Not started the week yet?
The first evening scripted end to end, opening line included, for a child who is nervous before anything has happened.
Read the Day 1 planHow to Set Win Conditions So the First Win Comes Early
Play Plans and Challenges
A win condition is the answer to how you know when you have won this. For a nervous beginner, win conditions are three things you set before the first go: how big the target is, what number ends the round and whether anything is timed.
The number comes from watching three goes you do not count, then setting the bar at or just under what they managed. Then the test that matters more than any of it. If they could not clear that number inside the first minute, it is the wrong bar, and you move one dial before you say it out loud.
This is for the evening that has already gone wrong once. You picked a number that sounded modest, five through the gap or three in a row, and then you watched four goes miss it. Somewhere around the fifth the shoulders went down and the five minutes was over.
Three dials, one decision
A Win Condition Is Three Dials, Not One
Most of the trouble comes from treating the whole thing as one setting. There are three, and they fail in different ways. The order below is the order they get set in.
How big the thing is. The width of the gate, or how far back they stand. This dial decides how likely any single go is to work.
What number ends it. Three of them, or one. This dial decides how long the good feeling takes to arrive.
What stops it. A number reached, or a clock. This dial decides whether the round ends on a good moment or on a bad one.
What earns a point in the first place is a different job from this one, and it's already settled on this site. The three cards on the page about what counts as a point do that properly, so this page takes it as decided and stays on how many and when it stops. Knowing how to set win conditions for a kids football challenge is mostly a matter of fixing those three dials before anybody kicks anything, then leaving them alone.
For a long time I thought the number was the easy part and the game was the hard part, and I had it exactly the wrong way round.
Watch three, then say it
How to Set the Bar Before the First Go
Five steps, and the whole method is in the first three. The number comes off the child standing in front of you tonight, and off nothing else, and then it gets tested before you say it out loud.
- 1
Watch three goes and count nothing. Set the game up, roll the ball out and let them have three attempts with no number attached and no comment. You are not warming them up. You are finding out what tonight actually looks like, which is usually not what last night looked like.
- 2
Set the bar at what you just saw. If two of the three worked, the number is two. If one worked, the number is one. If none of them worked, make the gate wider or stand closer and go again, because the number is never zero. Round down and never up, and not to a tidy number because five sounds better than two.
- 3
Run the first-minute test. Before you say it out loud, ask yourself whether they could clear that number inside the first minute. If the honest answer is no, widen the gate or shorten the distance until it is yes. Move the size dial, not the number.
- 4
Say it once, in one sentence. If all three of those goes went through, that sentence is "Shall we go for three through the gate, and then we are done?" Then stop talking about it. The number is the number for this round, not a running commentary.
- 5
Let the number be reached, not survived. Every go that works counts towards it and nothing takes anything away. No streaks and no best of five, because both of those are win conditions a child can lose after partly winning them.
Here is the whole of it on Day 1, start to finish. Two trainers laid flat on the grass, set wider apart than feels necessary, and three steps back, which will look like a silly distance and is meant to. Then three goes with nothing counted and nothing said, which on this particular night all went through.
So the number is three, and at that width they could clear it inside the first minute. Three through the gap and then we are finished. Three pebbles go on the step, one counter for each one needed, and they move into a saucer as they are earned. If the first one squirts off into the flowerbed, that's fine and it isn't counted against anything.
Anyone who wants the size dial thought through properly has a whole page for it, since choosing between targets of different sizes is that page's entire method.
The whole week, one row each
A Win Condition for Each of the Seven Days
Each of the seven days turns up with a natural finish line already attached, so the job isn't to invent one. It is to check that the one you pick can be reached tonight. Most of what people mean by 7 day football challenge early wins comes down to that single check, repeated seven times.
If you haven't started the week yet, the seven days themselves live over there, one five-minute game a day. The days are named as they arrive in the emails, so the table below is a companion and not a spoiler, and the games stay on that page where they belong.
One thing before the table, because it decides a cell. Day 2 arrives in the email with your child calling the colours and you doing the dribbling, so the win condition goes on whichever role your child is in that night.
| Day and game | A win condition that lands early | The shape to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1, Treasure Gates | A number set from three uncounted goes, played from a few steps back with the gate set wider than feels necessary | "Three in a row", which turns two good goes into nothing |
| Day 2, Traffic Lights | Swap so they have the ball for one round, then one clean stop on red wins it | A stop count that resets every time they wobble |
| Day 3, Copy My Move | One move each, copied badly, both counted | Judging whether the copy was any good |
| Day 4, Tiny Targets | A shared number you both add to, set from three uncounted goes | Whoever gets there first |
| Day 5, Beat Your Best | Beat yesterday's best by one and stop there, if last night ended with them wanting more. The one night the number comes from yesterday rather than from tonight's three goes | Beating it by a lot, or wiping the best after a bad go |
| Day 6, Mix Two Games | The mixed game works once, however roughly | Scoring both games at the same time |
| Day 7, Child's Choice | Whatever they say it is, said out loud before the first go | Correcting it, even gently, even if it makes no sense |
If you would sooner keep the roles exactly as the email sets them, move the win onto the calling side instead: one red they call that you actually stop dead for. Either version puts the win where your child is, which is the only part of that row that matters.
The pattern across the rows is the same until the last one. A number small enough to be reached tonight, and a finish that arrives while they still want more. Day 7 is the handover, and the number stops being yours.
The three that cost sessions
Three Ways a Win Condition Goes Wrong
These are the shapes worth recognising before you set anything, because each one can turn a decent evening into a short one.
The count that can go backwards
Anything with "in a row" in it, and any best-of. A child four goes into a five-in-a-row target has nothing banked at all, and the fifth go is carrying every bit of it.
The bar set from your own legs
Five into a gap from ten steps is easy for an adult and a different sport for a small child. The number has to come from their three goes, not from your sense of what is reasonable.
The clock that runs out mid-kick
A timer can end a round in the middle of an attempt, which is the one ending nobody wants. If you use a clock at all, it ends the round between goes and never during one.
The clock earns one more sentence, because it's the dial most of us reach for first. A time limit is mostly for the grown-up, a way of protecting five minutes from quietly becoming twenty-five, and the child should not be able to hear it ticking. Targets and time limits for a nervous beginner work best when the target is the thing that ends the round and the clock stays out of sight.
If this is a child who finds getting things wrong hard work, set the first bar lower than you think you need to, and be readier than usual to move the size dial before anybody notices.
Easier targets, more learning
What the Research Says About Setting the Bar
This is the only section on this page with studies in it, and every one of them arrives with what it can't tell you attached.
Start with the one that changed nothing except the definition of a good attempt. In a study of thirty adults throwing at a target, Iwatsuki and Regis (2021) had everyone throw soft golf balls with their weaker arm. After the first block, one group was given an easier definition of a successful throw than the other. A day later that group did better on both the retention and the transfer test, and reported feeling more competent. The task never changed. Only what counted as a good one did. That was thirty adult university students in a laboratory over two days, so it supports the narrow point that the definition of success changes how much gets learned. It is not evidence that a soft target works for a small child in a garden.
It points the same way with children, though not with children of this site's age. In a study of ten-year-olds putting at a hole made to look bigger, Bahmani and colleagues (2017) found that the group seeing the larger-looking hole reported higher self-efficacy and putted more accurately in practice. That group also learned more, measured on a later test with the illusion taken away. Those were ten-year-olds, above the top of the five-to-nine band this site is written for, doing golf putting in a controlled study. Making a hole look bigger with an optical illusion is not the same thing as agreeing an easier target out loud. It supports the general idea that believing the target is reachable helps, and nothing more specific than that.
Near beats far, and the evidence for that isn't from sport at all. Bandura and Schunk (1981) worked with children given goals for today rather than for the end of a self-directed maths programme. The ones working to near subgoals progressed quickly and came out with both more skill and more interest in a subject that had held little attraction for them, while distal goals had no demonstrable effects at all. That was arithmetic, not football and not a physical skill of any kind, with children who were already well behind and already put off. The published abstract gives neither a sample size nor an age range, so this page states neither. It is used here for one modest point: a win you can reach tonight does more than a win you can reach on Sunday.
Then the question of why the bar has to be re-set each night instead of inherited from last night. The challenge point framework (Guadagnoli and Lee, 2004) puts what a learner gets out of practice as a relationship between the difficulty of the task and their own skill level. That is the argument for deriving the number from tonight's three goes. It is also a framework paper and not an experiment, with no children and no football anywhere in it, so it explains why the number moves and proves nothing about this procedure. And the figure that circulates alongside it needs the same treatment. A success rate gets passed around coaching and parenting advice as the right one for a child in practice, and the paper the 85 percent figure comes from (Wilson and colleagues, 2019) contains no people of any age. It derived that rate for stochastic gradient-descent learning algorithms on binary classification tasks and demonstrated it on neural networks. So the useful part is the shape, which is that mostly working beats working about half the time, and the number itself is not something to measure a child against.
One last piece of context, and it isn't about targets. Sport England's survey of more than 130,000 children (2019) describes enjoyment as the single biggest factor in motivating children to be active. It reports well under half of girls and not much over half of boys saying they enjoy sport and activity, with confidence lower again. That is a national attitudes survey covering the 2017/18 academic year and reported in 2019, not a study of targets or of anything a parent does in a garden. It is the reason the bar starts low, and it proves nothing about this method. See how Our Kickabout researches its pages.
Knowing when it comes up
When to Move the Bar, and When to Stop the Round
There are two separate movements here, and they get confused with each other constantly, so here they are one at a time.
Inside a round, the number is fixed the moment it is said out loud. It doesn't go up because they cleared it quickly, and it doesn't go up because you're pleasantly surprised. On a later night it is set again the same way, off that night's own three goes, whatever tonight was like.
Across the week, the dial you move on purpose is the size one, and the number goes on coming from that night's own three goes. The gate narrows or the distance grows, and those three goes then say what the number is at the new size, so the round still finishes early even though the game got harder. Narrow the gate and stand them further back on the same night and you've made two changes at once and can't tell which one did the damage. Day 5 is the exception to both, since Beat Your Best carries yesterday's number over on purpose: that night the number comes from yesterday rather than from three fresh goes, and the gate stays put.
There is also a day when this stops being your job. The day they set their own number before you get the chance to, you stop setting it, which is exactly what Day 7 of the challenge is asking for anyway. The 7 day football challenge early wins are the means to that, and not the point of it.
Stopping the round is the plain part of all this. The number gets reached, you say so once, and the round is over while they still want another go.
A missed day is a different problem with an answer of its own, and there's a page on a whole day going missing that handles it properly. Changing the difficulty halfway through a game, in the moment and often without announcing it, is a different move again, and that page isn't built yet.
One decision among several
Where This Fits
Start with the closest neighbour. The scoring page decides what earns a point and this one decides how many of them end the round, so the two stack rather than compete.
The rewards page starts after the win and this one finishes before it, which is a cleaner split than it sounds. If the week hasn't begun at all, the page that scripts the first evening is the better place to start, and it will send you back here for the number.
A child whose worry is the ball itself and not the score needs a different page, and there is one. Two children who need two different numbers in the same game have a whole method waiting for them, so that gets one sentence here and no rebuild.
The exact words when a go misses are a page of their own, and it isn't published yet.
Quick answers
Common Questions About Win Conditions
How do I pick the number if I have no idea what they can do?
Give them three goes with nothing counted and no comment, then set the number at what actually happened. Two of the three worked, so the number is two. Round down, never up. You aren't guessing at their ability, you are copying down what you just watched, which is most of how to set win conditions for a kids football challenge.
Should I use a timer?
Only for your own benefit, and only between goes. Targets and time limits for a nervous beginner work best when the target ends the round and the clock quietly protects your five minutes. A timer that expires mid-attempt ends the session on the one moment you did not want to end it on.
Is it cheating to make the target that easy?
No, and it's worth saying out loud that it isn't. It sounds like a fudge. In practice there is no correct success rate to hit, and nothing about a wide gate makes the win feel fake to the person who has just got it. The research section above covers what the evidence says about easier success criteria, together with what that evidence can't tell you.
Keep going
Where to Go From Here
Three of the neighbours above are one click away, and any of them is a reasonable place to go next.
Want to change what earns a point?
What counts as a point in the first place, which is the decision that sits directly upstream of this one.
Read about scoring systemsTwo children, two different numbers?
Evening up two children of very different levels without either of them feeling handicapped is a method of its own.
Read about two kids at different levelsTonight's five minutes
Watch three goes, then say the number out loud.
Set it at what you just saw, widen the gate until they could clear it inside the first minute, then stop the round the moment they get there.