Football doesn't happen in parts

Hi {{first_name}},

We tend to talk about football in different parts. Technical-tactical, physical, psychological and social. It’s how coaching courses are laid out, how player reports are written and how most of us were taught to think about the game.

I do think there is value in this when structuring learning and ensuring a coach considers all of these parts.

But there’s an idea I have come across in my recent studies that I keep coming back to.

When the game is happening, none of those parts can be isolated. They happen at the same time, in the same action, all of the time. And most importantly, each one can impact the other in a way that changes the outcome.

I’m still working through it myself, so take this as a perspective worth thinking about rather than a set of rules.

Like I say all the time, I’m a coach/analyst on my journey, who is blessed to be in a position where I can think about football, every minute of every day, literally.

Anyway, let’s talk about football’s parts (or non-parts).

Let me explain…

Take a single pass in a match. Our midfielder receives from the centre-back and their midfielder jumps to press him.

Before the ball even arrives, he/she has to see where the pressure is coming from and where their teammates are (process information). Then he/she has to choose which option to take out of numerous options (and even some moments may bypass this ‘decision’ layer completely and become intuitive). Then he/she has to execute, whichever option he/she decided to take. All of that happens in a very short time.

Now let’s try to split that action into its parts.

The technical-tactical part is the touch and the pass, but they only make sense because of what he has seen. He opens his body because he knows the space is behind the presser, so the technique and the tactical picture are really one thing. The physical part is the speed of it all, staying balanced and getting the ball out of his feet while someone closes him down. The psychological part is having the nerve to play forward when the safe pass is right there. And the social part is the relationship with the 10, who has moved into that space trusting that the midfielder will look for him, without either of them saying a word.

It’s a bit like baking a cake. You can list the eggs, the flour and the sugar separately on the recipe, but once it’s baked you can’t take the eggs back out. That is what this pass is like. You can describe the parts, but you can’t pull them apart.

This is the bit that made the idea click for me. The parts aren’t just happening together, they depend on each other.

If the presser is a yard quicker, the decision has to come earlier and the first touch has to be better, so a physical change raises the technical-tactical demand. If the midfielder is tired late in the game, his scanning drops off and he starts choosing the safe pass. If he’s low on confidence, he plays back even when forward is on, which looks like a decision problem but starts in his head. And if he and the 10 haven’t played together much, the 10 might not make the movement at all, because he doesn’t trust the ball will come.

So when a player gets something wrong in a match, the cause is rarely sitting in the part where the mistake appears. A misplaced pass might be a technique problem, or it might be tiredness, lack of confidence or two players who don’t yet understand each other. All of these things can influence an action.

The way of thinking that put words to this for me is general systems theory.

And no, I have not just typed into ChatGPT, ‘Do some research and give me a crazy concept that will blow people’s minds’. This is something I have studied over the past month and I want to share it.

This theory started in biology as a way of explaining how living things work and it has since been applied to football.

It describes football as an open system, made up of lots of smaller systems that are connected to each other. They are constantly exchanging information, energy and matter with what is around them and they work together towards one goal, which is performing well. Rather than zooming in on the detail of one player’s movement or one technique, it looks at how the whole thing is organised and how each part affects the others.

And these 3 ideas from it stood out to me.

Because it makes the game easier to understand. Football is complicated and breaking it into parts gives us a language for it, in the same way we split the pitch into thirds and the game into phases so we can talk about what we are seeing.

That is great for describing the game. Where I think it can go wrong is when the way we describe football becomes the way we train it.

One of the best-known coaches to build his training around this idea is José Mourinho. He came across it at Porto through Vítor Frade, a sports science professor at the University of Porto, whose method became known as tactical periodisation. In his version, the team’s way of playing sits at the centre and everything else, the physical, the technical and the psychological, is trained through it.

Speaking at a coaching conference in 2005, Mourinho put it like this:

John Terry remembered what that looked like when Mourinho arrived at Chelsea:

I love that. And yes I’m a Chelsea fan so maybe there’s a hint of bias there.

If you coach, here is how I would start to put this into practice. You don’t need to throw your existing drills away. You can keep them and add the game back in, one layer at a time. Remember, players play the game, so they need to train the game too.

Stage 1. Four players around a square of cones, pass and follow, no opponents. It is pure technical work, but it allows you to get the detail required before going into the game.

Stage 2. 4v2 in an area of roughly 20 by 15 yards, with a target player at one end. The four score by playing into the target. If the two defenders win it, they score by getting through one of two small gates at the other end. Now a pass that was always on is blocked, so somebody has to move to find an angle. Teammates are starting to communicate and interact with each other. They begin understanding each other to work towards the objective. All four parts are back.

Stage 3. 4v4 with goalkeepers, on something like 40 by 30 yards. Often if you just play a game, you can lose the string of the session. So to make the players think, you can begin adding little rules. If you want to keep the focus on passing, add a condition, for example a goal counts double if it comes from a pass that breaks a line. The players will make far more passes than they did in the square and every one comes with a decision, a bit of pressure and a teammate to understand. Players begin processing information like they would in a real match.

That doesn’t mean isolation has no place. A young player learning to strike the ball with their laces, or someone fixing one technical habit, can benefit from a short block of repetition. The approach I have come across is to start with the game, step out for the one thing that keeps breaking down, then go straight back in so the player can use it. This is often called the whole-part-whole approach to practice design and is something I really enjoy using.

Talk soon,

Lucas

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