Spent the whole day on how the ball touches the foot.
Here is the thing nobody warns you about: in a football game, dribbling is not an animation problem. It is a ball problem. You can have gorgeous footwork, but if the ball floats near the feet instead of reacting to them, it looks fake instantly.
So the dribble is built around the ball. It rides right at your feet, leads the direction you are actually running, and rolls, spinning to match how far it travels, instead of skating. Jog with it and you get the dribble animation with the ball tucked to the correct foot. Sprint and it goes back to a run.
Then the fun one: the drag-back turn. Flick the stick back and your player puts his sole on the ball, drags it, and spins 180 to go the other way. To make it read as a real touch I choreographed the ball frame by frame through the turn: the ball creeps forward until the sole traps it, the sole drags it back, the ball releases and rolls out slightly, then you knock it into space and go.
The turn spun the player perfectly in the animation preview and refused to rotate him in game. He would just jog forward like the flick never happened. For hours. The tell was a little dotted line on the ground, the root-motion path. It was straight. The 180 was baked into the body pose, not the root motion, so the game moved him forward but never turned him. The preview had no capsule to fight, so it lied. Fix, for now: let the pose do the visual spin and snap his facing to the new direction the instant the turn finishes.
Day one this was a capsule shoving a physics ball around a field. Now you can dribble at someone, drag it back, and leave them.
Shipped: footed dribbling · drag-back turn · ball choreographed through the turn