Analysing football actions

I have been fortunate enough to attend another excellent course delivered by Raymond Verheijen of Football Coaches Evolution on analysing football actions, taking place in Stuttgart last week.

Over the past few months, and ever since I signed up for Raymond's Football Coaches Evolution Level 1 Mentorship programme, I noted significant improvements in myself as well as actual coaching on the field. Raymond has got an amazing charisma, and his coaching education methodologies, must be up there with the best I have seen and experienced. They are definitely unique and different to what I have been exposed to over the past few years.

First and foremost, he endeavours to develop the individual him/herself, before developing the coach as a practitioner, and often will design different situations within the classroom to provoke different behaviours, just to check whether you can handle certain situations. As we are coaches ourselves, some of us quite ambitious too, and often have, or will have to encounter highly pressurised situations on the side-lines, we need to develop the emotional intelligence to withstand difficult situations and being able to operate in adversity too without allowing our emotions to get the better of us.

As you may have rightly identified, personal development is of paramount importance!

Here I will summarise the key takeaways from the course I attended in an attempt to provoke some self-reflections to whoever is reading this.

''What You See Is All There Is'' - What is it and what are the pitfalls that come with it?

Normally, when people watch a footage and are asked to analyse a football action, they would go by their first instinct and first impression based on what they see, or past biased experiences. What people tend to see in a pass for instance, is the technical execution of a pass, also known as football technique, so when a pass is misplaced or doesn't reach the player is intended to reach, most of the people would normally attribute that to a 'poor technical execution', therefore plan and design a training session to work on that. It's almost like watching a man walk away from a crime scene covered in blood. Most people would think he must be the killer. Well, in theory, just because he is covered in blood doesn't necessarily make him the killer, but certainly the suspect, unless proven otherwise.

The question is, have we identified the right problem? Is the solution we designed the right one for the problem we identified? And how do we know is the right problem? Or have we identified the wrong problem and assumed it's the right problem, then designed a solution to the wrong problem identified? Are we trying to solve problems that do not exist? Are we creating problems? Or trying to solve problems that are just SYMPTOMS of a bigger problem?

The truth is, you wouldn't be able to identify the right problem just be relying on 'visual illusions', first impressions or biased past experiences. The player is a key component in trying to identify the right problem before moving on to design a solution. After all, how do we expect to develop the player if we design solutions to problems that we THINK exist, that may not even have existed in the first place?

As Albert Einstein once said...

Has the 'passing action' started on the player's foot touching the ball?? Well, based on the action theory, there are components involved prior to executing an action, such as 'communicating' with your environment, such as perceiving, sending and receiving information from the environment, then based on that, making a decision of WHAT to do, and HOW to do it, before actually executing the decision made.

So, based on the action theory, a passing action consists of 3 components

1) Communication - Sending and receiving information amongst teammates, and opponents

2a) Decision What -Deciding to pass the ball to player X

2b) Deciding How - Deciding the Position, Moment, Direction and Speed of the pass

3) Executing the chosen 'deciding how' - Executing the position, moment, direction and speed chosen

Therefore, if CDE (Communication, Decision, Execution) are integral parts of the 'passing action' would it not make sense to investigate the reason why a pass has been unsuccessful, rather than assuming it's an execution problem (the only thing anyone would normally see on a football pitch, as it's visible to the naked eye).

To investigate whether any of the 3 components were the actual reason why a pass has been unsuccessful, we first need to reverse engineer the whole football action by designing a conversation with the player him/herself, asking specific questions to understand the following:

Was the executed decision (i.e. the technical execution of the pass) aligned with the player's chosen 'how' (i.e. decision HOW). Did the player execute the pass at the Position, Moment, Direction & Speed of the chosen how? Or did he choose a different how but for some reason executed it wrongly (i.e. execution problem). If the execution is not aligned with the decision how, then the player has a football technique problem and therefore, a football technique solution shall be designed for the identified problem

Did the player choose the right how (i.e. decision how) based on WHAT he actually chose to do (i.e. decision what?). Was the 'decision how' aligned to the decision what or not? If not aligned and the 'decision how' is not aligned to the 'decision what' then there is a 'decision how' problem

Did the player's 'decision what' relate to the team intention? Did the player's 'decision what' choice contribute to what the team were trying to accomplish or not? If not, there is a 'decision what' problem

Has the player 'communicated' well with his surroundings? Has the player picked up on all the relevant cues available and has he perceived and received all the relevant cues available in the environment so as to guide his decision? Could he have communicated better? did he make eye contact with the surroundings (i.e. player and opponent) so as to help him guide his decision?

Analysing football actions is the core business of a football coach. It is the starting point of the training process and the development of individual players. However, a coach is facing many obstacles during the analysis process. For example, if a player poorly controls the ball, most coaches immediately say that the player has poor technique because the only thing the coach can see from the outside is the technical execution of a player. In psychology, this is called ‘What You See Is All There Is’ (WYSIATI).

However, the poor control of the ball could also have been the consequence of miscommunication or bad decision making but these components are difficult to judge from the outside. The only way to find out is by asking the player. Often, when two coaches analyse the performance of the same player they do not use identical references and terminology. How can these two coaches compare and discuss their analysis afterwards? Have they looked at the same aspects, but do they use different words? Or did they look at different aspects but use the same words?

Asking purposeful questions to players in the process of reverse engineering a football action from ‘executing decision’ via ‘decision making’ to ‘communicating’ between players, is paramount in trying to get to the route of the problem, to give ourselves a higher chance of designing the right solution to improve the player.

Thanks to this objective coaching tool, coaches will have a much bigger chance to get to the essence of a football problem and to explain the behaviour of their players.