If you coached a youth football team 15 years ago, the formula was pretty simple. Set up a drill. Tell the kids what to do. Run the drill. Shout corrections. Play a game at the end. Win on Saturday. Repeat.
Nobody talked about "corners" or "weightings" or "psychological development." You coached football. Full stop.
So when the FA started pushing the Four Corners model, a lot of experienced coaches had the same reaction: "What's wrong with how we've always done it?"
Fair question. And the answer isn't that traditional coaching was all bad. Parts of it were fine. But parts of it were accidentally doing real damage — and the Four Corners model exists to fix that.
The biggest shift: from coach-led to player-led
Traditional coaching put the coach at the centre of everything. You designed the drill. You set the rules. You told players where to stand, when to pass, and what they did wrong. The session was essentially you talking and them executing.
Four Corners flips that. The coach sets up the environment — the game, the constraints, the conditions — and then steps back. The players make the decisions. They solve the problems. You guide with questions, not instructions.
Sounds easy. It's actually harder than traditional coaching because it requires you to shut up at moments when every instinct tells you to jump in and correct something. But the result is players who can think, not just follow orders.
Here's a concrete example. Traditional approach to teaching a player to switch the ball: set up a passing drill with cones, tell them to play the long diagonal, correct their body shape, repeat 20 times. Four Corners approach: set up a 6v4 game where the overloaded team has wide players who are always free. Don't tell anyone to switch it. Wait. Eventually, a kid spots the space and plays the pass themselves. When they do, ask the group: "Why did that work?"
Same skill. Completely different learning. The second approach develops technique AND decision-making AND confidence, all at once.
What the old model got wrong about "development"
Traditional youth coaching had an unspoken definition of a "good player" that went roughly like this: fast, strong, can shoot hard, doesn't give the ball away, and wins games.
Look at that list. It's almost entirely physical and technical. There's nothing about decision-making, confidence, communication, resilience, or any of the other things that actually determine whether a 10-year-old becomes a good 16-year-old.
Worse, that definition actively harmed late developers. If you were small, slow, or uncoordinated at U9, you got less game time, less confidence, and often dropped out entirely. Research suggests around 80% of kids who are identified as "elite" at U10 are no longer playing at U16. Eighty percent. The system was selecting for the wrong things and losing genuinely talented kids in the process.
The Four Corners model doesn't ignore technique and physicality. It just puts them in proportion. When psychological development carries 40% of the weight and physical carries just 10%, you're forced to pay attention to things that traditional coaching brushed aside.
"But we still need to win games"
This is the objection that comes up most often. And it's understandable — nobody enjoys losing every week, kids included.
But here's the thing: Four Corners coaching doesn't mean you stop trying to win. It means you stop sacrificing player development in order to win.
Traditional coaching at grassroots level often looked like this: play your best kids for the full game, park the big lad at the back, stick the fast kid up front, and sub the weaker players on for the last ten minutes. You'd win more games that way, sure. But half your squad barely touched the ball.
Four Corners says everyone plays roughly equal time, in different positions, and you measure success by development, not results. Will you lose some games you'd have won with a "results first" approach? Probably. Will your squad be better at U14 because every player got proper development between U8 and U12? Almost certainly.
And honestly, the scoreline of an U9s match has never mattered in the history of football. Not once. What matters is whether those kids are still playing at U14.
The parent problem
One of the biggest practical differences between traditional and Four Corners coaching is how you deal with parents. Under the old model, parents judged the coach on results. Win = good coach. Lose = bad coach. Simple.
Four Corners asks parents to think differently. Your kid might not score this week because they're playing in a different position. They might make more mistakes because they're being encouraged to try new things. The team might lose because everyone's getting equal game time instead of just the strongest players.
That's a hard sell on a rainy Saturday when you've just lost 6-0. But it's the right approach.
The best thing you can do is set expectations early. Tell parents at the start of the season: "We use the Four Corners development model. That means everyone plays, everyone tries different positions, and we measure success by individual improvement, not league position." Some will love it. Some will grumble. But at least they know the deal upfront.
You're probably already doing some of this
Here's the encouraging bit. If you're a half-decent grassroots coach who cares about your players, you're probably already coaching some of the Four Corners model without realising it.
Do you encourage kids after mistakes? That's the psychological corner. Do you mix up positions? Social and technical corners. Do you use small-sided games? You're covering all four at once.
The difference the Four Corners model makes isn't that everything changes overnight. It's that you become more deliberate about what you're doing. Instead of accidentally supporting a kid's confidence, you're intentionally tracking it. Instead of vaguely feeling like a player has improved, you can point to specific development across specific corners.
That's where a tool like InsideFooty comes in. It takes the Four Corners framework and makes it practical for a volunteer coach who's got 20 minutes after training to reflect on the session. You log observations, the weightings are built in, and you end up with a genuine development record for every player. It turns good intentions into actual evidence.
The honest answer
Is Four Corners coaching objectively better than traditional coaching? For player development at youth level — yes. The evidence is overwhelming. Kids develop more completely, stay in the game longer, and become better players in the long run.
Is it harder to coach this way? Also yes. It requires patience, self-awareness, and the discipline to not default to "just win the game" when the pressure's on.
But you didn't volunteer to coach youth football because it was easy. You did it because some kid needed a coach. The Four Corners model just makes sure you're giving them the best version of that coaching.
Not perfect. Just better. And that's enough.