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Youth & adult football · United Kingdom

The development platform for football clubs.

Develop better players. Develop better coaches.

4CM connects session planning, coaching observations, player development and coach reflection into one continuous four-corner development cycle. Its AI Brain remembers your team, works from coaching methodology we can name, and helps you decide what to do next — from one session to the next, and across a whole season.

Apply for the limited pilotSee the development cycle

Free while we’re in beta. Works in any browser, with iOS and Android apps in beta.

The 4CM 3D tactics board: a stadium view of a pitch with player figures in home and away kit, the session name and formation above it, and the Coach Brain panel open alongside.
The Brain — the football AI in the corner of every screen. It reads your squad, your principles and your notes, and helps you decide what’s next.
  • 200+drills, every one tagged to the four corners
  • 4corners, with Harwood’s 5Cs within the psychological one
  • U6–U18one product, every age group you coach
  • 5coach levels, from first season to Cat 1 academy

Two people develop here.

Most coaching software develops nobody — it stores what you already did. 4CM is built so a player gets better at football and a coach gets better at coaching, and so that each can see it happening.

The player13+

They rate themselves before they see your rating.

A player checks in on how they slept and how they feel, then rates their own four corners. You rate them too. Neither sees the other until both are in, so nobody anchors on the other’s number — and the gap between the two becomes the most useful conversation of the week.

  • Their own view of their four corners over time
  • Goals they set, and progress against them
  • A side-by-side of their rating and yours, once both are in
  • Effort-and-process language throughout — never “were you any good today”
The coachevery level

You get developed too. That is unusual, and deliberate.

Every fortnight the Brain asks you four questions: what went better than expected, what didn’t land, what your team is wrestling with, and what you want help with next. Your answer to the last one becomes a standing instruction on every reply it gives you for the following two weeks.

  • A fortnightly growth conversation, by voice or text
  • Guidance that adapts to your experience level, from first season to Cat 1
  • Rating calibration, so your scores mean the same as another coach’s
  • A record of your own coaching year, not just your players’

Player accounts are for 13 and over, and the pilot issues none yet — a coach plans, rates and tracks a whole squad without any child holding an account. The development work still happens; the child just isn’t a user. Player self-ratingComing during beta and the parent viewComing during beta open after the pilot.

One continuous loop

The development cycle.

Coaching is not a sequence of separate jobs — it is the same loop, every week. 4CM holds the whole loop, and the Brain carries what you learned in one stage into the next.

The cycle runs inside three things you set once, and they cascade: the aim, the principles that serve it, and the curriculum that paces it. The Brain keeps all three in front of it every time it plans with you.

Team objectives

The aim for this team this season, the phase to focus on, and a few development themes. It sits at the top: the session planner treats it as the prior that outranks the rest, and principles, curriculum and every session are meant to ladder toward it.

Playing principles

How your team attacks, defends, and handles transitions and restarts. Written once, then in front of the Brain every time it plans with you. It tracks whether they cover all four phases and whether at least one is psychological or social — and tells you when they don’t.

Season curriculum

What this phase of the season is for, week by week, with the reason each theme comes when it does. The Brain plans from it, so a run of sessions goes somewhere instead of being seven good ideas in a row.

The 4CM team objectives screen: an aim set in large type reading “Build confident, quick-thinking players who win the ball back fast and attack the moment they do”, a chosen focus of Transitions, three development-theme chips, a mental and social intent tagged to the psychological and social corners, and a list headed “how this cascades down” linking to Principles, Curriculum and Sessions.
Set the aim once. The focus, the themes and the mental and social intent sit under it — and cascade down into your principles, your curriculum and every session you plan.

  1. Plan

    Decide what this week is for, and build the session that serves it.

    Curriculum, session plans and drills

  2. Deliver it on the grass, and on match day.

    3D walkthroughs, match plans and coaching points

  3. Observe

    Notice what actually happened, while it is still in your head.

    Brain memories, player notes and video

  4. Reflect

    Turn what you saw into a judgement — about the players, and about the session.

    Four-corner ratings and the coach growth check-in

  5. Adapt

    Change what you do next because of it. Then round again.

    Revised priorities, goals and the next session

The Brain carries context from every stage into the next session.

  1. Plan

    Plan the session

    Tell the Brain your focus — “pressing with my U13s, 45 minutes, 14 players” — and it comes back with a full session: warm-up, drills, small-sided game, cool-down, with corner balance and coaching points. Photograph a whiteboard or a napkin diagram and it comes back structured. Or pull from a library of 200+ drills, every one tagged to the four corners.

    The 4CM drill library filtered by phase of play, showing drill cards that each carry a pitch diagram, a duration, sub-corner tags and the name of the coach who authored them.
    Drill library. Filter by phase of play, by curator, or search it — every drill diagrammed and tagged.

  2. Coach

    Walk through it in 3D

    Rigged, animated players running your plays — pass, dribble, run, combine. Record a sequence once, play it back at half speed, share it with the squad. No more static arrows on a photograph of a whiteboard.

    The 4CM 3D tactics board seen from behind the goal, with player figures in home and away kit spread across the pitch, and camera, formation and frame controls beneath it.
    3D walkthrough. Move the camera, set the formation, step through the frames.

  3. Coach match day

    A formation-aware lineup pitch. A tactic-plan bundle — opposition shape, matchups, sub plan — in one card. Set-piece plays to share. A live transition tagger while you watch. After the whistle, a match report drafted for you to edit.

  4. Observe

    Capture as you go

    You don’t have to write anything up. As you plan, review and talk things through with Brain, it keeps what matters — preferences, patterns and traits, about you and about individual players. Everything it holds is listed on the “What Brain remembers” page, and you can forget any of it at any time. Those memories feed into future session planning, player reviews and your own coaching reflections, so your everyday observations become part of the team’s development record rather than disappearing into a notebook.

  5. Observe

    Review the week’s video

    Upload a clip. The Brain samples frames, spots events, and writes per-player four-corner notes — then talks with you about what actually happened. Clips attach to player profiles and to the curriculum. Nothing is auto-published: a coach accepts every suggestion first.

  6. Reflect

    Close the loop

    Blind coach-and-player ratings across the four corners, revealed only once both are in — so neither anchors the other. Bio-band aware, so a late developer isn’t marked down for being late. Velocity alerts when a player is quietly slipping, to the coach only. Parents see a clean, plain-English view.

    The team insights screen: a four-corner rating profile, the psych-social index described as the primary welfare KPI, a birth-quarter Relative Age Effect chart, and a welfare flags panel marked coach-only.
    Closing the loop. Corner profile, the psych-social index, and birth-quarter spread — with welfare flags that stay with the coach.

  7. And every other week, it checks in on you

    Four questions, by voice or text: what went better than you expected, what didn’t land, what your team is wrestling with, and what you’d like help with next. That last answer becomes a standing instruction on every reply the Brain gives you for the following fortnight. You are the other person developing here, and most coaching software forgets that entirely.

“I’ve got 12 players, want to do an attacking session, attack with width — what you got for me.”

Ben Petty, Football Technical Director — the bar he set for how hard this should be.

The Brain

It remembers the context most coaching tools lose.

The Brain is the connective layer, not the product. It carries what you covered, what you observed and what worked from one stage of the week into the next — planning, training, matchday, review — so the season reads as one continuous piece of work rather than a folder of separate sessions.

You speak into it, plan through it, review video with it, prep a match with it, rate players with it. Ask it “what did we cover last week?” and it answers from your actual sessions, not from a manual.

It drafts, challenges and explains. The coach decides. It can be wrong, and nothing it suggests reaches a player or a parent until a coach has accepted it.

The 4CM session planner opened on the Brain: quick-start chips for pressing, possession, counter-attack, set pieces, finishing and transitions, rows of style and psych-social intent chips beneath them, and the Brain asking what the coach wants tonight’s session to focus on above a voice input reading “say what comes to mind”.
Mostly, you just talk to it. Tap a chip or say what comes to mind — and take over yourself at any point, or hand it back when you want to.

Whose coaching is this?

An AI is only as good as the coach behind it.

It is a fair question to ask of any product with an AI in it. A general-purpose model has read the whole internet, and for youth football that means a great deal of confident nonsense.

4CM’s coaching methodology is led by Ben Petty, Football Technical Director. His guidance has been recorded and structured into the knowledge the Brain reasons from, alongside established player-development frameworks and attributed coaching sources — with the source attached to each piece of it. None of it is scraped.

So when you ask for an attacking session for your U10s, what comes back is shaped by what he has taught the system about coaching U10s: what to expect at that age, what to leave alone, how many coaching points a child can hold, and when to stop talking and let them play.

The Brain answers from a coach, not the internet

Its coaching knowledge is a curated body of guidance with citations, not whatever a general-purpose model absorbed. Ask it why it suggested something and it can tell you where the thinking came from.

It pushes back like a coach educator would

Change theme every week and it will say so. Ask for eight coaching points and it will argue for three. “Less is more” is not a tagline here — it is a rule the system actively enforces on your behalf.

Coach’s Corner is attributed

Sessions and drills authored by a named coach carry that name and their credentials wherever they appear, so you always know whether you are looking at platform content, your club’s, or an expert’s.

The shared language

Four corners.
Not four scores.

Every drill, rating, clip and conversation is positioned against the Football Association’s four corners — and, inside the psychological corner, against Chris Harwood’s 5Cs. These are the frameworks serious coaches already think in, so nothing has to be translated.

Technical / Tactical

The skills and the game intelligence. A player can have lovely technique and still read the game badly — so these are tracked apart, not averaged together.

  • First touch
  • Passing
  • Finishing
  • 1v1
  • Decision-making
  • 360° awareness
  • Pressing triggers
  • Positional play

Physical

Always read against biological maturity, never against a birthday. An early developer isn’t better; a late one isn’t worse. The app won’t show you a physical figure without that context attached.

  • Speed
  • Acceleration
  • Agility
  • Balance
  • Coordination
  • Strength
  • Endurance
  • Robustness

Psychological

Chris Harwood’s 5Cs live here — the vocabulary most academy coaches already use for the mental side.

The 5Cs

  • Commitment
  • Communication
  • Concentration
  • Control
  • Confidence

Plus resilience, composure, coachability and a growth mindset.

Social

Football is a team game, and most of these children will not turn professional. What they keep is this corner — so it is weighted like it matters.

  • Teamwork
  • Leadership
  • Followership
  • Communication
  • Respect
  • Fair play
  • Team culture

The psychological and social corners aren’t a soft add-on — they’re the floor. A player’s composite can’t reach the top band while either is weak, because a child who doesn’t feel safe or included doesn’t develop technically either.

Novice → Cat 1

It grows with the coach.

The workflow that runs a Saturday U8 session also runs a four-phase academy season. You tell 4CM where you are — it changes how much it explains, how dense the screens get, and how it talks to you. Same product, five dial positions.

  1. 01

    Novice

    Parent-coach · U6–U10

    A session in minutes, in plain English, with the jargon explained as it goes.

  2. 02

    Grassroots

    Introduction to Coaching Football · U8–U16

    A weekly plan, a drill library, four-corner ratings and match day end to end.

  3. 03

    Competitive

    Competitive grassroots · development squad

    Playing principles the Brain learns, opposition briefs, set-pieces and tactics boards.

  4. 04

    Advanced

    UEFA C / B · academy

    A season curriculum broken into phases, bio-band-aware load planning, development plans.

  5. 05

    Elite / Cat 1

    UEFA A/B · EPPP

    Full depth, peer-level dialogue, and a memory that holds a player’s arc across years.

You pick your level when you sign up, and you can change it whenever you like.

Built for children’s data. Not retrofitted for it.

4CM holds information about children, so the rules that govern it shaped the product before the product had a first screen. The ICO Children’s Code, the UK GDPR, the Online Safety Act and FA safeguarding practice are not a compliance page here — they are why several features look the way they do, and why some features don’t exist at all.

Your club is the data controller. 4CM is its processor. We hold and process it on your club’s written instructions, under an Article 28 agreement, and we never train AI on identifiable data about your players.

How we handle children’s data
  • Player names are stripped before anything is sent to an AI model.
  • No coach-to-child messaging. No stranger contact. No public profiles.
  • Player accounts start at 13. Younger squads are the coach’s to plan for.
  • Coaches are checked for current DBS and FA safeguarding clearance.
  • Every club has a named welfare officer route, on every screen.
  • Wellness logs are never shown in any ranked or comparative view.

Less is more

What we deliberately don’t do.

Every one of these would be easy to build and would probably sell. They are absent on purpose, and we would rather tell you now than have you find out.

No team chat

There is no coach-to-child messaging in 4CM, and there never will be. Safeguarding guidance is unambiguous about unmonitored adult-to-child channels in youth sport. Everything reaches a child through their parent or the whole squad.

No 1,000-drill catalogue

Coaches given a thousand drills jump from idea to idea and never build anything coherent. We would rather ship fewer drills with real depth — coaching points, progressions, the reason it exists — and an AI that pushes back when you change theme every week.

No advertising, ever

No ad SDKs, no marketing cookies, no selling data, no profiling children for commercial purposes. Not as a current setting — as a rule we have written into our own cookie policy.

No scores that rank children

No league table of players. Physical data always carries its maturity context, so an early developer isn’t flattered and a late one isn’t written off. Welfare flags go to the coach, never to the child or the parent.

Take the fear out of Tuesday night.

Create a free coach account and plan your next session in about five minutes. Bring your squad when you’re ready — or don’t, and just use it to plan.

Join your clubI run a club or academy

Free while we’re in beta. Players and parents join by invitation from their club — never from this page.