Since I began writing about football during the 2022 World Cup, the way I watch matches has slowly changed. I moved away from spotting weaknesses and toward tracking small, repetitive structural patterns. I’m going back to the old way.

When I first joined small football group chats with casual fans, I assumed people watched games the way I watched them. I was wrong.

I’d point things out. If this player does this, this will happen. This player needs to pass here, and then he’ll have space to do this. If they mark this player and that player, they’ll have this advantage.

Crickets. The average person isn’t doing this when they watch a match. But they are interested in learning how to do it.

Anyone can explain what is happening. It’s much harder to consistently predict what will happen before that change is made, and to find the changes that will actually have an impact. That, I realized, was the thing I could offer. I started posting my ideas into the void that is Twitter, with no following, hoping someone would find them useful.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped finding weaknesses and started tracking, hyper-focusing on structure and movement.

If you’re trying to spot changes in structure, you have to focus on what the teams are doing rather than what they are not doing. The in-possession formation. The out-of-possession formation. The shape in every phase of play. You track a run. You track whether this man is marking that man. You track passing patterns. And then you wait for something to change.

When you watch like this, you aren’t seeing the spaces as clearly. You aren’t in the mindset to offer suggestions. You are reacting to a change in structure or position, and it takes effort to track all the little movements mentally. You don’t have time to offer new ideas. New ideas are an afterthought.

When you switch your mindset to looking for where players aren’t rather than where they are, structure and position become secondary to space and movement.

The beauty of being on the outside is that we have no job to lose, no owner or board to answer to, and no consequences for being wrong. We can offer up unconventional ideas.

As Thomas Tuchel said to the Spielverlagerung writers when they met, “Guys, send me a page with just ideas that you have — what to do in professional football, what’s not being done. Just be creative, be crazy,” like he specifically said the words “be crazy; it can be crazy, and send it to me.”

The World Cup is a reminder for me to spot the failures and find the weaknesses. To go back to that way of watching. To be crazy and never assume people know what you know.