Is There Too Much Analysis in Football?

With players and coaches receiving more information than ever, perhaps the question is not what we can show them, but what they can actually understand, remember and use.

Are players and coaches being given too much analysis?

It is an easy question to ask. The amount of information surrounding professional football has grown enormously. Analysis meetings, individual clips, opposition reports, set piece work, physical information, nutrition, recovery and tactical preparation all compete for the player’s attention. At the same time, the amount of data and analysis available to staff continues to increase.

Every time I think about the amount of data points within a game and the potential analysis that could lead to, I’ll be honest, it gets a little overwhelming. There are literally thousands of data points, an unlimited combination of clips but only a limited amount of time to process things.

The obvious assumption is that more analysis must eventually lead to information overload. But I think the reality is a little more complicated than that.

The issue may not be how much analysis we are doing. It may be whether we are being intentional enough about when we deliver it, what we expect players to take from it and how much cognitive demand we are placing on them.

I remember the podcast I did with Josh Kirk, head of analysis at Brentford, and he made a comments saying something along the lines of ‘I don’t know how players cope… They are given so much, and expected to take it all on board, whilst trying to perform at the top of their game”.

That leads to ‘Analysis Periodisation’ that my recent podcast guest, Andrew Douglas described really well.

The idea came from looking at how intentional coaches are with the delivery of training. Football clubs already periodise physical work. They think about technical and tactical development across the week. Training sessions are designed with a particular purpose, and the demands placed on players change depending on what the team is trying to achieve.

Should the same thinking should apply to analysis?

If we are deliberate about the physical load we place on a player, why wouldn’t we also be deliberate about the cognitive load? I think this also goes for coaches too, not just the players.

That seems like a fairly obvious question, but it is one that is easy to overlook.

As analysts, we are often focused on what information we can provide. We have the data, we have the clips and we have the technology to put it all together. There is an understandable temptation to make use of those resources because we know they might contain something useful.

But useful information is not necessarily useful if the player cannot absorb it.

Should analysts be trying to focus on what players can understand and remember, rather than simply what they can be shown? That distinction is important. The objective of an analysis session is not to maximise the amount of information that passes in front of a player. It is to give them knowledge that can ultimately support what they do on the pitch.

That means we need to think about the complexity of the analysis we deliver.

The definition of complexity goes well beyond simply asking whether a meeting is 15 minutes or 45 minutes long. It can include the number of clips being shown, the length of those clips, the amount of detail within them, the number of themes being discussed and whether the information is completely new or something the player has already encountered.

All of those things affect the cognitive demand of an analysis session.

That creates an interesting challenge for analysts. We can produce an excellent analysis session that contains genuinely valuable information and still deliver it badly if we don’t consider what the player is being asked to process.

This leads to another interesting point…

Analysis happens in a very different environment from football. A player sitting in a meeting room has the benefit of a paused video, fancy telestrations, the ability to rewind and somebody explaining exactly what they should be looking at. None of those things exist when the player is actually on the pitch.

That does not mean we should stop using them. They can obviously be extremely useful. But it does raise an interesting question about what we are trying to teach. If we always pause the video at exactly the right moment and draw the relevant spaces on the screen, we have made the problem easier to understand. But we have also removed some of the uncertainty and speed that exists in the game itself.

Apparently, Ange Postecoglou, during his time at Celtic, did not want video to be paused in certain situations. Whether that story is entirely accurate or not, the principle is interesting. If the video keeps moving, the player has to think at something closer to the speed of the game.

The same applies to telestration. Drawing an arrow on the screen can make an idea much clearer, but there are no arrows on a football pitch. Again, this is not an argument against using these tools. It is an argument for thinking about when and why we use them. Sometimes we want to make the information as obvious as possible. At other times, perhaps we want the player to do more of the thinking themselves.

That is where the idea of periodising analysis becomes particularly interesting.

Should it be, that sessions could move from relatively low cognitive load towards higher cognitive load. Rather than every analysis session being designed in the same way, the demand placed on the players could change depending on the purpose of the session and where they were in the wider training process.

It is a relatively simple concept, but it challenges the way we often think about analysis.

We tend to ask whether the content is good. Is the clip relevant? Is the insight accurate? Is the presentation clear? Does the player understand the tactical point?

Perhaps we should also be asking whether the analysis is appropriate for that particular moment.

A player can understand something in an analysis room without necessarily being able to recall it when the game is moving at full speed. Knowledge acquisition and skill acquisition are not the same thing. That distinction becomes increasingly important as the amount of analysis available to professional football continues to grow.

We now have an extraordinary ability to analyse almost every aspect of the game. There is more data, more video and more technology available to coaches and analysts than ever before. The temptation is therefore to keep adding to what we give players.

But perhaps the next step in the evolution of football analysis is not finding more things to show. It is becoming better at deciding what players actually need to see, when they need to see it and how they need to interact with it.

That might mean that the best analysis session is sometimes the one with fewer clips. It might mean revisiting something familiar rather than introducing another new concept. It might mean allowing the video to run rather than stopping it every few seconds. It might even mean taking players away from the screen altogether and getting them to interact with a tactics board, a tactics mat or a ball.

The point is not to make analysis simpler for the sake of it. It is to make it more intentional.

I think that distinction matters because there is a danger that the growth of analytics becomes confused with the growth of information. Having more information does not automatically mean that players and coaches will make better decisions. The value comes from how that information is understood, remembered and ultimately applied.

So, is there too much analysis in football?

Possibly. But I’m not sure that is quite the right question.

Perhaps the better question is whether we are giving players the right amount of information, in the right format, at the right time, with the right level of cognitive demand.

Anyway, if you found this interesting, you may want to check out the full conversation with Andy, just below. We speak about the role of a coach analyst, more on coach development, and plenty of other related topics which I found really interesting.

I’d be keen to hear how other analysts and coaches think about this. Are we becoming better at managing the amount and timing of information we give players, or are we still guilty of assuming that more analysis is always better?

Thanks for reading 👌🏼