Formations come and go. Grassroots football coaching lives or dies on the stuff underneath them — the principles that travel with a kid no matter where you stand them on the pitch.
This is the good stuff. Not "play a 4-3-3," but "use the width so the swarm spreads out." Not "press high," but "win it back in the first two seconds." Principles like these don't expire when the tactical fashion changes, and they work the same on a bumpy field at nine in the morning as they do on the telly. The difference is you can actually teach them to Braden, who is seven.
The guides below cover the things I'd drill into any team before I worried about a shape: using the whole pitch, the much-maligned backwards pass, staying compact when you haven't got the ball, building little overloads, and the one that underpins everything — first touch. There's also the most important article on this whole site, the one about rotating every kid through every position, because that's how you build footballers instead of specialists who quit at fourteen.
Steal the principle, bin the packaging. That's the job.