Monthly newsletter - December 2024

Hello ballers,

Welcome to the December edition of my monthly newsletter. If you missed any of the previous months, you can check them out here: https://strivefootballacademy.com/blog

We are well into 2025 now, temperatures have dropped and most of us are looking to love that extra puppy fat we gained from one (or twenty) too many deserts over the festive period.

Football Camps

I am absolutely loving the football camps - and the next one is only around the corner.

It’ll run from Monday 17th - Friday 23rd Feb.

All details, as always, can be found at the link below.

https://strivefootballacademy.com/football-camps

What’s going on?

As some of you may have seen via my social post (Video attached at the end of the blog), I did one of the trials for Baller League. The Baller League, which is a 6 a side football league, started in Germany and was hugely popular. They are planning big things and got some really big names on board (KSI, Gary Linekar, Micah Richards, Simon Miniminter to mention a few). Their plan is to play all games at the copperbox arena (4000 seater indoor stadium in Stratford) while streaming it on Twitch and Youtube. Could be really exciting!

The Prem is as exciting as ever with Liverpool really impressing. They find themselves top with Chelsea and Arsenal looking like the most likely to challenge them. It’s not all good news for them though with arguably their three best players out of contract at the end of the season in Trent Alexander-Arnold, Virgil Van Djik and Mo Salah. Now, I’m no Liverpool fan but I wouldn’t be too concerned with Trent leaving… but Van Djik and Salah are must keep players. For me, VVD is the best CB in the world, supreme in the air, excellent when defending one vs one and a great leader on the pitch. Salah is arguably the best player in the world right now. Even though he seems to have lost a slight bit of pace over the last few years, he is still scoring and creating goals at will and is at the heart of everything Liverpool do going forward.

My question to you is: If you could only sign one of the three, who are you picking?

Ask me a question

This months question is from Sarah:

What’s the best way to improve weak foot?

I get this question LOADS on social media and I break it into two categories: striking and dribbling.

Everything we do when playing football is muscle memory - the things you are best at the muscle memory is good and vice versa.

Dribbling: So, start off by just dribbling with your weak foot - take loads of touches and use different parts of the foot. As you get more used to it, speed up and work on changing direction. Final part is adding skills with your weak foot.

Striking: Start with making inside of the foot passes - focus on technique and accuracy over power. Gradually add more power and distance as you get more used to it. After this start trying to use your laces - keep your toes pointing down! After a while add more power and turn this into a shot.

Remember, all of these tips won’t work if it’s a one off - trying to build muscle memory takes consistency and repetitions.

If you do those things for 10 mins every day - after a few weeks you will notice a massive improvement!

Have a question for me? I’d love to hear it!

Worth a watch

Check out my experience at the Baller League trial

https://www.tiktok.com/@the_jwl/video/7456824738774650144?lang=en

How to improve weak foot in video form:

https://www.tiktok.com/@the_jwl/video/7457568189849832737?lang=en