FutureFit Explained: Football DNA
The FA's FutureFit changes are one of the biggest changes to grassroots youth football in years. To help parents understand what is changing and why, Football Parent spoke to Paul Barry, Head of Coaching, Content & Club Support at Football DNA.
Football DNA is a really useful app where you can access thousands of drills to use in your coaching sessions. You can search by topic and filter by age group, making it easy to find practices that suit your players. Alongside full session plans, you can also watch top coaches like Paul deliver each practice, helping you understand the key coaching points and how to progress or adapt the session depending on the needs of your group. It's amazing for when you have an idea for a topic but aren't sure what to do or how to deliver it.
This is Part 1 of a two-part interview.
About Paul Barry and Football DNA
Paul Barry
Head of Coaching, Content & Club Support – Football DNA
Paul Barry is Head of Coaching, Content & Club Support. He holds the UEFA A Licence, the FA Advanced Youth Award (U5–11s) and has more than 25 years' experience across grassroots and academy football. During his career he has worked with Southend United, Arsenal and Crystal Palace, where he served as Head of Coaching. He also worked as a Coach and Mentor for The Football Association through the FA Skills Programme.
What is FutureFit?
Football Parent asks
For anyone who hasn't heard of FutureFit yet in plain terms, what is actually changing from next season, and why did the FA feel the current format needed updating?
Paul Barry • Football DNA
Under the FA’s new FutureFit framework, youth grassroots football is shifting down to a smaller-sided game format for U7s (3v3) and delaying 11 a-side until the U14s season, thereby allowing another season at 9v9 for U13s age groups.
The FA partnered with Liverpool John Moores University to analyse over 400 grassroots matches, and the data found suggested that young players can often get ‘lost’ during larger scale formats on big pitches. They concluded that current formats weren’t maximising children’s development. By reducing the space and lowering team sizes, the FA is looking to elicit an increase in technical actions such as receiving, passing and travelling with the ball, along with out of possession actions including pressing, tackling and intercepting.
They believe there will also be more consistent decision making in matches as well as age specific physical literacy (e.g sprints, agility, balance). Essentially, the FA is prioritising age-appropriate, player-centred fun over rushing kids into adult-sized tactical structures too early in their development.
Football Parent perspective
It's easy to think FutureFit is simply about changing match formats.
Paul's explanation highlights something much broader. The aim is to create more opportunities for every child to be involved in the game, with more decisions, more technical actions and fewer periods where players become spectators.
Many of the principles he describes are also characteristics of a good learning environment. Our guide to What Makes a Good Football Development Environment? explores what parents should look for when choosing a club or coaching programme.
How much more involved is a player in 3v3 compared to 5v5?
Football Parent asks
The phrase "more touches on the ball" gets used a lot with 3v3, but can you put some numbers on it? How significant is the difference in ball involvement between a child playing 3v3 versus 5v5?
Paul Barry • Football DNA
If you look at the data researched by the FA, it highlights a massive multiplier effect, determining that reducing the game to 3v3 forces a fast-paced environment where children interact with the ball up to 6 times more than in a 7v7 format. Because the 3v3 pitch is constrained to roughly 10m x 15m with no goalkeepers or substitutes, players are statistically required to touch, contest or manipulate the ball every 8 to 12 seconds.
Beyond physical touches, the research proved that the 3v3 format drastically accelerates decision-making opportunities. In traditional 5v5 or 7v7 matches, less confident and competent players frequently spent up to 10 continuous minutes without a single meaningful involvement while stronger, more physically mature players dominated possession. Conversely, the tight spaces of 3v3 means that 1v1 duels, passing choices, and dribbling opportunities increase significantly.
A child makes more decisions in a single 10 minute 3v3 game than they would in an entire half of a standard 5v5 match, guaranteeing between 100 to 150 touches per game.
Football Parent takeaway
Most parents expect children to get a few more touches in smaller games.
Football DNA's view is that the difference is much bigger than that, with children becoming involved almost continuously rather than waiting for the ball to reach them.
Does 3v3 improve decision making?
Football Parent asks
Beyond raw touches, how does the reduced format change the type of decisions a young player has to make? Is it simply more repetitions, or is it fundamentally different decision making?
Paul Barry • Football DNA
The 3v3 format doesn't just provide more repetitions; it fundamentally alters the cognitive and perceptual demands on a player. Each player has 2 passing options, compared to 4 in 5v5 and 6 in 7v7. There will often be 1 team-mate beyond the ball and 1 behind the ball, meaning that decisions will start to become engrained over time due to this narrowed-lens. Because every player is permanently close to the ball, they are forced into a continuous state of high-frequency scanning and spatial awareness.
Furthermore, 3v3 fundamentally shifts a child’s relationship with the ball by becoming more risk tolerant, and their game-insight responsibility of making ‘hiding’ impossible. With only two passing options on the pitch and no goalkeeper to rely on, all 3 players will be directly involved in every attacking and defensive transition. They cannot deflect the responsibility to a dominant teammate. Players must decide when to drive into space, pass quickly with less touches and support beyond, behind or beside the ball.
This constant exposure eliminates passive observation, forcing young players to become active, confident problem-solvers who immediately feel the consequences of their choices with regards scoring and conceding goals due to the small size of the pitch.
Football Parent perspective
One point that stood out from Paul's answer is that more touches aren't the only benefit of 3v3.
Football DNA's view is that the format changes the type of decisions children make by keeping them constantly involved in the game, rather than allowing them to become spectators.
If you'd like to explore how players develop better decisions over time, our guide to Improve Football Decision Making explains the practical ways coaches and parents can support this skill.
Learning positions in 3v3
Football Parent asks
There's an argument that 5v5 still gave kids a proper introduction to positional play and team shape, things you lose a bit in 3v3. How do you respond to that concern?
Paul Barry • Football DNA
I am of the strong belief that positional responsibilities, rigid team shapes and tactical formations should not form any part of an U7 player's development. At the U7s age group, introducing fixed positions or team shapes is actually counterproductive. Children at this stage are cognitively ego-centric; their natural instinct is to chase the ball, and forcing them to stay in a fixed position on a 5v5 pitch can suppresses their creativity, curiosity and enjoyment of the game.
The 3v3 format allows the players to enjoy the purest form of the game. Instead of learning positional concepts and rigid team shape, children in a 3v3 environment naturally learn foundational building blocks such as creating passing triangles, how to support a teammate in terms of effective angle and distance, trio compactness when out of possession and how to recover when the ball is lost. 3v3 teaches spatial awareness and basic game principles in a much more simplistic form, preparing them for age specific positional play development.
When should tactics be introduced?
Football Parent asks
From a Football DNA perspective, what do the best player development frameworks say about the optimal age to introduce tactical structure versus pure skill acquisition? Does FutureFit align with that?
Paul Barry • Football DNA
Player development frameworks such as that used at Football DNA believe in a core viewpoint - technique must precede tactics. Being able to execute consistently high level actions should be the main priority for any young player, especially those aged between 5 and 12. Game related principles associated with in possession, out of possession and transition start to become gradually introduced around 11 and 12 years of age. Concepts such as dispersal and compactness linked to individual and unit based learning with and without the ball are examples of this.
One statement I’ve used in academy football is to try and develop players that over time, are technically effective to be tactically capable. Biology dictates that the period between 5 and 11 represents the ‘Golden Age’ of motor learning. Here, a child's brain is absorbent for physical skill acquisition but cognitively ill-equipped for complex, rigid tactical structures.
The developmental timeline across elite coaching frameworks looks like this:
-Ages 5–8 (The FUNdamentals Phase) - Focused entirely on individual ball mastery and physical literacy (agility, balance, coordination).
-Ages 9–12 (The Skill Acquisition Phase) - The peak window for mastering football actions (passing, receiving, 1v1 duels, travelling with the ball). Basic game principles (such as creating and exploiting space) are introduced through skills practices and small-sided games. Players at the latter end of this phase generally start to become familiar with a specific unit of the pitch but at the start, should be exposed to all positions.
-Ages 13+ (The Youth Development Phase) - This is the optimal window to gradually introduce formal tactical structures, full-pitch team shapes and specific positional roles. Players should now have the cognitive maturity to understand these principles as well as the physical capacity to withstand and compete in the game on a larger scale, but this should be gradually employed throughout the course of a player’s journey in this phase.
FutureFit aligns with this approach as the framework has been created to protect the biological window of skill acquisition. By making 3v3 the mandatory entry format at U7s, FutureFit takes away the temptation for grassroots coaches to force adult tactics onto small children.
Furthermore, by delaying 11v11 football until U14s, FutureFit ensures that players spend their entire primary school years in age-appropriate, small-sided game environments. It allows the focus to remain exactly where the research says it should be: on individual development, high touch frequency and skill acquisition, before the physical and tactical demands of larger format football are introduced.
Football Parent takeaway
One phrase from this answer sums up Football DNA's philosophy:
Technique must precede tactics.
Whether or not every coach would phrase it that way, it's a useful reminder that technical confidence is the platform on which tactical understanding is built.
Coaching the FutureFit generation
Football Parent asks
FutureFit changes the format but not necessarily the coaching. Is the FA doing enough to upskill grassroots coaches to actually deliver 3v3 in a way that maximises the development benefit, or is there a risk that the same coaching habits just get applied to a smaller game?
Paul Barry • Football DNA
There is a fear that coaches will adopt a traditional, authoritative pitch-side approach, where they shout out directive instructions to the players. To help enhance coach development across the FutureFit initiative, the FA is deploying a brand support network ahead of the 2026/27 season:
- County FA Coach Developers - The FA has launched a dedicated network of County Coach Developers specifically tasked with positively supporting grassroots coaches. Rather than rely on coaches to educate themselves, these developers are running local CPD workshops and practical regional events. They’re teaching grassroots coaches how to manage a 3v3 ‘carousel’ setup, how to employ the new pass-in/dribble-in restart rules to keep the ball in play and crucially, how to step back and act as a facilitator to guide and prompt the players rather than tell them what to do.
- Grassroots Club Mentors - Within individual England Football Accredited clubs, internal club mentors are being up-skilled to provide peer-to-peer education on the ground, with their objective to reshape the player’s match-day experience. They will help volunteer parent coaches understand how to structure age-appropriate training programmes while ensuring that match-day remains competitive (despite no score-lines or results being recorded), high-energy, and completely free of too many rules and rigid structure.
Ultimately, the success of FutureFit hinges on these developers and mentors. It is the education from the County FAs that ensures coaches give kids the psychological freedom to make their own mistakes, thrive in an age-appropriate environment and truly believe in it themselves as adults that this is the best approach at U7s for their first year of organised football.
Football Parent takeaway
FutureFit isn't only asking children to adapt.
Paul believes volunteer coaches will play an equally important role, creating environments where children can experiment, make mistakes and learn through the game rather than receiving constant instructions.
Final Thoughts
Many of the ideas discussed in this interview centre around one theme: creating age-appropriate environments where children enjoy football, solve problems and develop technical confidence before adult-style tactics become the focus.
Part 2 of our interview with Paul Barry explores why 3v3 should embrace "chaos", why Football DNA believes delaying 11v11 is beneficial, and what grassroots football could look like over the next decade.
To learn more about Football DNA's coaching philosophy, courses and resources, visit Football DNA.
Editor's Note
The views expressed in this interview are those of Paul Barry and Football DNA. Football Parent regularly interviews coaches and experts to present a range of evidence-informed perspectives on youth football.
