will only get more and more rare as the video goes on, until the last one, which only 1% of players are actually doing right. But first, welcome back to the game show. I'm going to show you two footballers, and I want you to guess who is the best player. Starting with player one. Great shot. And look at that footwork. What a player he is. Now player two. Oh. Ouch. Who's the best player? Obviously, you'd say player one, but just because he messed up, doesn't make him a bad player. There were thousands of bad mistakes in the last World Cup, but these are some of the best players in the world. That's because mistakes are part of the game, but we've all become so afraid to make them because it makes you look bad, or you think your coach is going to throw you off the team. But if you follow this formula to learn from mistakes, you'll never have this happen to you. It's important you learn this, because if you keep winning and keep on doing everything perfect, you'll never grow. So that's why making mistakes is not a problem that makes you a bad player. It's a rare skill that makes you a good player. But you have to understand how to learn from these mistakes to actually get better. For example, I have a defender in front of me, and I'm going to engage him in a 1v1. So I'm going to go try and beat him with a double stepover. He wins the ball, right? That is a mistake. You need to try and analyse in the moment why you weren't successful. The reason why the stepover wasn't convincing enough was because I did the stepover so far away. No one is going to get sold with a stepover out here, right? So now I'm going to do a stepover closer. Now I'm actually able to beat him. And now you've learnt the lesson that double stepovers is really only effective when you're closer to the opponent. You can follow this every time you mess up to make sure you learn from it, and do it the right way next time you have a chance. But this sixth skill is an even better way to learn from your mistakes, except almost nobody knows about it. Imagine playing your best game ever. You score a couple goals, maybe get a couple assists, get a crunching tackle in, your coach is impressed, the fans are cheering you, everyone loves you, and you win your team the game. But you didn't film it. You just lost so much opportunity to improve. It's a very rare thing for people to do, but that's why it could put you so far ahead. Because when you film your games, a couple of things happen. One, even if you had a great game, there's always something that you can learn and improve on to get even better, and also see what you're already doing well to do more of to keep performing at that level. You're also able to understand feedback that you're given from your coaches, from your teammates, by directly looking at what you're doing in a match. Not only is feedback important, but you're also able to create a highlight tape out of it. Highlight tape is your best clips put together in a video that then you send to different coaches at the next level to get opportunities from. So how do you do it? Literally just get a family member to film your games. You can pay them, but you don't have to. You could also use your phone as well. Then after you have your games filmed, study your game just like any other pro games. Take notes of what you did right and wrong, and then in your training and your next game, work on these things. Which almost guarantees that every time you play, you can learn way faster than all your teammates, bringing me to skill number seven. This graph right here could stop you from ever having a bad game again, because it explains one of the hardest skills to master in football. And if you don't learn it, you could spend your next game taking shots like this guy for 90 minutes. Most players try to avoid nerves. I know how hard it is to have butterflies in your stomach and thoughts racing before a game. And this graph explains why those butterflies are a good thing. And it's called the Yerkes-Dodson Law. Basically what this graph is showing is that if your arousal is super low, you're super, super relaxed, you're not thinking about the game, that will actually make you perform worse. And on the opposite end, if you're super, super anxious, and those butterflies are super, super strong, that itself can make you play worse too. So you need a perfect combination of both to get that perfect middle ground that's going to help you perform at your best. This is why most players can't perform. They try to overcome nervousness. Loud music, hyping yourself up. This throws you into the far right side, where you're way too excited. Being nervous actually tells your body to prepare itself for the match. So having nerves is good. We want this. Without nerves, you're going to be half asleep on the field. So here's what you need to do. Listen to your body and where you're at on the scale, and then use rising and falling techniques to balance your preparation. If you're super relaxed, you're half asleep basically, you need to use rising techniques to get your energy up. So this would include fast music and really high energy warmups. But if you're super excited and your energy level's way too high up to the point where you're overly nervous, we need to use falling techniques to get your energy back down from being overexcited. And this is when you got to do some meditation and visualisation exercises. So don't try and avoid nerves. Understand when it's too much. Understand when it's too little. These techniques could be the difference between you performing in your next game or not. But there's thousands of ways to visualise and a million songs to pick from. So if you want the exact cheat sheet I give my students to use in their own games, with a full visualisation practice and every other mindset hack, click the link to get it in the Player Accelerator. But this video has one more skill, the rarest so far, which means nearly all your teammates won't be doing. And learning it could give you the ultimate unfair advantage. In 2010, an up-and-coming player in the Netherlands began his professional career at just 19 years old for a club called FC Groningen. And in his first season playing as a striker, he scored two goals. However, that didn't last long because by the time the season ended, he was one of the best centre-backs in the league. And a few years later, the whole world. That player was Virgil van Dijk. In Spain, however, a young kid once became one of the most important players in the biggest club in the world. More important than Vinicius, Toni Kroos, or even Karim Benzema. And the reason was because he was able to fill into multiple positions and play them well, which meant he was nearly in every game that season. His name is Eduardo Camavinga. And even though he and Van Dijk are very different, they have a skill which is so rare that anybody who's able to learn it can take and almost guarantee they become valuable to almost any coach out there. Imagine getting called to play in a new position, but you're not prepared. You could play bad, lose the coach's trust, fail at the trial. Instead, you have to follow these three steps to build one of the most important skills. Adaptability. Whatever you get asked to do in a game or at a trial, you can stand out. First, get great at your own position, or else you'll be okay at just a bunch of different positions and never great at one. No coach wants that. So here's how to become adaptable the right way. Play different positions and pick up. The key is to get pushed out of your comfort zone so you prepare for anything in a game. So it recreates the perfect game intensity, pressure, and potentially speed of play. You can play different positions and get better and get more comfortable playing in different areas of the field. Finally, study players in different positions. When you're watching film, instead of just focusing on your own position, I like to always spend 10, 15, 20 minutes sometimes after analyzing my own position to look at different positions on the field to see how players in those positions think and move. And that is how you become adaptable. And just like Van Dyke and Camavinga, you never know where you could end up. And learning this skill might just be the thing that gets you to the level you dream of. But then again, so could any of the tricks you've learned in this video. And now that you've got an unfair advantage, you need to know how to use it and follow the right path to reaching your potential. So go watch this video next to learn what I did to sign for a professional academy so you can too. Click it. Peace.