Evening.

I posted a short video this week that opened with a line that should not make sense. Football is simple and complex at the same time. So here is the longer version.

You will have heard this somewhere. “The top level of coaching has made the game too complicated. Too many instructions, too many patterns, players looking at the bench instead of the pitch. Let them play”.

I think that complaint has the direction wrong. The higher up you go, the game does not get more complicated. It gets more precise. And the reason most teams look overcoached has very little to do with how much detail the coach has. It has everything to do with how much of it the players actually understand.

The objective of the game does not change from an under-9s pitch on a Sunday morning to a Champions League final. We want the ball in the back of their net and we want to stop them doing the same to us. That part is fixed. Nobody at any level is arguing about it.

I wrote about this in August in How Football is Simply Complex, so I will not go through it again. The short version is that everything a team does should be traceable back to those two outcomes, and if you cannot describe how a principle helps you score or stop a goal, it probably does not serve one.

What I want to do this week is take the next step. If the objective is the same everywhere, why does the football look so different as you go up the levels? And why does the elite game need so much more detail to achieve something a group of nine-year-olds is trying to achieve as well?

The objective stays simple. The conditions for achieving it get harder, and they get harder in four specific ways.

Less time and less space. A centre back in a Saturday league game receives the ball with the nearest striker eight or nine metres away. He can take a touch, look up, take another touch and still have a pass on. At the top level that striker is two metres away and already moving before the ball arrives. The decision that took three seconds now has to be made before the ball gets there, which means the information has to be gathered earlier and the body has to be shaped earlier. Everything happens before the ball, and that is not something you can leave to instinct.

Less margin for error. The same centre back takes a heavy touch. At a lower level he recovers, because the striker is still closing and the pass is still available. At the top level that touch is a shot on goal for the other team. A poor first touch, a late scan, a half second delay on a press. Things you get away with lower down get exposed at the top, every single time, because the opponent is good enough to punish them.

A smaller gap in quality. In most grassroots and youth games the two teams are not evenly matched, and the better players decide it whatever the coaches do. As you go up, the quality evens out. Both squads can pass, both can press, both have players who can beat a man. When the technical gap closes the tactical gap is what is left, and that is why top coaches are so detail-orientated. They are not adding detail to make the game harder. They are adding it because it is the only edge still available.

The other coach is doing exactly the same thing. This is the part that makes the elite game look so complicated from the outside. It is not one coach with a plan. It is two coaches with plans, each one built to break the other, each one adjusting during the match. What you see on the pitch is two precise ideas colliding, and from the stands that can look like chaos. It is the opposite. Every one of those movements has a reason, it is just that the reason is answering something the other team did.

So the complexity is real. But nobody put it there on purpose. It comes from the level, not from the coach.

Here is where I want to push back on the complaint properly.

When a team looks robotic, when players are stood in the right positions doing nothing with them, when the ball goes sideways for ninety seconds because nobody wants to make a mistake, the easy diagnosis is too much coaching. Strip it back. Let them play.

I do not think that is what is happening in most of those cases. I think the players have been given a lot of detail and not enough understanding. They know the shape, they do not know the aim. They know where to stand, they do not know what the position is for or what the cue is to leave it. That is not a team that has been overcoached. It is a team that has been under-explained.

And the fix for under-explaining is not less detail. It is better detail.

This is the thing I keep coming back to. Detail is not meant to be complex. It is meant to be specific. The difference is easy to see when you write two versions of the same principle down.

The vague version: we press high.

The specific version: when their centre-back receives facing his own goal, our nearest forward presses on a curve that blocks the pass to the full-back, and the winger on that side jumps to the full-back as the ball travels.

The second one is longer, but it is not more complicated for the player. It is simpler, because it tells him exactly what to look for and exactly what to do when he sees it. The first one leaves him to work all of that out on his own, at full speed, with a coach shouting "press" from the side. Which of those two teams is going to look robotic?

So the test I use for any piece of detail is three questions.

Is it specific? Does it name a situation, a cue and an action, or is it a general instruction that sounds good in a team talk?

Is it actionable? Can a player do it on Saturday, or is it a description of an outcome we would like?

Is it coachable? Can I design a practice where this either happens or does not happen, so I can see it and correct it?

If a line in your game model fails any of those three, it is not detail, it is complexity, and it should be cut or rewritten.

This is the part I did not have time for in the video and it is the bit that matters most for the people reading this.

The elite game needs the amount of detail it has because the conditions demand it. Your team's conditions are different. You have more time, more space, a wider margin for error and probably a bigger gap in quality between the two sides on any given weekend. So the honest question is not "how much detail do the top coaches use" but "how much detail does my team's age and stage require?"

For a group of under-9s the answer might be two things. When we win it, look forward first. When we lose it, the nearest player goes to the ball. Two principles, both specific, both actionable, both coachable, and both traceable back to scoring and stopping goals. That is a complete game model for that age. Anything more is for the coach's benefit, not the players'.

For an under-15 side the same two principles get a layer of detail underneath. Look forward first becomes a cue and a movement. Nearest player to the ball becomes a rule about who covers behind him. The principle has not changed. The precision has gone up because the players can now take it, and because the game they play in has started to punish the gaps.

For an adult team playing on a Saturday, more again. And so on up, until you reach the level where two evenly matched sides are being coached by people who have written a specific answer to every phase of the game, and the football looks complicated because it is precise.

The mistake in both directions is the same one. Coaches at the bottom copying the amount of detail from the top, and giving players more than they can carry. And coaches at the top being told to strip it back to what a grassroots team needs, when their players are being punished for every gap. The detail should follow the level. Not the other way round.

This is what a game model is for. It is not a document for making the game complicated. It is the acknowledgement that the game is simple, followed by exactly the amount of specificity your players need to understand what the team is trying to do in every part of it. Simple at the top of the page. Precise underneath. And only as precise as the group in front of you can actually use.

Write one principle two ways. Take any line from your game model, or from your head if it is not written down, and write it the vague way and the specific way. Situation, cue, action. See how far apart they are.

Run it through the three questions. Specific, actionable, coachable. If it fails one, rewrite it until it passes. If you cannot make it pass, it might not be a principle at all.

Ask a player what a position is for. Not where to stand. What it is for. If they can tell you the where and not the why, that is the gap between coached and explained, and it is the one worth closing first.

When your team looks robotic, is it the amount of detail or the amount of understanding?

Reply and tell me which one you think it is for your group. I read every one and I would be interested to compare.

Until next week,
Lucas

p.s: if you want to build your own game model with exactly this in mind, simple at the top and specific underneath, I've broken the whole process down in this workbook. click here.