Which Data About A Youth Player Is Actually Worth Recording

Anyone who starts organising a squad properly goes through the same phase: they want to record everything. Height, weight, dominant foot, 20-metre sprint time, completed passes, a technical rating from 1 to 5 across six parameters, behaviour notes, school reports.

Three months later, half the fields are empty and the other half are out of date. And, worse, the coach has convinced themselves the problem was theirs.

It was not. The problem is that most of that data was of no use at all to the decisions a youth coach actually makes.

The question that filters everything

Before adding a field to a player’s record, answer this:

Which decision will I make differently because I know this?

If there is no concrete answer, the field does not go in. It is not meanness. Every field has a cost: someone has to fill it in, someone has to keep it up to date, and, these being children, someone becomes responsible for storing it properly.

What is genuinely worth it

Identification and contact. Full name as it appears on the document, date of birth, and two parent or guardian contacts. This is not bureaucracy. It is what lets you deal with a twisted ankle at eleven on a Saturday morning on a pitch sixty kilometres from home.

Medical expiry date. Not the medical, not the report: the date it runs out. It is the only item on this list that can stop a player taking the field, and it is precisely the one that tends to be on a piece of paper in somebody else’s bag.

Main and secondary position. Two, at most. In youth football a position is not a sentence, but having recorded that the boy has played at full-back avoids the “has anyone here played on the right?” conversation five minutes before kick-off.

Shirt number and size. Trivial until the day the kit is handed out.

Attendance. Not attendance as a calculated percentage, just the record of who was there. It is the piece of data that, with no analysis whatsoever, answers the most frequent question in meetings with parents: “why does he play less?”

Minutes played. In youth football this is the indicator that matters most and the one fewest people write down. After ten rounds, a column of minutes shows in five seconds whether you are really spreading game time or whether you just have the impression that you are.

Free notes, with a date. A text field per player, where you write what you saw and when. It is worth more than any rating grid, because it does not force you to invent a number for something you have not fully understood yet.

What almost never pays off

Technical rating grids with numerical scales. From the youngest groups up to under-13s, giving a 3 instead of a 4 for “short passing” is nearly always noise. The scale is not stable between coaches, nor even between two moments of the same coach. It eats an enormous amount of time and changes not one decision.

Frequent physical measurements. Monthly height and weight, at ages of accelerated growth, produce pretty graphs and no conclusions. Without a physiologist to interpret them, one measurement at the start of the season is enough.

Detailed match statistics. Completed passes, duels won, shots on target. This requires somebody dedicated to observing instead of coaching, and in an under-13 side the variation from match to match is so great that the numbers do not settle before the season ends.

School and clinical information that is not strictly necessary. Grades, diagnoses, medication: unless there is a direct sporting or safety reason and the parent has communicated it in writing, this is sensitive information about a child that the coach has no reason to hold. If you hold it, you become responsible for it.

A note about children’s data

It is worth saying plainly: almost everyone in youth football is carrying children’s personal data around in spreadsheets on a phone, in WhatsApp groups and in photographs of handwritten lists. It is common practice and it is bad practice.

Three rules that remove most of the risk:

1. Collect only what you use. It is the same question from the start of this article, applied for a different reason.
2. Limit who sees it. The team manager needs contacts; they do not need to see assessment notes. The assistant needs the squad; they do not need everyone’s phone numbers.
3. Keep it in one place. Data scattered across six places cannot be deleted when a player leaves. And deleting it, when asked, is an obligation, not a courtesy.

In short

A useful record for a youth player fits on one screen: who they are, who to call, whether they can play, where they play, how much they have played, and what you have noticed about them lately. Everything else is optional, and most of it is dead weight.

If you want to see how this looks when it is organised (with different permissions for coach, assistant and team manager), you can try My Team Manager for 30 days. The player record was designed precisely around this short list, and not the long one.