1v1s 1/7: Soccer Is 1v1's With Help
A few years ago, Mark Savvides said something on the Heads and Volleys Podcast that I haven't stopped thinking about. He said: "Soccer is 1v1's with help."
Simple. But it changes everything about how you think about the game.
Go watch your next match — youth, college, professional, doesn't matter — and stop watching the ball. Watch the players around it. Watch what they're doing with their bodies. Watch who's getting beaten, who's creating space, who's covering, who's holding their position. What you'll see, if you really look, is that every single moment in a game comes down to one player facing another. The 1v1 is everywhere.
The player on the ball is in a 1v1. The players off the ball are in 1v1's too — fighting for space, tracking runs, winning position, trying to get free. It's happening all at once, all over the field, from kickoff to the final whistle.
So why do we spend so much practice time doing things that don't look anything like that?
I wrote this book because I became obsessed with that question. Not in a "tear everything down" way — I'm not here to bash coaches. Most of the coaches I've met care deeply about their players and work incredibly hard. But a lot of us were taught to coach the way we were coached. Laps and drills and "okay, now a game at the end." And somewhere in that process, the actual game got buried.
The 1v1 — the most fundamental unit of the game — got reduced to a warm-up activity. Something you do for five minutes before the "real" training starts.
I want to flip that.
This series is based on my book 1v1's Outside the Box, and what I'm going to share with you across these posts is how I think about developing players through the lens of the 1v1. Not just isolated drills — though those have a place — but what happens when you take that idea and expand it. Into small-sided games. Into your game model. Into the way you plan a session and communicate with your players.
Because here's the thing: when your #4 is receiving the ball with a striker pressing from behind and two midfielders closing — that's a 1v1. When your #11 is cutting inside off the wing against a fullback — that's a 1v1. When your #9 is holding up a ball with a centerback on their back and three teammates trying to find angles — that's a 1v1 too, just with help available.
Training the 1v1, in all its forms, is training the game.
So that's what this series is about. We're going to go through it piece by piece — clarity, expectations, planning, isolated 1v1 training, small-sided games, and what I want you to walk away with at the end. Each one builds on the last.
But it all starts with this: every time you watch a game, stop watching the ball. Start watching the 1v1's. You'll never look at soccer the same way again.
And when you start seeing those moments everywhere? You'll want to train them that way too.
Let's go.