How does soccer help you

Soccer can also be a great sport for kids who may not have high levels of athletic ability, but who would like to participate in team sports. Soccer is ideal for boys, girls, men and women, who play the same game under the same rules and where physically appropriate may play alongside each other.

Soccer is very popular in Australia and is played both recreationally and competitively. It can be as simple as having a kick with friends. Playing soccer just for fun can be done in backyards, streets or on beaches. All you need is a ball. You can also play soccer competitively by joining a local club, organised competitions and junior clinics.

Some indoor sports centres offer indoor soccer competitions with reduced team sizes. This page has been produced in consultation with and approved by:. Engaging in an individual physical activity to benefit only yourself, away from family or community, may be seen as inappropriate or selfish.

Soccer therefore greatly enhances players' empathy as you see other people work hard, suffer defeats, and celebrate victories and can empathise both with their emotions and viewpoints. Playing soccer also helps you learn how to control your emotions better. This positively impacts your life both on and off the pitch. Dealing with victories and defeats, successes, and disappointments are all part of playing a sport.

So over time, you'll learn to better process and control these emotions. This will see you act thoughtfully and carefully rather than impulsively and be more stable with your emotions. Knowing that you have a soccer training session or match coming up can be great for your mental health as you know that you have something fun to look forward to with your friends.

It's a time for you to forget about your worries, it gives structure and meaning to your week, and it helps you refocus and refresh your mind. Just playing for a couple of hours here and there will do wonders for your emotional well-being. Closely related to both the physical and emotional benefits that soccer brings is the positive impact it can have on your mental well-being. While playing soccer can do wonders for your strength, stamina, and self-esteem, it can also have a very positive effect on your mental health and well-being.

This varies from increasing your concentration skills, resilience, and mental strength to developing your gross motor skills and problem-solving abilities. If they get distracted or lose focus just for a moment, players are liable to get punished by not being in the right position or losing their opponent and letting in a goal.

Over time, players increase their concentration levels which helps both on the pitch and in life in general. By working on your passing, shooting, and other elements of the game, you'll train your muscles and mind to work in sync as you familiarise yourself with and repeat the different movements of the sport. Besides helping you get better as a player, this will also have a positive impact on other physical activities that you perform such as running, jumping, throwing, and catching.

As players need to be able to judge how near or far something is on the pitch, playing soccer also helps enhance their visual-spatial awareness.

While scanning around them, players have to also be able to take in a large amount of information such as where the ball, the sidelines, their teammates, and opponents are. This, therefore, develops both their analysis skills and problem-solving abilities as they respond to whatever new scenario comes their way. Besides helping them make the most of their talents on the pitch, these skills and abilities are also very helpful in other walks of life such as at work, school, or university.

As not every pass or shot will come off and not every team can win every game, players need to have great resilience to deal with the setbacks and defeats that come their way. As well as this, soccer also encourages players to learn new things and develop new skills and in doing so teaches them not to fear failure and accept that it takes hard work to achieve a goal.

Consequently, soccer helps to fuel players' motivation and drive as they work hard in each training session to become better players. By instilling this desire in them to improve, soccer provides a roadmap for other areas of players' lives off the field too.

As soccer is a team sport, players learn to help their teammates and support one another as best they can. This not only develops their sense of responsibility but also enhances the respect they feel for others whether that be their coach and teammates or their opponents and even themselves. July 16, at pm. Soccer is an awesome sport for all ages.

It builds fitness, motor skills, coordination and so much more. It is an ultimate team sport as well. July 28, at pm. November 13, at pm. Hello, very good article on the benefits of playing soccer. August 12, at pm. My daughter played last spring and loved it. Both of my kids want to play in the fall so I signed them both up. August 13, at am.

Burt Silver. February 8, at am. I like that you mentioned that kids who play soccer have increased social interactions. When kids are young it can be hard to get them involved with other children. My son is getting old enough to play sports and I want to make sure he gets involved with a team so that he can be more social. I will have to look into soccer for him. March 22, at am.

Bernard Clyde. April 4, at am. I agree that soccer can improve focus and attention, especially in younger children. We all hate more a bad winner than a sore looser. It is fundamental in a sport like this, that you know how to behave correctly when your up, because you never know when you will be down.

Soccer teaches you how to be humble at the times you are at the top and strong at the times your down. Learning to work in a team is super important for everyone. Absolutely all people, no matter what you do in life, has to know how to work in teams. Anywhere you are: at school, for example, the teacher will always make you work in groups. At your job, maybe your boss will assign you a task to do with other colleagues. If you are a manager, then you need to understand how each one of your workers is and how to get the most out of each one of them.

Teamwork is important in order to be a successful person in life. You can achieve a lot more with a great team than alone. The same happens in soccer, in order to win championships, you need to play good collectively, as a team. Another great thing about soccer is that you meet people of all type: shy, social, arrogant, humble, etc.

In soccer you learn how to treat and deal with different types of people. This is a very useful skill to have in your dailu life outside the soccer field. It has been scientifically proven that exercise helps you develop a higher self-esteem. Playing soccer is something that will boost your confidence and personality. I grew up wearing horrible huge glasses to play, using braces or brackets, and with acne issues, and even with all of this things, I always had a high self-esteem.

These three things are well tought to all soccer players. All the best professional players out there have worked super hard to get to where they are. They all say it: Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar. It is true that talent plays a big factor, but without hard work not even one of them would have gotten there.

It is not only about working hard, but also about dedication and sacrifice. If you dream on becoming a professional player one day, you need to understand that you will have to choose soccer over other things in life like partying or hanging out with your friends.

You do this because you are dedicated to soccer. This is applicable to be successful at any aspect of life too. Finally, discipline is something that comes by default in every soccer player. Same happens in life. In football, all soccer players develop a personality and strength of character by force. The game will always put you into situations where you need to show the best version of yourself, like for example: needing to score 2 goals to complete a comeback, recover from an injury, defending an advantage, or scoring the decisive penalty in the penalty shootout.

Soccer teaches you how to build your strongest part of yourself to overcome the toughest situations. A player without a strong personality and strength of character is going nowhere in a soccer pitch, and in life. All of this that you learned in soccer, can be passed to use in your daily life.

When we feel in that way we tend to over think everything. When I am having problems in my life, the best thing I can do is becoming an addict to soccer.

The reason I love this sport so much is because I can have a thousand problems, but at the moment I step into a soccer field I forget about all of them.

Again, we talk about how soccer benefits you emotionally. In soccer you learn to respect everyone, specially the authority. In soccer, players respect the coaches instructions, tactics, and philosophy. Being disrespectful with your teammates or coaches is a behavior that is socially unacceptable among soccer players.

In life there will always be authorities you will have to respect and deal with. Again, this is how sportsmanship in soccer helps you develop as a human being. This is probably the reason why all the people play soccer or sports in general.

We just want to have a great time with other people. We play the game because it is fun and we enjoy it. One of the people that did the survey that is at the end of this article said:. This benefit I can say is exclusively unique to soccer.