Soccer, But Slower: Clifton Park Soccer Club's Walking Soccer Offers Different Spin On The Game - Walking Sports Hub

Club is in its 2nd year of sponsoring weekly walking soccer matches at Clifton Common

CLIFTON PARK — The 2026 FIFA World Cup is in full force. The world’s best soccer players are racing up and down at stadiums across North America with national pride and glory at stake.

The scene on a recent sweltering early evening at Clifton Common is … not that.

The game being played is four-a-side, on a far more compact playing field and using small nets with no goalkeepers. The eight players on the pitch for this particular evening range in age from their 30s to their 70s.

Oh, and one more thing: No running allowed.

Welcome to walking soccer.

“It’s a fun game,” said Bill Sofko, the adult league chairman for the Clifton Park Soccer Club. “It’s a different game, but it’s still soccer. It focuses you very clearly on the foot skills, the passing skills and the positioning skills, which are the fundamentals of the game.

“It’s just, speed is gone.”

The club’s first walking soccer games were held in the spring of 2025, with a group of eight to 10 players getting together for weekly games on Monday evenings. But, Sofko said, the group ran into difficulty finding a consistent number of players to take part last fall, and wasn’t able to hold its first game of 2026 until earlier this month. — Pic credit: Adam Shinder/Times Union

Walking soccer was created in the United Kingdom in 2011, providing an option for players who, due to age or a lack of mobility, found themselves unable to play traditional, full-field soccer. Running is banned, as is any contact beyond minor, incidental bumps.

It’s grown massively over the past decade-and-a-half in the U.K., where the Walking Football Association organizes national competitions. In many ways, its rise in the U.K. is analogous to pickleball’s rise in the United States as an alternative to tennis in recent years.

Peter Fowler, a native Englishman and coach with the Clifton Park Soccer Club, was the one who pitched the club on starting to organize walking soccer games.

“In the U.K., there’s like 10,000 teams or something crazy,” Fowler said. “But there’s no real physical contact, no heading, the ball is played below head height. You get to walk, you get to chat and you get to kick a ball around. That’s why I pitched it.”

Sofko, who founded the club’s adult rec league after tearing his ACL and meniscus during a competitive men’s match against Halfmoon in 1999, embraced the concept. While the game, unsurprisingly, moves at a far slower pace than traditional soccer, it places a greater emphasis on precision passing, ball control and defensive organization — especially the way it’s played at Clifton Common with a smaller field and no goalies.

“It just changes the dynamics,” he said. “With no running, speed comes out of the equation. The best players in a regular game are no longer necessarily the best players out here. The best players are the ones who can keep the ball tight under control, who can make good passes. The best teams out here are the ones that keep their shape, because as soon as you lose your shape, you’re open to a counterattack.”

Switching from traditional soccer to walking soccer includes clearing a few mental hurdles. Among the biggest, Fowler said, is remembering to pass the ball to where a player currently is, rather than where they’re going to be.

“I’ve played soccer all my life, but it’s kind of weird. You have to adapt to passing the ball,” he said. “When you pass the ball normally in a normal game, you pass it way ahead of the person running onto it. Here, you pass it like that, and the person is still back here walking.”

The club’s first walking soccer games were held in the spring of 2025, with a group of eight to 10 players getting together for weekly games on Monday evenings. But, Sofko said, the group ran into difficulty finding a consistent number of players to take part last fall, and wasn’t able to hold its first game of 2026 until earlier this month.

There’s also interest in expanding the games to make them co-ed.

“We’re having trouble building critical mass,” he said. “We’ve got a small group to play. We played a game every week during the spring last year, and then in the fall, a couple people were injured, and a couple people were traveling, and we couldn’t really get a game off.”

For more information about taking part in Clifton Park’s walking soccer games, visit www.cliftonparkadult.soccer or email Sofko at coordinator@cliftonparkadult.soccer

Source: https://www.timesunion.com/sports/article/walking-soccer-clifton-park-2026-fifa-world-cup-22293918.php

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