The 8 Most Common Soccer Scoring Criteria at Tryouts

Every soccer tryout comes down to the same core question: what exactly are coaches scoring? Based on data from evaluations run across soccer clubs and associations, these eight categories make up the most common soccer scoring criteria coaches use to evaluate players — covering everything from raw technical ability to the intangibles that don’t show up on a stat sheet.

Core Technical Categories

1. Technical

Technical scoring covers a player’s overall ball skills and control — first touch, ball handling, and general comfort with the ball at their feet. It’s often the broadest category on an evaluation sheet and serves as a foundation that many of the more specific skills below build on.

2. Passing

Passing evaluates accuracy, weight, and decision-making on distributing the ball — whether a player consistently finds teammates, chooses the right pass at the right time, and can execute both short combination passes and longer switches of play.

3. Receiving

Receiving looks at how cleanly a player controls an incoming ball under pressure, including their first touch and their ability to set themselves up for the next action immediately after receiving. A player who receives well rarely wastes a touch or gets pinned by a defender right after the ball arrives.

4. Dribbling

Dribbling measures a player’s ability to control the ball while moving, change direction confidently, and beat a defender in 1v1 situations. This category often separates players who can simply control the ball from those who can actually create something with it.

Game Understanding

5. Tactical

Tactical scoring evaluates a player’s game awareness — positioning, decision-making, and understanding of team shape and strategy. Coaches use this category to judge whether a player understands where to be and when to act, not just how skilled they are technically.

Physical Attributes

6. Physical

Physical scoring covers speed, strength, endurance, and overall athletic conditioning as it relates to soccer performance. While it’s rarely the only factor coaches weigh, physical ability often determines how well a player can execute their technical and tactical skills over a full match.

7. Athleticism

Athleticism is closely related to the physical category but focuses more specifically on agility, balance, coordination, and explosiveness — the kind of natural movement ability that helps a player change direction, win first-to-the-ball situations, and recover quickly.

Intangibles

8. Attitude

Attitude scoring captures the mental and behavioral side of a player’s performance — coachability, effort level, competitiveness, and how they respond to mistakes or adversity during evaluation. Many coaches weigh attitude heavily precisely because it’s one of the strongest predictors of how a player will develop over time, even when it’s harder to quantify than a technical skill.

Why These Eight Categories Matter

Together, these eight categories give coaches a complete picture of a player — not just what they can do with the ball, but how they move, think, and compete. Organizations that use a consistent rubric built around categories like these tend to produce more defensible, comparable rankings than evaluations based on gut feel alone, and they give evaluators a shared language for discussing where a player stands.

TeamGenius helps soccer clubs build consistent scoring rubrics around categories like these, so every evaluator is measuring the same things the same way.

Visit teamgenius.com to learn more.

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