Blowouts suck.  They suck the spirit out of the losing team, and even the winning team isn't having any fun.

The best way to avoid being in this situation is to avoid letting the game ever get that lopsided, pull back early and the game can be a lot better for everyone.  The time to start pulling back is not at 5-0 (which is a common definition of a blowout), and it is already way too late at 4-0 -- by the time your team is up by four or more goals your players are already roaring at the top of their game, and the other team is likely disheartened, and all of this just makes your job as coach even more difficult. 

The time to start pulling back is as soon as your team scores any two unanswered goals, so that if and when your team scores a third unanswered goal your players should already be working under your system of scalable controls.  Yes, reaching for the brakes after only a couple of goals might leave your opponent a chance to come back and win the game -- and that is exactly the point!

The only effective method to avoid a blowout situation is to sustain the opposing team's belief that this game right now is still worth trying to save. Flip things around and look at the field from the other team's perspective.  When the score is 0-4 against them will their defenders really fight to win the ball -- or will your attackers start having an easier and easier time getting the ball in advantageous locations? At 0-4 will their strikers still work together to build an effective attack -- or are they increasingly likely to try desperate shots that won't ever test your keeper? At 0-4 will their midfielders be as willing to sprint end-to-end to help sustain their attack as well as hustle back to manage your counter-attacks -- or are your players going to find much more room to control the ball, enjoy more time to look up and see the field, and have the confidence to be able to pull off a stellar play?

You cannot wait until you are sure of victory before you start pulling your team back. The moment your opponent loses heart in the match, that is the moment your job becomes infinitely more difficult. Adjust while the game still hangs in the balance and you have some chance to be quietly effective, wait too long and no matter what you do things will be ugly.

Blowout Tactics

Blowing Them Out

It happens.  Be prepared.

Losing a blow out is difficult to coach, but winning a blowout can be even more difficult on the coach. As the coach of the winning team everyone will demand you exert control of the game, and will demand that control right at the very time your players begin to recognize they can score at will even if (especially if) they don't listen to you. All of the energy in the game (the excitement of your players, and the disappointment of their players) is working against you, and it will take a relatively long time before the game even begins to react to any changes you make. The best solution is to avoid falling into this trap.

Start acting as soon as your team scores a second unanswered goal. Have your plan in action before the third unanswered goal, and if necessary already be working the brakes hard before any more unanswered goals are scored.

What May Work Best

The easiest way to re-balance a game is for the winning team to willingly play a more difficult game than their opponents -- ideally in a way that offers the opponents more opportunities to win a ball back in a good place to score.  In an AYSO setting the easiest method is for the winning coach to challenge their own team to add extra conditions to their play -- conditions that in the long term will lead to your players developing new skills that improve their play in the future, but in the immediate term can serve to make this game more difficult for their side.

Adjust Your Players

The most direct action is to try adjusting players. Move your obvious goal scorers away from the front line (perhaps even sit them out if you can). This is the time to put your developing players into key positions (replace your attackers with players who have yet to score, fill your back line with players who need to improve their tackles or ones who may struggle to clear the ball, go ahead and put the goalie gloves on someone who isn't used to using their hands). Do not just rotate your best players to defense -- doing that just makes it so much harder for your opponent to ever score (and having your opponent earn a few goals is the only way to relieve your blow-out situation...)  [Moving players works best in the older age divisions especially when using free-substitutions rather than quarters.  In small sided games with limited rosters there may be fewer good choices.]  In the more severe circumstances it may be worth considering having your team play short-handed as a last resort.

Add A Challenge: Cycle Back Through Keeper

Require every possession to include a pass back to your goal-keeper before your team can advance on the opposing goal [encourages lots of build-from-the-back experience in game situations].  This constraint can easily progress to: every possession must include at least one touch by all teammates on the field before any shot is attempted -- and every time your team loses possession they need to find away to cycle the ball back to their keeper and start over to try again to include all teammates before any shot attempt...

Add A Challenge: No Dribbling

Often a very effective way to challenge a successful AYSO team is to require them to pass rather than dribble.  First step: require them to not dribble -- never more than three touches: just trap the incoming pass, control the ball, and pass it away to the next player.  This can be really effective with those teams where one or two players often do all the work advancing the ball; a "no dribbling" challenge pushes teams to involve more players, makes it more important for all teammates to be available for give-and-go.  This challenge can easily be scaled to add increasing levels of difficulty to your team: limit all players to three touches (or two touches, or even one-touch) every time they receive a pass or regain possession [encourages players to learn how to increase their pace of play]. 

Add A Challenge: Weaker Foot Only

Limit players to passing and shooting only with their weaker foot [encourages players to be more balanced and eventually become less predictable].   Longer term being able to make plays with either foot is a serious advantage, but in the immediate term forcing players to use only their weaker foot is very likely to lead to errant passes, missed traps, and other opportunities for your opponent to disrupt play and even repossess the ball with good field position -- so this can be a very effective way to restore balance to a lopsided situation.

Add A Challenge: Only Volleys (or even for the older ages: Only Headers)

Any attempted shot-on-goal needs to be a volley (or even headers for the older ages) [effectively "one touch" shots, encourages teams to place crosses or through-balls into the just the right locations].   Also combines well with the "Cycle Back Through Keeper" -- the kids get a single "one time" shot, and if that misses they cannot take any other shot until after they cycle the ball all they way back through their keeper and then approach the goal again. 

Scale The Challenges

Mix and match these constraints as needed to balance the game.  All of these challenges can be scaled (1-touch-only is a harder challenge than 3-touch, cycling back to the keeper can have a minimum number of passes before crossing midfield that you can adjust to scale the challenge, or you can require multiple passes through the keeper, and so on).  But, for greater affect, adding multiple requirements together multiplies the difficulties (perhaps start by requiring at least three 3-touch-only passes, but you can scale up through demanding more than a dozen passes, each being a 1-touch pass, all with the weaker foot only, and so on).  If your team readily can score direct from a volley after executing more than a dozen consecutive one-touch weak-footed passes without the opponent ever disrupting the play, well, then, okay, maybe we do need to find you a different level of competition...

Properly scaling these restrictions on your team's play will tend to decrease your team's ability to sustain possession.  Losing possession will lead to the other team finding opportunities to gain possession, possibly in more advantageous locations.  All of which increases your opponent's potential scoring chances -- and the more your opponents can earn a goal, the sooner you escape a blowout situation.

Change The Focus

Also, look to adjust your players attitude. Your team has already shown it can score, now what else can they do? Rather than let your players show off how they can score, maybe this is the time to have them prove they can make their least developed teammates be successful. Come up with different achievements for your team other than just putting the ball in the other net; maybe have them focus on a passing sequence they struggled with in practice, or even see if they can master some dynamic tactics through a pivoting midfield, or use whatever might place them under more difficult demands. This is a time to focus on elements of the game where your players struggle; it's not a good time to let them polish their trick corner-kick scoring plays, or try to perfect their bending free kicks.

Ask For Help

Finally, reach out to your opposing coach. Work together to avoid a blow-out from becoming ugly. Offer them suggestions for what might work against your team. Listen to their levels of frustration and offer to call the game (and instead swap some players and scrimmage the second half) based on when you both agree that players are giving up rather than rising to the challenge.

Start Early

Remember, start early.  The earlier you start these changes the easier it is to make them work.  If done right, adding cumulative constraints to your players will slow down your scoring and provide your opponent with some better opportunities for them to possibly score as well.  With this kind of control then you never have to face the "we can't score another goal" moment -- which makes it much easier for everyone on the pitch because then the focus can still remain on scoring goals (just scoring prettier, more difficult, more rewarding goals).

If you start early, you can adapt gradually and you will have time to even relax a condition if your team begins to struggle so much they fall behind.  Done smoothly it is quite possible your opponent won't even notice whether you are reaching for the brakes or the accelerator.  If you start too late, then everyone on both sides of the field is going to know what you are doing and they all will have opinions about how well you do each and every step of the way.

Training With Challenges

These "challenges" are unlikely to work at game time without a bit of prep-work ahead of time.  Generally, "game time" is a horrible to ask your players to take on something they haven't tried before, and blowout conditions just make everything worse.  So spending a bit of time in your training sessions can make these situations so much easier by helping your players understand what you are asking them to do.  The specifics will vary by ages and skill levels, but the challenges above can be implemented effectively in relatively short time by making small adjustments to the scrimmages your teams may be enjoying already at your training sessions.

Code Words

Develop codewords for these challenges (perhaps "goofy foot" for playing only with the weaker foot, "premier league" for scoring only with volleys, etc.), and use these terms enough in your training sessions to be sure your players understand what you mean with each codeword -- trying to scream specific instructions from the sidelines during a blowout game is likely to make an ugly situation even worse, but your players can and will adapt to codewords they recognize from practice sessions just like the other play and formation directions they expect you to provide during games.  Before the season starts, or at least before your next game, spend some practice time in scrimmages where you add different constraints, let your players recognize they can work with these restrictions, and let them realize that you (and their teammates) will notice and call them out if and when they try to "cheat" on your restrictions.

Adapted Scrimmages

One suggestion: take a simple scrimmage and then adapt the conditions.  Let your players start with a reasonably balanced scrimmage, then have one or two players switch sides.  Notice how long it takes for the stronger-side to find ways to exploit the weaker-side -- that's a key understanding to use when assessing how quickly your regular matches can get unbalanced.  Once even the players see how unbalanced the scrimmage has become, then ask the strong-side to use one or more of your "challenges". 

Scrimmages are great times to experiment with these challenges -- which ones work best with your players, and which do they resist?  Keep things interesting by mixing challenges and player-counts.  How effective are these challenges, or more specifically how big a deficit can be covered by each of these challenges?  Experiment a bit to see how well or poorly these challenges can be scaled with your players, and learn which combination of challenges merely add to each other and which combinations overwhelm your team.  Such practice sessions give you a chance to learn how to use these to manage your team, and they also give your kids a stress-free opportunity to learn your codewords and hopefully understand exactly what you mean when you impose a condition.

What Doesn't Work

It never works to just hope for a change of luck, or wait for something else to happen, or just ignore the problem until the final whistle.

"Don't Score!"

Telling your players "Don't Score!" is almost always going to make a bad situation much worse.  The whole point of the game of soccer is to score, suddenly trying to not score makes everything awkward and weird very quickly -- and it doesn't help your opponent feel any less blown out.  Goals can be seen as just the exclamation point capping the end of a glorious sentence, and even without the extra punctuation your opponent likely can read the scene anyway.  To stay out of blowout situations sometimes you need more than just telling players to not finish, you will need to change the whole script.

'Keep Away'

Another common idea to escape a blow out situation is to start a 'Keep Away' drill, or some form of possession-focused passing between the players of the winning team.  While perhaps a bit more subtle than "Don't Score!", the effect is just as disheartening on your opponent -- arguably more so, because a proper possession drill exhausts the opposition by forcing them to be continually chasing you around without ever getting a chance to play the ball themselves.

Similarly, "take it to the corner" or "shoot the ball wide of the goal" usually come off just as slightly more aggressive forms of the 'Keep Away' drill, as all of these methods largely focus on minimizing your opponents' ability to touch the ball while simultaneously demonstrating your team's ability to still attack and penetrate their helpless defense.  None of this is going to help you or your players, and is almost certain to bother your opponent.

Just Let Them Score

Some teams have tried to escape a blow out score by purposely not playing good defense until the losing team scores a goal; and then the winners go right back to playing their usual aggressive game.  Technically this may work to keep the score right at or just below a "5 goal differential", but this method fools no one, and the rapid changes of tempo and aggression often lead to frustration and even anger on the field.  In these parts of AYSO we like to think that the philosophy of Good Sportsmanship would dissuade any of our teams try such a legalistic rather than sporting approach to a fun game.

Other Notes

• Referees are also going to try to manage a blow out, but they are coming from a different angle -- during blowouts referees may be thinking more about safety first, they are likely to be watching a bit more for the ugly fouls that come when players are frustrated and perhaps worrying a bit less about whether everything is absolutely "even" or "fair".  For example, don't be surprised if the refs wave off a hand-ball in the penalty area -- awarding a penalty kick to a team already winning a blowout is not going to really improve the outcome of a game, so the referees may be using a different definition for "intentional act" than what you or your players expect. The calls may go a bit more against your team -- don't complain, adjust to how the game is being called.

• If your referee agrees, perhaps having your team play shorthanded by one or more players might help restore some balance to a game -- but you and your referee need to understand what you are doing (and why) otherwise the referee can consider this an improper substitution.  Note: AYSO's focus on Everybody Plays works against this approach, so some referees may not understand or simply may not agree -- you cannot remove a player from the field without the referee's permission.  Sometimes it might work better to ask the referee if you can "rest" a player and if that's accepted then decline to substitute in another player at that time.

• Note: for some games that are recognized in advance as potentially seriously unbalanced it might be worth discussing before the game whether your opponent and your referee might consider a scrimmage scenario instead and support adding players to their side (allow your opponent extra players on the pitch rather than having your team play shorthanded, or both).  [Adding extra players to the pitch would be contrary to the laws-of-the-game so any such move renders the game a scrimmage rather than a match for league points (see note about forfeits below), but if everyone agrees this can be a better solution than just playing out an ugly game.]

• Over the course of an eight or ten game season, unless your defense is as weak as your attack is strong, your team will have a total budget of only about 30 or so goals at most for the entire season if you are to avoid blow-out situations. If you find yourself with a team that is likely to dominate most or even all of your games, then you need to be careful about how you "spend" those goals. If you have a couple of players focused on getting hat-tricks each game, their dominance will mean that nobody else on your team ever gets any chance to score. Instead, in a development league, a much better objective would be to work so that every member of the team enjoys the thrill of scoring a goal themselves. 

Getting Blown Out

It happens.   It has happened to just about every one of us.

Remember, your players will react to how you act. If you show that you are defeated then your players are more likely to give up trying, and you will lose all control over what they do on the field. If you show them that you care, and that you have ideas for what they should try, then perhaps you can still have some influence over how they play.

One trick is to understand what weaknesses are being exploited by your opponent and try what you can do mitigate them. If what you are doing isn't working, try something different, anything different. Adjust your player positioning to diminish player mismatches. Change to a different goal-keeper if your opponent has figured out how to exploit a flaw in your current keeper (or just change keepers anyway to avoid your players having an easy choice for someone to blame). Swap your formations around to minimize the trouble from your most frustrated players, and fill the key roles with whatever players still have the most energy.

Have some ideas where else to draw the focus of your players, something other than the game score. Give them a simple objective, and celebrate whenever these are achieved. Maybe you can get them to focus on "just get one goal of our own", more probably an easier task to celebrate would be something like "complete three passes", and possibly it is something as basic as just "clear the ball".  Support your players every time they meet that objective, and then perhaps push them to achieve a new objective that builds on the first ("complete three passes but now do them in their half"). Help your players see that they can still play -- perhaps today's opponent plays a better game than you can -- but help your players see that they can still play a good game.  This can give you something that you can work with today, as well as something you can build from to help them play better next game.

Also, you are not alone on the sidelines.  Talk to your opposing coach.  Ask for some suggestions.  Work together with your opponent to make the game better for both teams (they are likely to want to help -- winning a blow out is not as much fun as playing a better game).  Talk about limits before things get ugly -- maybe the game is lopsided enough it makes more sense to stop at halftime and just scrimmage the second half after swapping players between teams, maybe a game gets too ugly late in the game and you are both better off asking the referee for to suspend play.  Work together to improve the situation rather than just let everything get uglier.

A Note Regarding Referees In Blowout Games

Recognize that while referees are likely to recognize and sympathize with your plight, they are not necessarily going to help you; their priorities are on managing a safe game and are not focused on the resulting score.  It is not any referee's responsibility to enforce any league or local blow-out rules.  Some referees may choose to say something or even stop play if the game gets too lopsided, others may not -- and either way that is their choice.  Note, the referees are the sole authority over any match, even blowouts; you will need their permission before you can sub out a weaker player, and they are unlikely to stop play just for you to manage some defensive improvement.  Angering a referee would only make a difficult game even harder.

League Mechanics for Blow Out Situations

Point Deductions

PCSSL does not deduct points directly for each blow out, and there is no fixed value where a PCSSL game is labeled a blowout (we've seen 0-9 games where both teams had a good time, and we've seen 5-0 games which were horrible experiences for everyone involved). Instead, PCSSL may choose to deduct points from any team that appears unwilling or unable to control their games (the scale of any such deductions will be determined by the PCSSL Board and it is possible and even likely the penalty may be larger than all points earned for winning those games).  Note: in these cases where the PCSSL Board reviews blowouts, the opinions of the referees and the opinions of your opponents about how your team managed the game are likely to be given more weight in the deliberations than whatever were the final scores. Treat your opponents well.

Forfeits

Forfeits are PCSSL's least favorite method of dealing with any issue, but can be accepted as a method of dealing with an otherwise unmanageable blowout situation. We much prefer to see all of our games played, but if teams foresee that a blowout situation is difficult to avoid then the teams can agree to a forfeit result and instead swap players around to play a scrimmage with mixed squads -- the referee must agree to this change in game conditions (typically this means these decisions need to be made during pre-game warmups or at half-time). In cases where teams agree at half-time, the league can consider the half-time score as the final score for reporting purposes so that a more balanced scrimmage can be played during the time allocated for the second half.  Note: as a developmental league PCSSL believes strongly that development comes through game play, forfeits are never an excuse to not play; forfeits are only supported as a paperwork solution so that the players on both teams can continue with a scrimmage or some other activity that takes advantage of everyone's efforts to get the players and the volunteers ready and able to play.

Other Views

We also have some messages regarding blow outs contributed to us by some very experienced AYSO coaches from past PCSSL seasons.

• Blowouts (Coach Art's Perspective)

• Blowouts (Coach Tim's Perspective)