Analyzing football tactics

Finding the next edge.

Kyle Boas

Author of the Tactics Journal

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Why measuring perception accelerates learning

10 November 2026

Author of The Weasel Way and presenter of United Soccer Coaches’ Reading the Game series Tony Nicalo:

In perceptual training, measurement does more than become something that is managed. It accelerates learning.

When a player knows you’ll count their scanning, they scan more. Measurement creates attention, and what players attend to is what gets stored.

The instrument becomes part of the training.

I wish coaches taught me how to scan when I was a kid.

It’s exactly how we implemented it with a World Cup-winning coach and his team.

For them, we also built a library of pause-and-quiz videos. We measure the speed and accuracy of the players’ responses to rate their reading ability.

But this is what they measure on the pitch, in training and matches.

This would be a great app idea local to a club, if it doesn’t exist already.

Tony Nicalo on why measuring perception accelerates learning

10 November 2026

Author of The Weasel Way and presenter of United Soccer Coaches’ Reading the Game series Tony Nicalo:

In perceptual training, measurement does more than become something that is managed. It accelerates learning.

When a player knows you’ll count their scanning, they scan more. Measurement creates attention, and what players attend to is what gets stored.

The instrument becomes part of the training.

I wish coaches taught me how to scan when I was a kid.

Nicalo:

It’s exactly how we implemented it with a World Cup-winning coach and his team.

For them, we also built a library of pause-and-quiz videos. We measure the speed and accuracy of the players’ responses to rate their reading ability.

But this is what they measure on the pitch, in training and matches.

This would be a great app idea local to a club, if it doesn’t exist already.

Inter forward Marcus Thuram's share of the team's box touches rose from 11% to 27% after Lautaro's injury

09 November 2026

Francesco Lisanti for UltimoUomo translated from Italian:

A graphic produced by Sky Sport after the match showed Thuram’s “usage rate” percentages, a metric used far more in the NBA than in football in general, before and after Lautaro’s injury. Before, 11% of all of Inter’s touches in the box and 14% of all their shots on goal went through his feet; now he is responsible for 27% of touches in the box and 25% of shots on goal.

In purely numerical terms, this difference in centrality was natural (Lautaro is the most important player in the squad in every respect), but in terms of responsibility it was not a given.

[…] When Inter manage to build from the back without a single fixed playmaker, relying on the fluid rotation of the back four, in which even Çalhanoglu can often end up playing right back, as we saw yesterday, they automatically defuse the opponent’s aggression and create space vertically.

With a body feint Bastoni gets past Douvikas and opens up the pitch, while Akanji finds himself as the playmaker, forcing Perrone to switch markers, Barella plays centre-back and Calhanoglu full-back. When Inter play with this lightness and fluidity, it is difficult for any opponent to break shape and re-form without leaving space.

I think this plays a lot into how modern football is moving with rotations from midfielders moving back into the back line more often. Look at Frankie de Jong at Barcelona, Declan Rice at Arsenal, or Andrey Santos at Manchester United. Hold up play central becomes more important and more frequent when you lose a player in the midfield.

Older kids get picked for elite youth teams, but they don’t end up as the world’s best young players

09 November 2026

Defying the odds: the relative age effect’s absence among the best teenage football players in the world by Arve Vorland Pedersen:

The relative age effect (RAE) is the advantage of being born earlier in the selection period, thus being more experienced and more developed.

[…] In the 2025 U20WC, 287 players (57%) were born in the first constituent year whereas 217 (43%) were born in others, and in the 2023 U20WC, the corresponding distribution was 292 and 212 (58%-42%).

Among the CIES’s 200, 59 players (30%) were born in the first constituent year (i.e. 2005), whereas 100 players (50%) were born in 2006, 36 (18%) in 2007, and five (3%) in 2008.

[…] The selected ones are not necessarily the best prospects but ones who perform best among their often less physically developed peers.

[…] Club scouts, as well as scouts selecting players for regional and national teams, should be aware that many of the players that they select may be selected largely due to their physical development, not their skill.

As a kid, I was always jealous of the kids of my similar age who were put in the age group below because of that physical development advantage. You are just stuck on the bench in the lower rung of the club when you are small and scrawny.

Nottingham Forest are taking blood twice a week from 25 second-team players to predict muscle injuries

09 November 2026

Rivista Undici translated from Italian:

The English club is experimenting with a new technology able to identify the biological signals that come before injuries. It is a 12-week project, developed with the Scottish biotech company Entourage, that could change the way teams manage their players’ health and extend their careers. The study will initially involve the 25 players of Forest’s men’s second team, who will give two blood samples every week. The samples will be analysed to monitor thousands of proteins and build a detailed picture of each player’s biological response to training, matches, injuries and the recovery that follows.

The results will then be compared with data the club has already collected on workloads, physical preparation and the players’ clinical condition. The aim is to understand whether certain biological changes can anticipate the risk of non-traumatic muscle injuries, the ones that happen without direct contact with an opponent.

Entourage chief executive Patrick Gunning:

If we know a player’s individual biology, we can start to understand what works for him and what does not.

If, after a match, one player’s inflammation levels stay much higher than a teammate’s, that information can help the medical staff judge whether a different approach to recovery is needed.

More technology, more, more, more.