When it comes to attracting top talent to your youth club or league, control what you can control and the rest will take care of itself. Sounds easy, right? Well, it’s not always simple to know where to focus to recruit youth players, especially if you want the best.

We sat down with several experienced club directors to find out what they focus on to recruit talented young players (and their families) to their organizations.

So you’re the kid on the team with a slender, 5-foot-something frame and weight that falls right in the middle of the 50th percentile for your age. You’ve heard the words “scrawny” and “toothpick” tossed around by coaches when discussing your physique. However, as a product of your natural build, you also possess pace, good foot speed and decent technical ability.

Lionel Messi is one of the most soft-spoken players in the world. If he wasn’t constantly one of the two best — if instead he was a middling player taking the field for Stoke City every weekend, then there is every reason to believe that only hardcore fans would know who he is. It is incredibly ironic, then, that he has risen to fame at the dawn of the age of social media, at a time when everyone is making a name for themselves through their personalities. Likes and clicks matter more than news and facts, and Messi has risen above it all. The irony of Messi’s success is not lost on him.

The weather’s growing colder and the winter’s first snow storm is imminent, but that doesn’t mean your soccer game has to go into hibernation too. These indoor soccer tricks and skills are guaranteed to humiliate your opponents and drive your game to the next level.

Indoor soccer provides players with an opportunity to work on their close control, to try tricks and skills that would normally land you a spot on the bench and to focus on scoring the golazo of your dreams. 

Now is not the winter of our discontent. Now is the time to play beautiful, my friends.