Football, often referred to as soccer outside the UK and Europe, is a highly popular activity on many university campuses. As a result, football training programs are offered across many institutions, training students at a range of skill levels. Therefore, this paper investigates a deep learning (DL)-based algorithm for recognizing and tracking targets in sports training videos. The study specifically addresses those videos tailored to identifying small targets, by generating new multi-scale features and modifying anchor point generation rules. Experimental results demonstrate the algorithm's strong performance in tracking football targets. Compared to Histogram of Oriented Gradients, the DL-based model achieved a 29.58% increase in accuracy and a 39.68% decrease in error rates when recognizing football player movement features. This algorithm accurately locates the edge contours of a football player's movements, meaning that universities can, and should, actively reform football teaching and training to enhance teaching effectiveness by utilizing this powerful algorithm.