At the Strikers, we believe that the phase between 8 and 12 years old is absolutely key for a football player's development and we make sure our coaches are specialised in these age groups and have the right knowledge, experience and passion to guide them and inspire them. 

Did you ever listen that the coaches in charge of the youngest players should be amongst the best coaches in any Academy? Well, in our case, they definitely are. 

Our U8-U13 program is directly connected to the Juniors and Youth program, being all of them based on the same football identity and very similar training methodology. These very young players mainly need to develop their love for football and need to practice their technical skills, but we are positive that they can and they must do all this by enhancing their decision making at the same time, which means no more and no less than they can take their development to the next level by using real football related exercises from the start to the end of a training session.

"The capacity and potential of these young kids to read and understand the game is amazing", says our Academy TD Nacho Ferrer, with previous experience in Spain, working with the U10 players at the Academy of Real Madrid C.F. and the State U12 players at the Football Federation of Madrid. "The ideal way to develop their technical skills and love for the game is by linking this directly with the decision-making factor and that is what we do in our SAP program at the Strikers. We develop the technical skills of the player and we guide him to use them wisely in a real football environment". 

Besides Nacho Ferrer, the background of another two Strikers SAP coaches, Nzube Okafor and Luca Braico, is with Barcelona FC International Academies, whose training methodology runs along the same lines. You can see the outcomes of this approach for SAP in the video 'Our Playing Philosophy' in the section 'Academy Information' in this website.

Our U8-U13 programs have held a FQ Gold Rating since 2019, when this academy assessment program by FQ was put in place. Gold is the highest award possible and it covers matters such as: coaching, training methodology, individual player approach, player services and player progression. On top of this, being Gold allows our U8-U13 teams to take part in the highest level competition in Queensland, which is FQA Maroon. "Competition is key in a player's development, for it allows him to put in practice what he learned in training, now in a more challenging context. And for this to work well, it needs to be the right competition, which implies that if the player is very talented, then the competition needs to be demanding enough, up to the player's level", says Nacho Ferrer.