What are the advantages of playing in different positions?

You'll be able to help your team out in a match if a team-mate gets injured or sent off, or over the course of a season.

Because you've proven your ability in another position in a match and your coach wants to give it another go.  

Because you yourself wanted to try out other positions.

Over the years, you'll show that you've got more strings to your bow: when you're young, you'll want to play in your favourite position, which in 95 per cent of cases is the position your footballing idol plays in. In any group of 20 children, half of them will want to be playmakers and the other half forwards.

You've had time to take stock of the seasons you've played. When, after a few years, you start to really understand the game, you realise that you can have a lot of fun playing in goal, in defence or at full back, which are all positions that don't appeal that much on paper. You realise that you've got what it takes to be the driving force of your team and to take pleasure from playing in those positions.

You have the skills to play in certain positions, for sure, but there are other players in the team who are perhaps a better fit for them, so your coach is going to play you somewhere else. That's also what makes football so much fun.

When you're young, you're more explosive, and you can make the difference, though it's harder for you to manage games and finish them. You also need to progress on a tactical level, to improve your positioning on the pitch. As time goes by, you build up your stamina and reach a stage where you can just keep going, which is when you're much more able to manage yourself and last a full game. As you get older, you become more and more tactically aware.

So it's partly because of that development that it's not unusual to play in three or four different positions on the pitch.