The Other Foot

Despite a career in professional football, I am always keen to keep up to date with any new ideas in youth development. As a young man I was a teacher and then a lecturer in Primary Education and I suppose old teachers never die!

I became aware of a novel approach to developing two-footedness in young players recently and must admit to being quite taken by it. Ian McArthur is the football coach behind the idea and he is also a qualified teacher. Ian was struck by the number of young players who seemed unable to use both feet and designed his programme to combat that inefficiency in our young players.

The more he investigated the problem, the more examples he discovered of two-footed players learning to be that way. Like other skills in football and in life, learning to use the weaker foot (or