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Choosing Captains in Soccer: Here’s How to Pick the Best Players for the Job

Published: August 9, 2021
Updated: February 23, 2023
By: Jenn Ireland

Category: Coaching, Leadership, Team Culture

Choosing captains in soccer can be a TOUGH job. Whether you’re picking or voting on soccer captains for your high school team, your rec team, your collegiate team, or your GA or ECNL team – choosing team captains is an important part of setting your team up for success. The type of player(s) you elect to be a team captain speaks A LOT about the team culture and what the team values and wants to achieve.

If you are currently trying to make a decision about how to pick team captains, either as a soccer player who has to vote and choose between teammates, or as a coach who is assigning the roles themselves – this post will help you. We know that choosing captains can be a difficult decision, so we wrote this post to help you pick the best people for the job and to help your team avoid it turning into a popularity contest (again).

How to pick team captains

When choosing captains, there are many methods & ways to go about it. But regardless of if you are a player voting on teammates or a coaching choosing captains themselves, your job is to pick the players that will be the best for the team. Your job is to pick the players that will help your team grow and be successful, both on and off the pitch.

So, what does a good team captain look like? When choosing captains, you want to pick players that lead by example, players that are extremely inclusive and care about the well-being of others. Players that are hard-working and invested in their own personal growth. Players that are authentic, know themselves well and are not too wrapped up in what others think about them.

When choosing team captains, you want to pick players that do what they say they will do – aka have strong integrity. They need to be players who are GOOD PEOPLE. Players that know how to balance things, such as being kind yet competitive at the same time. Players that work hard, but still know how to have fun. Players that will be able to lead your team with a healthy striving mentality and players that understand the power of a strong collective. Players that are selfless, not selfish.

After a few weeks of training with your team and getting to know everyone better, you will start to get a sense for who naturally fills certain leadership roles within the group. When you start to pay attention and look for these qualities, you might be surprised to find how easy it can actually be to pick team captains.

7 Attributes to look for when choosing captains

On field leadership and confident communication in the run of play
Respectful and appreciative of teammates
Organized and takes initiative
Reliable on and off the field, honest and trustworthy
Mature, growth-minded, and a team player that understands the importance of every role on the pitch
Hard working and takes responsibility for their actions, a good role model
Supportive & encouraging, inspires and motivates their teammates in the face of adversity

What if I'm still having a hard time choosing captains?

When the time arrives to be choosing captains, a good way to gauge it is to ask yourself this question: “will the group benefit from something this player has to offer (in the way of leadership)? Yes? Then – make them a team captain!

If you are still having a hard time choosing captains, try this. On a piece of paper make 3 columns and divide everyone on the soccer team into 3 groups: definite YES’s, maybe’s and definite NO’s. The last column shouldn’t be difficult as it should be clear to you by now who is NOT leadership material. Be sure to include everyone in the YES or MAYBE column that excels in at least one of the above qualities.

Hang onto that list and review it regularly after soccer practice, moving players around as you see fit. As you get more and more time with your team you should be able suss out who will be the best fit. Start doing this right away so that when it comes time to be choosing captains, you are already ahead of the game and have a pretty clear idea of how to pick team captains.

How many captains on a soccer team?

As a youth club coach, I am a firm believer that team captains should be chosen based on what they, as unique individuals, have to offer to the group. Any individual player that stands out in a way that benefits the team as a whole, should be given consideration when you are choosing captains in soccer. Even if that means you end up with a lot of captains.

When choosing captains in soccer, you should have as many or as few as your team needs to have a well-rounded group in the leadership role. 1-2 soccer team captains is typical, but your team shouldn’t limit themselves if having more would be better for the group. It really depends on your team and what they need. It also depends on who your players are and what their leadership qualities are.

There might be someone who is particularity strong at on-field leadership and communication, and then another who is more organized, takes initiative and can even run some activities on their own. And then a third who is very supportive and encouraging to everyone when things go wrong. This is when you choose multiple captains and build a well-rounded leadership team with players who compliment each other.

One of the biggest benefits of having multiple soccer team captains is that you can cover a lot more ground when it comes to high quality traits. It’s kind of like building your own ‘super-captain’! Last year I chose 4 soccer captains for my U15 girls competitive travel team. While I know that some people will think this is way too many, it was perfect for our team dynamics (each player had their own specific role that they were great at) and WE THRIVED because of it.

What about having no official captains, but instead a rotation?

The main issue with this is that, while you DO give everyone the opportunity to be in a leadership position, players don’t really get enough time to grow into the role or really gain from it. The job of captain ends up being line leader for warmups and flipping the coin before the game and not much else.

Giving a select few an entire year to guide the others and work on their own leadership skills, will provide them the opportunity to grow into the role, and thereby elevate the entire group with them. When you change leadership week to week you don’t get this depth.

Soccer team captain responsibilities

When you are chosen to be a team captain for your soccer team, you are being elected into a leadership role. A real leadership role with real responsibilities and implications. What you do, say and how you act, all have ability to impact the entire group, how you play together, and how tight knit you become as a team.

Something to be aware of and try to avoid, is being a team captain with just a title and no actual impact. Quite often, soccer players get chosen as team captains, but then aren’t empowered by coaches to lead and take on some of the collective leadership responsibility. When this happens, it often result in them not being very effective captains because they weren’t given any guidelines, responsibilities or autonomy to take action and implement anything.

If you are a coach, make ‘team captain’ an actual job with actual responsibilities. Don’t let it become an ambiguous title – actually give players a specific role, a job, a task. This is how they will grow as leaders and best support the team. If you just give them the title and leave it at that, it is now simply a popularity position again and doesn’t serve the team much.

Specific roles

As a captain, you want to be actively involved in the building of team culture. As a coach, you want to give your team captains encouragement, and permission, to help guide the direction of the team.

When soccer team captains are actively involved in leadership decisions, they are more invested and want to work hard for the team to make a positive impact. When they feel they are valued and trusted by the coaching staff, this trickles down to everyone else on the team, leading to an overall culture of caring, collaborative teammates all working hard for the group. This is when the ‘we’ becomes more powerful than the ‘me’. For everyone.

If you are a captain, make sure you clearly understand what is expected of you. If your coach doesn’t come to you and talk about it, either start doing stuff on your own and taking initiative, or go to them and ask. Coaches, after choosing captains, try to assign each of them a very specific role – something that is complimentary to their specific leadership qualities. Here are some examples:

Being in charge of the ‘Skill of the Day’, something the players can work on as they arrive to soccer training. Captains come up with it and write it on a whiteboard for the team to see before every training session.
Organizing and leading warmups & technical drills before practices and games.
Pumping soccer balls and making sure equipment is organized and ready to go before training.
Creating ball mastery or fitness challenges for players to work on individually outside of training.
Leading team-building activities and planning things for the group to do together outside of training.
Encouraging teammates through some kind of weekly ‘captain’s award’, maybe recognizing players for something that they did that was thoughtful or kind and not even soccer related.

Players and coaches, you could also consider holding a monthly captain’s meeting to sit down, check in, and brainstorm together about what the team needs. Everyone’s ideas, thoughts and opinions matter and these proactive meetings are a fantastic way to collaborate and discuss what everyone (coach included) can be doing to help the team grow stronger and strengthen collective play.

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An argument for letting coaches choose team captains

Many team captains are chosen and voted in by their teammates. And that can work extremely well, but can often at times turn into a popularity contest. The danger of allowing players to vote is that it (depending on the dynamics of your team) it can potentially create an environment where cliques thrive and the team becomes disconnected. If players feel like outsiders on their own soccer team, and are constantly worried about what others think of them, the team will suffer due to lack of trust and support.

With middle and high school soccer teams specifically, or with any teams that are newly formed or have short seasons – I am a strong proponent of letting the coach be the one choosing captains. Teams that have been playing together for awhile though, such as in competitive and year-round programs, have a deeper trust of each other and will be better at electing the right leaders than a team who isn’t as familiar with each other on a personal level.

Avoiding the popularity contest

When soccer team captains get chosen based on how well ‘liked’ they are, how good of a player they are, or simply how loud and commanding of attention they are – things usually don’t end up well. Here’s a video explaining why we should avoid popularity contests, and also (if your team IS voting), how to choose captains in a way that will actually benefit your team.

Choosing captains is a growth opportunity

After all of this careful assessment, my biggest piece of advice is ironically quite small and simple: go with your gut. If you feel like someone will be a good leader, trust that feeling. Your intuition is usually right, and if it isn’t, if you end up picking someone that wasn’t quite ready or quite right for the job – then THAT’S OK. It will be a learning opportunity none the less.

Coaches, if choosing captains didn’t result in the best people making the cut, work with what you have. Motivate them, encourage them, help them fill the gaps where they lack and GROW into the role of being a good captain. This will make YOU a stronger coach, THEM a stronger captain, and BOTH OF YOU stronger leaders for your team.

Choosing captains to lead your team can be hard. But it can also be a learning opportunity and a chance to really tune-in to others and what they offer. We often don’t take the time to think about how the personality traits of others benefit, or hurt, the group at large and this an excellent opportunity to reflect on some of those qualities. For players and coaches alike.

Hi everyone! I’m Jenn and I create content to help female soccer players and coaches maximize individual and team potential by developing healthy mindset skills. Join other subscribers and sign up for the newsletter for all my best tips and advice!

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Hi everyone!

I'm Jenn, a USSF C-licensed youth soccer coach, mental skills coach & founder here at Expand Your Game. I created this site because it is the site I needed when I was a soccer player.

About me: I am a former newspaper photojournalist who loves downtempo electronic music, guacamole and books of every sort. And of course soccer! On days off you can find me researching tiny farms in Portugal , tossing a frisbee for my dog, or tending to my growing collection of indoor plants.