5 Soccer Games to Play by Yourself

Since soccer is a group sport, you might find it hard to enjoy playing with the soccer ball if you don’t have any of your friends able to join you. However, there are still some simple soccer related games that you can play whenever you’re alone.

Throughout my whole childhood, I played soccer almost every single day on the street with a bunch of friends. However, there were days where these friends were busy studying or doing something else.

Instead of going home and hoping that they’re free the next day, I went and played a few games revolving around soccer on my own, and I’d like to share these games with you in this article.

So, here are 5 soccer related games that you can play by yourself.

 1- Juggling the soccer ball

Juggling the soccer ball may be viewed as a practice more than as a game, however, if you change things slightly, juggling the ball can be an interesting game to play.

For example, you can assign points for hitting the ball with different parts of your body. Here’s how I used to assign points for each action:

  • 1 point for foot
  • 1 point for knee
  • 2 points for head
  • 3 points for shoulder
  • 3 points for chest.

What you need to do is juggle the ball using the above parts of your body and collect as many points as you can before the ball hits the ground. For example, if you managed to hit the ball with your feet 5 times, with your knees 5 times and with your shoulder 2 times, then you’ll get 16 points and so on.

You could compare your results with the previous results that you were able to accomplish, or with the results that your friends have managed to achieve.

I had so much fun playing this game whenever none of my friends were around.

This game will serve as a soccer practice session two. So you’ll be having so much fun while also practicing for a real soccer match.

If you don’t want to limit yourself to just using the above parts of your body, you can do what the soccer freestyle players do. Try to turn your juggling skills into an act that people might enjoy.

Many soccer freestylers have gained their skills by playing with the soccer ball alone for long periods of time.

So always make sure that you push yourself to try new moves whenever you’re playing this game.

2- Aim at a target.

Set a solid target in front of you, and try to kick the ball towards the target and hit it. To make this game interesting, you should move away from the target gradually as you hit it.

In other words, start from a position that is close to the target and attempt to kick the ball towards the target. If you hit it, move a few steps back and repeat until you hit the target again.

Keep moving away from the target as much as possible and see how far away you can move from your target while still being able to hit it.

To make things harder for you, you can restart from the initial position if you miss the target an x number of times. Knowing that you might have to restart from the beginning will increase the suspense that you feel whenever you’re attempting to hit your target, and it will also increase your focus.

Again, you can compare your results to the results of other friends who are living far away from you, or you can compare your new results with your own old results and see if you’re improving.

This game will also serve as a practice session because it will definitely help you increase your kick accuracy and it will help you aim better during free kicks.

3- Kick the soccer ball high.

This isn’t a game that can last for more than a few minutes, but it’s something that I used to do all the time whenever I didn’t have anyone around to join me for a soccer game.

I just kicked the ball straight up in the air as high as I could, and I always aimed to kick the ball higher than my previous attempts.

Whenever you do this, you need to make sure that you’re in an open area and that you are not going to hit anyone or break anyone’s car, or else you’ll be in trouble.

Just try this whenever you are absolutely sure that you won’t hurt anyone or break anything. Also make sure that you look at the ball when you’re hitting it high and not look up in the sky, because if you miss the ball when you’re kicking it with a lot of force, then you will most probably hurt your knees like I did many times.

4- Play with the wall.

You don’t have a friend to play with? Not a problem. Just pretend that the wall is your friend and let it redirect the ball towards you every time you kick the ball towards it.

What I used to do is to try to kick the ball towards the wall with enough force to make it come back to me. 

To make this a game, try to hit the ball towards the wall and receive it back, then kick it again with only one touch. The challenge is to be able to repeat this as many times as you can. You lose if you are forced to touch the ball more than once to kick it towards the wall, or if you take too long to kick it.

Count how many passes you can do back and forth with the wall and use that as a score for your game.

To make things harder and more interesting, you can set targets that you have to hit on the wall whenever you’re kicking the ball towards it. If you miss the targets while playing the game, then you lose points.

This game can increase your pass accuracy and it will help you react faster when you receive a pass from your teammates during a soccer game.

5- Nutmeg yourself

Nutmegging other soccer players has a special meaning in soccer. However, nutmegging yourself is on a totally different level. (Just kidding).

Jokes aside, here’s how you can play this game. First you’ll need 2 walls that are opposite to each other. Run towards the first wall, kick the ball towards it and wait for the ball to come back. When the ball comes back, let it pass between your legs and then run towards the opposite wall and repeat the same thing.

Keep running back and forth and nutmegging yourself till you either fail to do so or till you get tired. Your score will be the number of consecutive times you were able to nutmeg yourself using the wall.

This game can be both fun and beneficial. It can increase your agility skills since you’ll have to immediately run towards the opposite direction whenever you get nutmegged, and it also teaches you to kick straight since if you don’t kick the ball straight towards the wall, then you won’t be able to nutmeg yourself because the ball will redirect somewhere away from you.

With that said, I’ll end my article here. The above 5 games are the games that I used to play every single time I didn’t have anyone around to join me for a soccer game, and I am hoping that you or your kids can also enjoy these games whenever you/they are alone.