There are six different colours of bib strewn across the indoor pitches of St George’s Park. There’s an equally vibrant kaleidoscope of disc cones marking out small pitches, and there are collapsible goals at each end. Amid it all are a load of youngsters, largely unattended, trying skills, dribbling past opponents, shifting from pitch to pitch and forming new teams. It’s 3v3 football: a bit messy, a little unstructured and, the Football Association hopes, a key development in ensuring the future of the game.
From next season, as part of a new strategy for youth football, the youngest cohort in the game – the under 7s, which is six- and seven-year-olds – will play three-a-side instead of five-a-side. When they’re under-eights, they will shift back to five-a-side. It’s a small tweak that lasts for just 12 months, but the FA believes a window of exposure to this new form of the game will help improve young players’ technical ability and decision-making on the pitch. There are also quieter hopes that 3v3 may make some positive changes off the field, too.
“At this age players are getting used to their body,” says John Folwell, the FA’s head of grassroots coach development. “You’re developing your agility, your balance and coordination. But you’re also getting to love the ball; 3v3 gives you lots and lots of touches on the ball, lots of dribbles, lots of 1v1s. Go next to your opponent, do your tricks, do your skills, try and outwit them. That’s what we want to encourage.”
As well as putting an emphasis on the fun bits of football, 3v3 is also a game with no goalkeepers and no referees. “The main driver was seeing if we could create a model that allows every kid to play,” says Folwell. “We know that in five-a-side, goalkeepers are often standing around. And we know that there’s often squads of nine, with three or four on the side. Then we were thinking about how we give the kids more ownership of what their football looks like. So do we need referees? I suppose what we’re trying to do is almost recreate that playground feel again.”
The FA has not invented 3v3 football. In fact, it is playing catchup with other European nations, like Norway and the Netherlands, who have been using it at youth levels for more than a decade. Germany have developed the concept further with a 3v3 game called Funino that has two sets of goals to allow for an added emphasis on passing. But every country that has adopted the format has drawn similar lessons about how it can develop a new kind of relationship between young players and the game.
For Rachel Yankey, the England and Arsenal legend and an ambassador for the FA’s youth strategy, adding more fun and giving players greater freedom has the potential to shift some of the barriers that cause young people to fall out of love with the game. “Three v three is a throwback to how we played when we were growing up,” she says. “There wasn’t a parent or a referee, it was just about playing and learning that social side. Maybe with structured football you lose a little bit of personality and that resilience of just being able to get on with it. I think this matters, especially for girls where they are probably less confident. This is a game that shows you can try something different. You don’t have to always be told what to do.”
A feeling that organised sport is not for them is one of the key factors in girls dropping out of football when they hit adolescence. Giving young players more control over the game they play may help change that. But read the literature on the FA’s 3v3 rollout, and listen to the insights of those involved, and it becomes clear that it’s not just the culture on the field that people want to change. Referees are not the only ones kept away from 3v3 football, parents are too.
“There are lots of really good things about grassroots football, but there is a cultural challenge sometimes about the sideline behaviour,” says Folwell. “The result can be paramount for people on the touchline and parents will shout at little Johnny or Jenny to do what they want them to do.”
But with several games going on at the same time in 3v3, Folwell says: “We think this model takes away that focus. And parents are a little bit further removed from the actual side of the pitch as well.”
Some of the strongest pushback during trials that have taken place over the past year is from parents. The absence of a goalkeeper is the main frustration alongside, in the words of coach Ryan Walker who has presided over 3v3’s introduction in the Cotswold Youth League, “the age old, ‘it’s just not football, is it?’” Even at the St George’s Park showcase there are parents muttering that their child is not getting enough direct coaching in this liberated form of the game.
Three v three is unlikely to be a magic bullet for all the challenges grassroots football faces, though the fact it can easily be played indoors is another bonus. But as well as being a format that can benefit younger players, it’s also one that has been picked up by marketers. Whether it’s Stormzy’s 3v3 Merky FC Cup or the Adidas World Cup commercial where Timothée Chalamet hustles Lamine Yamal and Jude Bellingham into a pickup game, 3v3 has a buzz about it. It may not be your dad’s version of the game, but it’s growing at pace.
