I run into a surprising number of soccer folks who don’t think juggling helps you become a better soccer player.

Their logic is usually: “You don’t juggle in a game, so you’ll be better off practicing the stuff you use.”

Though juggling isn’t used in the game, it has lots of benefits.

Juggling teaches you to lock your ankle, use your whole body to control the ball, improves your ability to read and react to it and trains your body to stay in the athletic position, reducing chances of injury.

All this translates to be better at all ball skills: 1st touch, passing, dribbling, shooting, winning 50/50s and tackling.

Watch someone can juggle stop a ball. They have a clean touch. They ball looks like it’s stuck to their feet with tape or by a string.

It’s subtle and most don’t notice how they do this. They tend to move their whole body a little bit with a little hop of their plant foot while the whole body absorbs the ball’s momentum, rather than just sticking their foot out and trying to pull that foot back to take the momentum. Juggling helps make this little hop become second nature.

The athletic position is when you could snap a photo facing the player and draw a rectangle with the corners at the shoulders and toes and lines intersecting the hips and knees. 

I believe this position helps reduce chances of injury because, like absorbing the ball’s momentum, it more evenly distributes game forces across your whole body.

Extending body parts, like your feet or knees, outside this position causes forces to concentrate into small areas of your body, like your joints or hamstrings, which can be too much stress in one spot and cause injury.

Play the tape back on many injuries and you will see the injured player was reaching outside this position and losing this shape.

The athletic position also helps you leverage your body weight and core strength, improving touch on the ball, control, strength of tackles and power on shots.

Pay close attention to a well-executed bicycle kick. You will see the player does a back flip while maintaining the athletic position, driving all of his or her body weight and core strength through the ball.

Even good headers come from a player in the athletic box position.

In 50/50s, the better juggler has a greater than 50% chance of winning the ball.

In 1v1’s, the better juggle has a good chance of keeping or winning the ball.

In loose ball scrambles in front of goal, the better jugglers are more likely to get to the ball the quickest to score or to prevent the score.

Better jugglers can pull the ball out of the air better. They are more effective on converting corner and free kicks.

Juggling has all these benefits, plus once you get decent at it, it becomes a fun way to pass the time and it can be done just about anytime and anywhere.

Juggling is not the only thing players need to work on, by any means. But, the attitude that it is unnecessary is a cultural element of soccer in the U.S. that holds soccer back.

I’d be curious if there are any top level soccer players that don’t know how to juggle. I don’t think so. That says there’s something to it.

Granted, there are many non-top-level players who also know how to juggle, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth learning.

Another bash on juggling is that there are a lot of show jugglers that are not great soccer players. No-duh. The proposition isn’t that you need to become a show juggler. The proposition is that learning to juggle makes you a better player.

As with anything, there are probably some diminishing returns the further you go for game play. I’m not sure where exactly those start, but once you can juggle several hundred, that’s probably good for high school.

And, for some people who don’t think Messi is all that great of a juggler, I recommend they search for some videos on YouTube. He is an advanced juggler.

Juggling can be learned at any age.

In soccer-playing cultures, it’s common for players to learn before age 8 and not remember the time when they couldn’t juggle. 

I learned to juggle in my 40s, so I was fully aware of all the improvements above as my juggling improved I could see how it helped how I played on the field.

There have been many times I’ve blocked a ball in front of goal just as someone much bigger than me was putting all they had into shooting it. I had locked ankle, side of foot behind ball and I was in athletic position.

I barely felt anything and it looked like they kicked a boulder and they went tripping over themselves.

I credit that to being able to react to the ball quickly while remaining in the athletic position and getting my body weight where it would best distribute the force across my whole body and having a solid, locked ankle.

Had I learned to juggle when I was 8, I may never had noticed how it improved my play.

*A side note on injuries: I recall reading years ago about a study that showed that the ‘quickest’ (over short distance) players tended not to make it to the top of the game due to their propensity of getting injured. The hypothesis was that fast twitch muscles are more susceptible to injury than slow twitch muscles.

That might be true, but I have another possible explanation. The quickest players tend to rely on their speed and they don’t put in as much effort to develop their ball skills, which in turns leads them to not making it second nature to maintain athletic position.

It seems like there are more quick and skilled players coming in the top levels of the game like Vardy, Mbappe and Pulisic. Perhaps the skill work they have put in, including juggling, has helped train them to stay in the athletic box position and stay healthy.