Juggling is a skill (sometimes called keepy uppie) that has developed into it’s own sport (freestyle football). It is extremely useful to practice, to give yourself confidence to receive (control) the ball from bad bounces or passes that travel to you in the air. The key areas you should start practicing juggling is with your feet, your thigh and your head, these parts of the body are regularly used in competitive football matches. However, other parts of the body can be used.

There are some football players, coaches or fans that will say that juggling and freestyle football is not relevant to the game of football.

I do not agree with this.

If you look at all the very greatest players in the world you will see that they are very, VERY good at juggling the football.

Lets look at the great Maradona in the video on the right.

When people saw him train, warm-up and show off his skills, they were a revelation.

Now, this has developed into it’s own sport of “Freestyle Football“.

If Matt LeTisser hadn’t practiced his juggling skills, I’m sure he wouldn’t have scored half of these goals.

Juggling is a great skill to learn as a player for many reasons.

First of all it only needs you and the ball.

You can do it in a relatively small amount of space.

If you can practie your touch with the ball while it’s in the air (ie: inside of the foot, outside of the foot, laces etc)  it will be even easier when it’s on the floor.

During a game, if you have the ability to take control of the ball while it is still in the air and before it gets to the ground, you will have an advantage over your opponent.

Have a look at the video below, everyone that started juggling a football started here:

Once you start getting comfortable with keeping the ball up in the air, you can start to practice some different methods to get the ball from the floor into the air, after this you can start to develop some other tricks in the air.

Have a look at these examples below :

Once you get comfortable with all these tricks you can put them all together and practice, practice, practice.

Here are some other videos you might like:

• Under 9 soccer girl juggles 2730 times
• Here’s a novel game called Socci
• Juggling a ball has been around for centuries in SE Asia
• Tony Yeboha scores a goal voted one of the decade
• Thierry Henry flicks the ball up to hit it on the volley
• Kerlon doing the seal dribble (you’ll see why!)

Now see if you can juggle like Maradona in this game (click here)