It doesn’t matter if it’s a defender or a striker; every football player loves a shooting drill. There are a variety of football shooting drills that you can include in your training sessions, but as coaches, you must pick the right exercises that will improve your striker's shooting.
Some drills involve dribbling and shooting, while others involve target practice. In this guide, we look at the most effective drills to improve a player's shooting accuracy and power.
Football shooting drills to include in your training
- Target Practice
- One-Touch and Finish
- Crossing and Finishing
- Shooting Under Pressure
- 2v1 Shooting Drill
- Shooting placement drill
Target Practice
One of the best football shooting drills that will help improve a player’s accuracy is target practice drills.
Firstly, you need to set your football goals up, and then you can place either football cones, football training poles or small targets inside the goal at different locations. Players can then take shots from various angles and distances with the aim of hitting specific targets.
Coaches can try to get their strikers and attacking players to shoot with the inside of the foot for accuracy and placement and then to have a shot on goal with their laces for power.
To add a competitive edge to the exercise, you can time the drill or count the number of targets hit and compare it against the other players.
One-Touch and Finish
This drill not only improves your shooting, but it can help a player improve their first touch as well. For this exercise, a coach or teammate feeds a ball into a player standing in the D-area of the penalty box, and the person shooting has to bring the ball under control and then shoot at the goal.
Coaches and teammates can feed the balls to the player shooting from various positions around the box, and passes should be varied, too. A pass, for example, should not always be along the ground, and it should be varied amongst lofted passes as this is more realistic to a game situation where forwards will not always receive the perfect pass.
To mix up the exercise, you can introduce defenders to put a bit of pressure on the player shooting and to make it even more realistic to a game situation.
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Crossing and Finishing
A lot of goals in matches come from crosses into the box, which you can practice in training. You can place players on the wings and get them to deliver crosses into the box, so the strikers must time their runs and attempt to finish on goal.
The crosses in the box should be varied so there are low and high crosses as well as cutbacks. To get players used to the drill, it should start simple, with the wide players putting in crosses and the forwards being tasked with finishing the chances, but you can make the exercise more challenging by adding defenders to mirror a game-like situation.
The Soccer Xpert, a site that shares some of the best football drills you can try, spoke about why this exercise is brilliant: “Football crossing and finishing drills put players in game-like situations that focus on the final third of the attack. These drills are not just shooting drills, as shooting drills are the skill of an individual. These football finishing drills are game situations that give the attacking players excellent opportunities to score a goal. Make sure the proper pressure is applied to these training sessions, as this will make the drills more game-like.”
Shooting Under Pressure
This drill simulates a typical game scenario where a defender puts pressure on the striker as they look to take a shot on goal.
This is one of the best drills for shooting in football, and to set this up, you need a defender to start behind or beside the attacker, and then a ball is passed to the attacker, and they must look to get their shot off before the defender catches up. You can use different angles and distances for the shot to mix it up.
To make it harder for the attackers, you can increase the defensive pressure by getting the defender to start close to the attacker, so they are able to put a tackle in.
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2v1 Shooting Drill
For this exercise, you will create a small-sided, game-like scenario with two attackers and one defender. This drill aims for the attackers to make quick passes to one another to create a shooting opportunity against the goalkeeper.
The exercise is great for improving an attacker's decision-making about when to pass or shoot and for a defender about when to press or hold their position. To make the drill harder, you can add more defenders or attackers so that there are 3v1 or 3v2 scenarios.
The Sportplan website, a resource that shares the best football drills, looks at how the exercise should work from an attacker's perspective: “The player who starts with the ball passes the ball square to the other player. This player runs towards the defender (isolating the defender), allowing the other player to loop around and overlap them to receive the ball in the space created.
“After receiving the pass, this player should have a shot at the goal.”
Shooting placement drill
To get your team's attackers to work on curling the ball into the corner of a goal, you can set up football mannequins or cones as defenders and put targets into the top corner of the goals.
To set this exercise up, you can get the attackers to take shots from the edge of the penalty area and curve the ball around the mannequins towards the targets, which will help them improve their technique and placement. You can also add a goalkeeper to make the drill even harder.
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How drills can improve your shooting
As this guide demonstrates, effective drills can help improve a player's shooting. Below are some tips for effective shooting drills.
- Variety: The best shooting drills should simulate different scenarios from games to help improve adaptability.
- Track progress: To monitor a player's improvement, coaches and managers should measure metrics such as conversion rates and shooting accuracy.
- Focus on technique: Exercises should focus on the body position, follow-through, and striking technique of a player.
- Practice with both feet: Shooting drills should encourage a player to use both feet when shooting at goal.
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