Game Guides

Anyone can tap the ball or hammer the shot button, but the players topping the leaderboards are reading the game rather than reacting to it. Each guide below breaks one game down the way a coach would: what is actually happening under the hood, the technique that beats it, and the mistakes that quietly cost you points. Pick the game you want to improve at, or read them all.

Start with the game you are currently worst at rather than the one you enjoy most. The guides are written to fix specific problems, and the biggest jumps in score come from a weakness you have been avoiding.

If you want to read them all, the Penalty Shootout Guide is the best opener, because the other shooting guides build on it. Follow it with the Goalkeeper Guide even if you never play in goal: seeing a shot from the keeper's side is the fastest way to understand what you give away when you shoot. The Free Kick Guide is the most technical of the four, and the Juggling Guide stands slightly apart, being about rhythm and patience rather than beating an opponent.

Four separate guides, but a handful of principles keep reappearing, and noticing them is worth more than memorising any single tip:

• Placement beats power. A keeper's problem is the distance they have to cover, not the speed of the ball. The same idea shows up as touch weight in juggling.
• Late decisions are better decisions. Dive early and you have given away information for nothing. Jump early and you are committed to an arc you cannot change.
• Patterns get punished. Repeating a corner, a dive or a recovery touch makes you readable, which is the single most common reason a good player stops scoring.
• Look where the information is. At the striker's hips rather than the ball. Most of what feels like slow reactions is attention pointed at the wrong place.

Some of these guides mention terms like the penalty area, direct free kicks or a clean sheet. If any of that is unfamiliar, start with our plain-English Football Basics guide. It explains how the real game works, from the object of the match to the laws every fan should know, and it doubles as the perfect warm-up for the Football Quiz.