Analyzing football tactics

Finding the next edge.

FIFA is engineering 2026 World Cup grass to keep ball roll and bounce the same across all 16 stadiums

At the 2025 Club World Cup, Jude Bellingham said the ball barely bounced and Luis Enrique said it hopped like a rabbit. Those pitches were shallow sod laid days before kickoff. For 2026, FIFA grows rooted grass to keep ball roll and bounce steady.

Design two energy-matched sessions to separate intensity from total load

Staff can match two football sessions on energy cost, varying only intensity, to expose what a single GPS total hides. In matched runs, players lost 12% strength after high-intensity work versus 10.6% after moderate running.

What a young player's first big shot can and cannot tell a scout

Luiz Henrique plays for Brazil now and became an idol at Botafogo. At six, in Petrópolis, he curled one left-footed shot into the top corner, and a youth coach invited him into a small academy on the spot.

Bernardo Silva’s center-back role and the limits of a positional experiment

Bernardo Silva described Pep Guardiola’s centre-back experiment against Arsenal as “uma loucura” — madness. Guardiola then moved the experiment to left-back, and still called the first-half version “horrible.”

World Cup will use a new five-second restart rule for throw-ins and goal kicks

A new five-second restart rule for throw-ins and goal kicks will be used at the World Cup. If the referee judges voluntary delay, a visible count starts. At zero, a delayed throw-in goes to the other team and a delayed goal kick becomes a corner. 1 2

May

January

September

August

July

June

May